During October 2003 the Shetland Arts and Crafts Association began a project to make a promotional video to be shown at that year's Craft Fair, and called us in to take care of the production.

The 25 minute video was to be made up of short sections showing 6 of the association's members at work, mixed with shorter "postcard" presentations of other members and landscape shots of Shetland to set the scene.

The budget available was quite limited, but as it seemed like an interesting production to be involved in we decided to go ahead and make the effort to come up with a high quality video.

When we were filming the people at work we found the action flowed more naturally if they worked at their usual pace, with the camera moving around them to catch the best angles as they happened. The people were all working indoors, and that meant setting up portable lighting to give a clear and distinctive image that would really do justice to the crafts.

Willie Barker of Shetland Music Studio came in to his own at this point, taking his inspiration from the images and getting right down to writing and recording a background score that really complimented the visuals. In fact during the 6 weeks of the project Willie came up with 7 original tracks for the video, as well as cleaning and enhancing all the recorded audio.

With the backing audio already fitting the mood of the tracks so well, and with so much footage to choose from, the initial editing came quite easily and we soon had rough cuts to give the clients some chance for feedback before the next stage.

The power of our computers really got tested as all the shots were then all digitally processed, firstly to pull out the full quality of the individual images, and then to pull everything together visually, giving the videos a consistent style and a distinctive look while optimising the output for both TV and video screen viewing.

The brief for the video also called for some landscape shots to use between the member's sections.

As we began filming these we developed the idea of using time-lapse shots, to give more motion to the clips.

Initially these were shot as straight time-lapse, particularly cloud shots, but later on we began to develop some more interesting post-production techniques in software, to have different parts of the picture running at different speeds, giving us the time-lapse clouds and real speed waves of the finished video.

The finished results are a real attention grabber, and bring some of the artistry of the crafts to the landscape shots.