Handmade

[steve66]

BBC4 tonight in five minutes, making a Windsor chair

 

[chris watford]

I am late

 

[Farm Labourer]

Well that was enjoyable!

 

[MikeK]

I'll be the dissenting vote, as I didn't care for the show. I watched an earlier Handmade episode about a knife maker and was almost bored to tears. Last night's show about Jim Steele's Windsor chair was disappointing, so I won't be watching any more BBC4 Handmade episodes.

I lost track of the number of times the camera went off to obscure scenes. It seemed that at least a quarter of the program was spent on scenes that had nothing to do with the manufacturing of the chair and the director was trying to impress the viewer with his camera angles, focus pulls, and slow pans. Some examples of time wasters include a woman hanging and retrieving laundry, the woman picking at the dog's fur, the butterfly as it walks across the window frame, the floor of the shop in anticipation of the next scrap of wood to fall, a closeup of the bandsaw blade as it slowly comes to a stop, and so on. Yawn.

It's as if the camera turned away as an important part of the manufacturing process was occurring. In the final scenes, he is preparing the chair back and then in the next scene he walks away from a completed chair. The chair looks great and I don't doubt Mr. Steele's skills, but maybe I'm spoiled with the volume of quality videos on the Internet.

I was curious about Jim Steele's work and wanted to see more, but his website expired.

 

[Geoff_S]

I'll be the dissenting vote, as I didn't care for the show. I watched an earlier Handmade episode about a knife maker and was almost bored to tears. Last night's show about Jim Steele's Windsor chair was disappointing, so I won't be watching any more BBC4 Handmade episodes.

I lost track of the number of times the camera went off to obscure scenes. It seemed that at least a quarter of the program was spent on scenes that had nothing to do with the manufacturing of the chair and the director was trying to impress the viewer with his camera angles, focus pulls, and slow pans. Some examples of time wasters include a woman hanging and retrieving laundry, the woman picking at the dog's fur, the butterfly as it walks across the window frame, the floor of the shop in anticipation of the next scrap of wood to fall, a closeup of the bandsaw blade as it slowly comes to a stop, and so on. Yawn.

It's as if the camera turned away as an important part of the manufacturing process was occurring. In the final scenes, he is preparing the chair back and then in the next scene he walks away from a completed chair. The chair looks great and I don't doubt Mr. Steele's skills, but maybe I'm spoiled with the volume of quality videos on the Internet.

I was curious about Jim Steele's work and wanted to see more, but his website expired.

Good! I wasn’t the only one who thought that about all the camera angles then

 

[Sheffield Tony]

This was first on TV quite some time ago - 2015 ? I met Jim at the Bodger's ball after and asked him about the experience. I found it a bit irritating, my thinking was that the film makers obviously were putting their art above the craft they were presenting. But he seemed quite open minded about the presentation style, and an attempt to interest a wider audience than would stick with a programme focused on the technical aspects of building a chair. He did say he was a bit bemused as to why they put in stuff like his wife hanging the washing out though. This was from the experiment of "slow TV" though, and I think it is to emphasise the passing of time, and to give an unhurried impression of the crafting process.