Ian Farr(I)

I am a 69 year old Film Editor who, as my workflow is decreasing, would like to add something I am very proud of to my IMDB Page as a piece of Trivia for anyone who is interested: In 1987 when I was a young BBC Assistant Film Editor I worked over 100 hour weeks on a documentary called 'A Sense of Place - The Fens' which sucked the life out of me. This was edited on Film with acetate sound tracks, that as anyone of that period would know suffered 'drop-outs' when joining high pitch sounds. This film was full of them from the constant sea-wash and high-pitched winds peculiar to this area of reclaimed land. The elderly Editor quit from exhaustion after working well over a year on the show physically rebuilding cuts, some only two frames long, so I was asked to take over fine cutting whilst creating the soundscape culminating in working over 100 hour weeks to the point where it took 90 minutes to stagger back the 30 minute walk to my apartment disturbing my wife repeatedly from banging open our windows whilst sleepwalking. I know it sounds far-fetched but is true. The film's end result however, was something rather special - a rich soundscape of superb naturally recorded wild-tracks, just a few sparse phrases of spoken word and a huge amount of artificial sounds recorded by yours truly in a Foley theater, from flapping my woolen jumper to emulate a mass of birds in flight to plucking my beard to emulate grains of falling wheat. My director came from radio so was meticulous about sound previewing the fine cut to some luminaries who praised the film's 'pure cinematic soundscape.' The dubbing mixer received recognition but myself and the sound mixer received none. I was too naive to chase an award and felt it would be 'big-headed' of me to do so but I wrotae a letter to BAFTA calling for them to recognize those contributions and received a lovely response from James Cellan Jones, then Chairman of BAFTA, which suggests my effort had been successful, of which I'm very proud.