Category: Videos

Pebble Mill 2004

Pebble Mill 2004 from pebblemill on Vimeo.

Copyright resides with the original holder, no reproduction without permission.

This video was recorded on December 11th, 2004 by John Sarson. By this time production had moved to the new BBC Birmingham headquarters at the Mailbox, and the excess equipment had been auctioned off, prior to the building being demolished in 2005. The site is now being redeveloped as a dental hospital.

Thanks to John Sarson, and the VT Oldboys for sharing this video. There is plenty more interesting material on the VT Oldboys website, so do take a look: http://vtoldboys.com/.

Pebble Mill reception Dec 2004

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The following comments were left on the Pebble Mill Facebook page:

Terry Powell: ‘I walked through those doors for many a happy year’

Andy Marriott: ‘Where was the tape storage area?’

Pete Simpkin: ‘The nagging question is what happened to all the tapes in that library?’

Janet Collins: ‘Tape storage area was down stairs in the basement.’

Matt Toomer: ‘Did all those tapes get rescued or were they binned?’

VTB Channel Record 1988

VTB ‘Channel Record’ 1988 from pebblemill on Vimeo.

Copyright resides with the original holder, no reproduction without permission.

The video is a bit of moving history, although it was shot mute for a music sequence. It shows VTB in 1988 doing a drama “channel record” from Studio A on a pair of 1” VPR2 machines. The programme is “Final Run” VTB1 is on the left, manned by series editor Steve Neilson, VTB2 is on the right manned by yours truly. Video drama on location was very much pioneered by Pebble Mill (“Blackstuff”) and it was practice that the recording engineer or editor would record both the studio and the location. The bottle of Bush Mills Whiskey suggests the studio was after our location shoot in Northern Ireland . The “main” recording would be on VTB1 and the “backing” on VTB2. This was a throw back to the days when VT recording was not that reliable and all studio recordings had a back-up in case of problems. The blank tapes were assemble edited from the studio allowing time code to be “time of tape” rather than “time of day “as was used in London. In the case of a drama series we used “multi-episodic” tapes which meant that we would change tapes to that of whichever episode was being recorded. So for a four episode series we would have four master and backing tapes being used at any one time. This saved a lot of time at the edit not having to change tapes, and relieved some of the inevitable boredom of awaiting rehearsals to turn into “takes”. The tape trolley had a four channel audio mixer in it for editing purposes, and if you wanted to add music at all during the edit, you had to order you vinyl disc from the library and have it transferred to ¼” tape in the transfer suite.

Colin Fearnley

2″ editing discussion

2″ editing from pebblemill on Vimeo.

This video was recorded by Colin Fearnley, in Nov 2004, on the last evening of editing at BBC Pebble Mill, before the building was cleared and subsequently demolished.

In this video, introduced by Mike Bloore, editors Tony Raynor and Steve Critchlow discuss how 2″ editing worked in the 1970s.

2" editing block chat

Jenny Brewer – becoming a female manager

Jenny Brewer on becoming a female manager at the BBC from pebblemill on Vimeo.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

In this specially recorded video, Jenny Brewer talks about becoming one of the first female managers at BBC Pebble Mill, outside of traditionally female areas like: Costume and Make-up and Personnel. This was in the era of John Birt’s reforms in the early to mid 1990s.

Jenny Brewer

The following comment was left on the Pebble Mill Facebook page:

Lynn Cullimore: ‘Jenny was someone you could respect as a Manager because she had been through production and as she says worked her way up. She had been there, done it and got the t-shirt. She knew the problems that the people she was managing experienced. She had also been on location and knew what it was like to be filming in the pouring rain, having to get the film back and the problems this could bring. I remember a particular occasion I went to her with a problem (she may not remember it but I do) and she was helpful and understanding. She commanded respect – certainly from me.’

Editing Boys from the Blackstuff

Editing Boys from the Blackstuff from pebblemill on Vimeo.

Video recorded by Colin Fearnley, no reproduction without permission.

Colin Fearnley recorded this video in November 2004, on the last evening of editing at BBC Pebble Mill. He filmed the editors looking round the empty edit suites and reminiscing about the programmes they had edited there. Mike Bloore remembers editing Boys from the Blackstuff in VTD, on 1″ videotape, with director Philip Saville sat on the sofa in the edit suite.

Editor, Mike Bloore

Editor, Mike Bloore

 

 

 

 

 

The following comments were left on the Pebble Mill Facebook page:

Keith Brook: ‘Well done to Mike. A great editor and thoroughly nice guy. We had so much fun at Pebble Mill.’

Abby Bottrill: ‘Aww, the legend that is our very own Sir Mike Bloore.’