Here's a turnup for the books. I normally link here to metal detecting videos that show something atrocious or that I want to use to illustrate a point. I stumbled across this guy (Future Bleeps) when looking for something else and was impressed. I have not looked through the whole series, so I don't vouch for what they contain, but I was entranced by the visual quality of these, the camerawork and the sound, and above all the clever camera angles. Here its the sounds underfoot, the traffic in the background and of the weather conditions that really give these videos an atmosphere, they speak of the solitary searcher, where we are almost an intruder in a special world. In particular we don't have the inane running commentary with awful accents and sloppy diction that mars the bulk of metal detecting videos, he speaks rarely, nicely and to the point. The sequences are closely-cropped and the fragments where the soundtrack is silent are valuable.
The first one is here: https://youtu.be/guBfasx5_7M but this one was the first I watched and was good:
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Posted on You Tube by Future Bleeps 24 Mar 2020
In general, I really like these. I'm obviously not happy about the way some of the finds are being treated on removal from the ground, rubbing, scraping, rough brushing (please don't). It's also a personal thing of mine that I don't like to see pinpointers used as a digging tool. As for the camo get-up... hmmm. We don't see much individual bagging and GPS plotting either. I like that a lot of the things he shows are byegones things (and modern) rather than archaeological artefacts. But some of that soil is... awful. Where in the world is this?
But as films, these are as good as metal detecting stuff gets. I look forward to seeing more when the lockdown is over, and see what techniques he's been thinking up for telling his story in the meanwhile.
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2 comments:
What's this? Has lockdown suddenly become too much? Or have your new pals on the UK and E MD forum bunged a few bob to say nice things.
The one I watched was indeed much better than those with some chuntering chav, they have been thoughtful in the use of cut aways, drone shots etc.
For people obviously au fait with technology (drone, detector, wonderweb) you really have to wonder why a GPS is so alien(some detectors have an inbuilt capability)? with the trouble taken to lay out and video finds you would think adding an ngr was neither here nor there.
Why is it that obvious techies have not cottoned on that a well conducted survey is more important and potentially more interesting than a few objects, that by conducting such they may actually contribute to our understanding of past land use and activity.Could it be that the public funded organisation responsible for promoting such positive use of metal detectors has failed miserably in engaging detectorists for anything other than an identification service?
The film was posted ion the first day of UK lockdown so was taken just before, as for the rest PAS have failed. They could be using the lockdown to create a really cracking resource on survey, what responsibility really is etc. Will they?
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