"In the Archives...!"

Stephen, The Wandering 1500, at the National Railway Museum. Dean Walker

I need something a little bigger than a 1TB HDD for my videos. I hate getting rid of footage, you never know when it'll come in useful. I currently have four HDDs with various amounts of BRWS footage and similar, and I never delete any of them. It would be criminal, should I actually make it big, not to have something for the blooper reel and to say "that's where I started...!!!"

So going through the archives this week has reminded me of a few serious bloopers. For example - when former team member Jason did the original subtitles for the second trailer on Youtube, way back in 2007 (when Allen was still actually intended to be "Arthur"), he misspelled the name to "Authur".

Then there was the original trailer itself. No faces. Looks really, really weird now. Lots of subtitling with phrases such as "the end of steam is nigh" and other really depressing catchphrases.

If it had been up to me, we would have gone into the series in 1948, with our lovely Holden B12 character at a famous museum, narrating the whole series and their stories to a few children, sat there listening at the marvel of a talking train!

The potential for this to be made to my vision now is steadily growing. "Project Allen" - the worst kept secret in the history of literature (and particularly if you look carefully at the artwork on this blog, and one other!) has shown the way forward in storytelling for me.

It has been a delightful creative exercise, but it meant for the first time in three years I dug out the original scripts I had written, and reworked them into something more meaningful and wholly more satisfying than the five first episodes on Youtube which were extremely hit and miss.

Soon I hope to share with you all the fruits of my labour, something tangible I can put my name to, with beautiful artwork and stories which go somewhere, teach you something, and entertain all in the same book.

So until next time, keep listening out for news of "Project Allen", and wait for the anniversary video on the 17th, where I am trying to cram in as much old/unused footage, "how to" segments, and a few new pieces of footage, all into one 10 minute Youtube video!

Until next time!