Lismore for Argyll

Sarah Campbell convened a meeting at the Hall to discuss buying a new sound and PA system for the Hall. The arguments are that it;s often hard in the Hall to hear people speak. Sound quality at ceilidhs is poor. Renting equipment is expensive and cumbersome. Fok had a range of questions. Will the equipment be insured? Will there be more noise at night if the Hall becomes a more popular venue for gigs? Where will the money come from?

Sarah has researched this and suggested an appkicaiton to the Lottery fund, Awards for All. This has a limit of £10,000 and the set of equipment Sarah has, with advice, identified as the most suitable costs arpund £7,500 so s well within the fund’s limit. The feeling of the meeting was posirtive and the decision was to go ahead with the application to Awards for All.

Yorick Paine volunteered to build a Gigrig on castors which would sit permanently on the stage. Roger Dixon-Spain volunteered to build a cupboard to store the gigrig securely. Davie Garrett offered to write clear and straightforward instructions for hall users like the Country Dance Group, on how to use the equipment.

Lismore Community Council, in recent meetings with Caledonian MacBrayne, has succeeded in getting the company to agree to providing an expanded vehicle ferry service to the island from Oban to Achnacroish. The company is now offering a Summer Timetable with four ferries day. They will also provide a fifth ferry - on request - on Saturdays and two request ferries on Sundays. The proposed new Winter Timetable will also run four ferries a day Monday to Sunday and with one extra request ferry on Sundays only. The Sunday service is expected to make a real difference to life on the island and to access to it by car for visitors to Argyll.

The copyright on the photo above of the Pier at Achnacroish on Lismore is owned by Iain Macaulay and is licensed for reuse under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license.

‘The Cast’ folk group, made up of Mairi Campbell, one of the Lismore Campbells and Dave Francis, has performed an unforgettable version of Auld Lang Syne in the recently released film Sex and the City. Although Mairi and her family live in Edinburgh, she often performs and teaches on Argyll’s Isle of Lismore where the family have a cottage.

In 2007 Mairi won the Citty Finlayson Scots Singer of the Year award at the fifth Scottish Trad Awards. Mairi’s sister Sarah and her family are coming to live on the family’s old land at Ballymakillichan.

Jeremy and I had the privilege of travelling to Furnace to participate in the ‘Out there for Argyll’ video training day a few weeks ago.
There were representatives from 4 community groups in Argyll all in all and much was learnt.

Dave and John ran the workshop and showed us the how to make use of the much loved Sanyo exacti video camera.  Small, easy to use, lightweight and vaguely waterproof up to deep enough to dive with, the camera is perfect for making web friendly films, documentries and  whatever the imagination can come up with.
It also takes photos. 
So we ran through all the functions of the camera with everyone managing to stay awake .  Top marks to our tutors for that.
The most exciting part, apart from the pub lunch which was quite wonderful, was Johns
wonderful homemade steadycam,  which opens us up to the world of steady images easily.  I’m not going to try and describe it, instead when I find a tripod mount I can use, (anyone got a broken tripod they don’t want, out there?) I’ll make one and put pictures on the blog.
Since the training day Jeremy and I have both had the opportunity to use the camera, filming and photographing the day that Dot moved her two beautiful horses from the field down to the byer and the picnic that was to follow.  All we need to do now is figure out how to edit it, do it, add sound and post it. Easy!    

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