Tagged: Burdett Christmas Lights

Christmas Lights – 11 January 2010

It’s nearly a week after the official end of Christmas. Twelfth Night marks the coming of Epiphany, and the end of the twelve days of Christmas.

The Christmas Lights

Our Christmas Lights are supposed to come down on Twelfth Night, but instead all that got removed was the tree and downstairs decorations. This has meant I’ve had a little longer to film the lights. They are sure to come down over tomorrow night, and into the early hours of Wednesday morning.

An Editorial Problem

This year, ABSstudios took a brave decision to step out from the standard 4×3 ratio which almost all of our videos have been produced in before, and went widescreen for the full cinematic effect. This is great for YouTube too, whose player is designed for 16×9 video (i.e. widescreen). However, the actual Christmas Lights show is 12 minutes, 47 seconds, and 971 nano-seconds long. YouTube will only allow uploads of 10 minutes at a maximum.

I have successfully made an ‘alright job’ of this year’s Christmas Lights video. I am currently toying between either: making a cut-down version of the entire show or just uploading each section individually. The former would involve a little more work, including tweeking the audio etc. To be honest, I’m more tempted towards the latter, and I’ll probably just add some links to the previous and former clips in each video as YouTube annotations.

Photographs

View Full Album

Tonight we had the last run of the lights this season. As I write this blog, some of the decorations have already come down, including the door decorations and the tinsel/lanterns which are suspended. I’m sitting in what is still a grotto, but a grotto rapidly falling to pieces. The sooner I clear it out, the better. Don’t get me wrong, I love doing it (I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t), but I feel that Christmas has gone now and it’s time to move on.

Having said that, this year’s Lights were excellent, so to try and remember them, I took still images, which you can see in this gallery.

Andrew xx