{"id":578,"date":"2010-01-25T15:05:39","date_gmt":"2010-01-25T14:05:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www2.imperial.ac.uk\/videoarchive\/?p=578"},"modified":"2022-02-04T14:39:51","modified_gmt":"2022-02-04T13:39:51","slug":"city-and-guilds-college","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.imperial.ac.uk\/videoarchive\/city-and-guilds-college\/","title":{"rendered":"City and Guilds College"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Margaret Thatcher Opening Tech2000<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

My involvement with the City and Guilds College (C&G) started during its centenary year in 1985. A week of celebrations were held (26 February \u2013 1 March) and as part of that the Junior Common Room was transformed into an impressive exhibition called Tech2000. The exhibition was officially opened by the then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher<\/a>. Can you spot the famous handbag in the photo?<\/p>\n

Besides making some 12 individual videos for various exhibits, an official video record of the week was also commissioned. This would capture the build-up, the opening and tour of the exhibits by the Prime Minister and the banquet held at the Guild Hall with the main speaker being HRH Prince Philip and this itself was not without its own problems. I was told in advance that we could not use too many lights when recording his speech because he didn\u2019t like lights in his face.
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Prince Philip at the Guild Hall<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The problem was the size of the Guild Hall and the area we were trying to cover. Illumination within the hall was to be mostly from the candles on the tables, but this was far too low for our camera. A compromise was reached and we used a 2kw floodlight that would only be switched on moments before any one of the speeches started. Although this sounded good, we were located high up on a balcony some distance away, so the end result was better, but not great. It was also such a vast increase in light levels (compared to the candles) that actually switching the light on caused most of the people to turn around and look up at us! Although I’d requested a feed from the sound system to plug into our video recorder, I had not actually spoken with the engineers operating it on the night. Everything turned out OK and we received a cable with audio from the hall sound system. We were intending to video record most things, but our tapes would only run for 20 minutes at a time, so tape changes were going to have to be made. I was concerned that from an archives point-of-view we should not lose any of the speeches. I asked the engineer if he had been asked to make a sound recording of the whole evening, only to discover that no one had thought to do so! This was corrected and the tapes now reside in the college archive.<\/p>\n