Hello! These videos were the brainchild of Peter Gladwell, a Clinical Specialist Physiotherapist in the Pain Management Service at Frenchay Hospital. Pete realised that there was a severe lack of resources for Deaf BSL users and managed to raise a small amount of money to kick-start a project to help remedy this situation. Along with other professionals Pete developed a number of scripts and asked EyeGaze (a social enterprise based in Bristol) to create a DVD from them.
EyeGaze at that time, consisted of myself (Mick Canavan), Neil Finlay, Nathalie Smith and Siobhan O’Donovan and between us, in 2005, we created a DVD called Stress and Relaxation. The DVD was a great success and many Deaf people left a host of positive reviews on our website, regretfully now dis-continued.
A few years later, a good friend of mine asked whether I could possibly re-use these videos and put them online. It was a good idea but unfortunately I couldn’t find the original videos or indeed the scripts, as EyeGaze had ceased to operate in 2013, and then life intervened and I completely forgot about the request. That is, until COVID 19 arrived and forced most people into lockdown. I, like many others, had a great deal of time on my hands and so I decided to see if anything could be done.
I decided to rip these videos from the original DVD and re-compressed them for the web. There is an obvious ‘hit’ in terms of quality but still, they are not too bad at all and have come out much better than I expected. Of course, this is mostly due to the fact that the video dimensions are much smaller than a TV screen and effectively mask the poor resolution. Watch these videos at full screen and you will see what I mean.
I had to re-edit some of the video clips because the presenter made a few references to the original DVD and although for a time I did consider leaving these references in place, in the end I decided to cut these out. You will notice the odd occasion where a small ‘jump’ in the video occurs, I hope this isn’t too distracting. Further, there were a few occasions where I had to replace some of the original graphics because they had originally being designed to be watched on a large TV screen and simply didn’t work at all when presented in such a small frame size. Given that the graphics were now effectively ‘burned’ into the MPEG2 video files this was not that easy a task but finally, after much experimenting, I think I’ve managed to replace them seamlessly. The final task was to create the ‘captions’. This was very time consuming as it required continuous round tripping between the original DVD and the FCPX timeline to re-type and insert text at the correct time intervals.
Many Thanks to Siobhan O’Donovan who has done a splendid job in presenting the information in a fun and accessible way. Also thanks to Neil Finlay who created the original art work. All video production, both pre and post, were my responsibility as was a hefty share of the project management.