buROCKeaucracy

Over the past few nights, my friend Matt and I have been trying to work out a way to do certain special effects for a video we are planning for 'Sharks'. A raid of our garage, which I suppose is not really our garage, but our landlord’s storage space, proved prosperous; we found several bits of material, all presumably belonging to the landlord, that could come in handy. Most nifty of these is an enormous piece of blue dust sheeting, which will make a great sea. After sketching out the structures required and listing marine life we will have to make, we felt we were ready to push things forward, and set a date for shooting the thing.

3rd and 4th April were the decided days, a sort of breather before the exam gauntlet begins (if anyone is in the Yorkshire area around then, do drop in; we need some extra hands). Matt had been keeping a sly eye out during his saunters around the university campus, and had spotted a room aptly suited to our enterprise, which we decided we would try and book for said date.

Naturally this is easier said than done: without recounting the tedious details too thoroughly, it turned out the room’s chunky size meant that something that takes place in it is apparently not just something taking place in it but a ‘minor event’, necessitating the filling in of a minor events form, and bringing up unwanted issues of ‘liability’. On handing this in we were met with furrowed brows and told to go and see Ginelle (who it turned out was actually called Ginenne) at the Student Union office. Ginenne was ill, so we bounded across campus to another office to meet Steve Wilkinson, Campus Faculties Manager. It’s probably fair to say at this point that Steve doesn’t have a sense of humour. A Risk Assessment form needed to be filled in. We told him we didn’t think there were any real risks involved. He replied “There are risks in everything”. So with this philosophical spring in our step we returned to the S.U. office, where a man whose name we never discovered stared at our form for a long time. “What’s it for?”, he asked. “Um, sort of a music video for a song”. He seemed very upset by the whole thing, and to be fair given how many risks there are in everything it probably means many more forms for him. He said he would help us with the Health and Safety check, but he needed to see a diagram of what we were doing.

So this morning I made the above drawing, and carefully coloured it in to demonstrate to him of our commitment to detail, and thereby safety. We haven’t yet got a response. I was annoyed to have to give away the secrets behind the special effects (and so I thought I’d post them publicly here to save him the hassle of leaking them onto the internet), but we kept back from him the design of “Watervision”™, which is the where the real money is: a contraption that makes the things behind it look like they are underwater. The only risk in that is the risk of utter brilliance.