The 22nd National Audio Visual Championship 2022

Malcolm Imhoff FRPS FACI(M)

The rst major live AV event since Covid locked everything down, the 22nd in 2022. Was it a success?

The National AV Championship (NAVC) is usually held every two years, but Covid put paid to the 2021 event. The organising team of three, myself, Keith Watson, and "the Boss" Alastair Taylor, were determined that the Nationals, as they are usually known, should happen again after a gap of three years of small screen, lo- sound, and variable quality presentations via Zoom. We missed the human contact and social interaction of a live event. We are all passionate about AV and we were keen to get back to theatre quality projection: Big Screen. Big Sound. Audio Visual as it was meant to be experienced.

We decided on the venue, Leeds Trinity University, which has a large comfortable auditorium, raked seats, massive screen, awesome sound, and a dedicated staff of administrators and technicians who went out of their way to help us at every stage.

After anxious moments worrying about whether we would be supported by enough people entering their work and enough people attending, we had 89 entries, from 57 AV producers, with an encouraging 26 First Time Entrants –over 10 hours of top quality audio visual sequences. This was more than we had time for, but rather than have pre-selection, which nobody likes, we managed to somehow squeeze them all in.

Then events overtook us and we heard of the death of Her Majesty The Queen, so the programme had to be altered. We inserted a lovely portrait of Her Majesty to be shown before the start of each day when we observed two minutes silence and were able to remember and reect on the enormous inuence she has had on all our lives. I also had to re-programme the Friday night show.

To view the NAVC 2022 Programme in full, click on the QR Code or visit: https://rps.org/media/d45bxjxb/12-navc-2022programme.pdf

The 22nd National Audio Visual Championship 2022 continued …

The main competition took place on Saturday and Sunday, but as a "festival fringe event" on the Friday night we took "The Magical Mystery Tour" to Leeds. The "Fab Four", that is John (me), Paul (José Currant), George (Richard Brown), and Ringo (Dave Cooke), who even brought his own drum kit, entertained the audience with an evening of Beatles themed AVs. Was it a day in the life of an AV worker or a hard day's night? Yeah Yeah Yeah!

We held a rafe in aid of Macmillan Cancer Support but there were so many prizes donated that we continued the rafe into the Saturday and Sunday. The star prize was the "Beatles" cake made and donated by Dave Cooke's daughter Diane Curzey ("Di's Sugar 'n' Ice" on Facebook). To date we have raised £265 for Macmillan.

As the person responsible for receiving all the entries, cataloguing and acknowledging their receipt, viewing and proong them to make sure they play all right, and then trying to t a quart into a pint pot to compile the programme for the seven sessions over two days, it was a challenging task.

The 22nd National Audio Visual Championship 2022 continued …

I tried to start each session with a strong sequence which would grab everybody's attention. Documentary and themed AVs were mixed with Photo Harmony, Music, Poetry and Song interpretation sequences. AVs on similar themes were widely separated. I made sure that if people were only attending on one of the days their sequences were shown on that day. I tried to end each session with a light-hearted or humorous AV to send people off to the breaks in a good mood. I also made sure that every session had two or three AVs which, if I had been a judge, I would have given an 'A'.

The judges (pictured below), Alan Tyrer, Sheila Haycox and Ian Bateman (Chairman), all extremely experienced and highly regarded AV producers in their own right, had a most difcult task. In a major competition like this it is right that the AVs should be judged on the day, as seen, on the big screen, with the unforgiving sound. OK the judges may have seen some of the AVs before in other competitions, but as we all know, the temptation to keep "tweaking" our productions and entering updated versions is very common, so what the authors have entered is what was judged. The judges only had one minute between each sequence to reect and make some brief notes. It is a credit to them that they came up with the list of award winners so quickly.

The winner of the Gold Medal, and the National AV Champion, was Judith Kimber from Northern Ireland, with her sequence "Poems for Girls". There is a feature on this outstanding AV later in AV News.