HP Voices

The recent re-release of Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon, in a new print from the BFI, has been a triumph.

When Barry Lyndon first came out in 1975 it went off like a damp squib. Kubrick’s previous films – Paths of Glory, Spartacus, Lolita, Dr. Strangelove, 2001, A Clockwork Orange – covered a range of themes and a variety of moods, but each in its own way kept the story moving along at a brisk canter. When it was known that Kubrick was working on a screenplay of Thackeray’s novel set in the eighteenth century, one obvious point of reference was Tom Jones, Tony Richardson’s bawdy celebration of life and lust starring young Albert Finney. Of course, Kubrick was a very different filmmaker – but even so, the eighteenth century was all about frock-coats, oaths and wenches, wasn’t it?

The use of Speechmatics to obtain a printed text is a great saving on employing a stenographer to do the work. I have experimented with different files to obtain the most correct printed text from the voice. Speechmatics themselves say that a good level is essential for the system to work. Strangely the results do vary enormously.. One male voice can sound very similar to another but the resulting text print out can be totally different. By way of experiment I recently tried a female archive voice and only used one side of the recording. The result I think was slightly better in that A) The female voice works better with Speechmatics anyway and B) The use of one side of the recording produced near perfect results especially when there were few technical terms and/or proper names. It is always worth an experiment to do a short before getting the whole interview processed.

In August 2016  the following interviews have been digitised and uploaded to the website. Peggy Gick ( Interview number 403) ; Tony Garnett ( Interview number 560) ; Kitty Wood ( Morrison) ( Interview number 6) ; Peter Morley ( Interview  number 166) ; Rodney Giesler ( Interview number 312) 

In August 2016  the following interviews have been digitised and uploaded to the website. Peggy Gick ( Interview number 403) ; Tony Garnett ( Interview number 560) ; Kitty Wood ( Morrison) ( Interview number 6) ; Peter Morley ( Interview  number 166) ; Rodney Giesler ( Interview number 312) 

Author: Melanie Williams, (School of Art, Media & America Studies, University of East Anglia)

Author: Rebecca Harrison, (School of Art, Media & America Studies, University of East Anglia)

Author: Joy Cuff ( née Seddon)

On my first visit to the Stanley Kubrick archives, I began looking through an inventory that detailed information on over 700 boxes that related to 2001: A Space Odyssey. My aim was to find some of the artwork that I had produced for this monumental film forty years ago.  At random, I selected two boxes noted as ‘Miscellaneous Polaroid’s and 35mm transparencies’. To my wonder and surprise, both contained photographic shots of the moons’ surface; I had indeed created a number of tabletop models of the moon and its’ complex surface.

Over recent months the BECTU History Project has been busily continuing its interviews with women and men from across the UK film and television industries. With nearly 700 recordings so far, it is one of the most extensive audio-visual archives in the world. 

Recent interviews have included:-

John Henshall 

John Henshall is an acknowledged expert in electronic photography and digital imaging. He started at the BBC in the 1960s, and left in the mid-1970s. As a DoP in the following years he helped establish the new genre of music videos, and did innovative TV work such as ‘Spitting Image’ and ‘Network 7’. 

This is a copy of a magazine article from 2012 in which "Janice Turner (Editor) reviews a study by Andrew Dawson and Sean P Holmes of the development of the BECTU History Project – from a reminiscence during an ACTT conference to an internationally important  archive".

Read the original article in full here:- History Project Article SSR April-May 2012 (1113Kb PDF)

Source: Stage, Screen & Radio, 2012