VIDEO

 

The Eighth British Juggling Festival, Norwich, England and the 1995 Portland Juggling Festival. Alan Plotkin Productions. Price: $25 for each or $40 for both. $5 extra for PAL format and $4 for postage. Order: Alan Plotkin,  Austin, TX.

 

This is an interesting combination of festi­vals that can be ordered on one or two separate videos. There is a wild, almost anarchic feel to the British Festival with many unusual, "fringe" types of entertainment and the British fondness for verbal catcalling and interaction, while the Portland venue has a kind of fresh, wacky approach in many of the acts.

 

Plotkins technique is very good. Festivals often provide only poor lighting for video balance and pick up and the camera may be forced into a limited point of view. But Plotkin's work overcomes this problem at almost every turn; it is solid and steady, even when the acts start to randomly move out of frame. The overall structure of the videos is satisfying, with initial parades and registrations, through main stage and fringe acts, to fi­nal festivities, and including generous sprin­klings of interviews, workshops and atmosphere all the way through.

 

Some of the sound quality is marginal in the British festival, but that's a function of mike placement for the acts. You'll get enough of the flavor of the festivities that it shouldn't interrupt the pleasure and excitement. The choices for music underlays in both the British and Portland videos that Plotkin has provided (in addition to on-site sound and music) are very good: fun and often tongue-in-cheek.

 

I do wish that these videos could have more in-frame description displays, such as act names and names of individuals being interviewed or teaching, etc. Plotkin has done this in the IJA annual video and it would be very welcome here. I know this would require much more time in preparation, but I do find it frustrating not to know who is who when the event is happening. Or what about a small included flyer or index that might list acts and people in order? Plotkin does provide extensive credits at the end of both festivals, but we have no way to link faces or acts with names the way it is now presented.

 

But this is really a small point and shouldn't prevent anyone from purchasing this video. The acts do stand on their own and are a marvelous testament to the vitality of juggling at present. Alan Plotkin obviously cares a great deal about the quality of his videos - the fact that the IJA has chosen him as its official annual festival videographer is proof of that.

 

These are fun, instructive videos and I'd recommend getting them both.

- by Craig Turner

 

The Show Must Go On. Starring Waldo and Woodhead. It's a Fine Mess Productions. 26 minutes.  Charlotte VT.

 

The 10-year-old comedy juggling team of VValdo (Paul Burke) and Woodhead (Woody Keppel) have not produced a juggling video. Instead, they're trying to tap a far larger market by creating a children's video. The first half follows Waldo. and Woodhead in a whale-sized Chevy convertible as they wander the beautiful Vermont countryside haplessly trying to find their way to a show. Their poor map-reading skills are further hindered by slow tractors, cows in the road, flat tires, etc.

 

They eventually do arrive on time for their show at the Flynn Theatre in Burlington, Vt., site of the IJA's 1992 summer festival Cascade of Stars show. The second half of the video is more interesting to jugglers, featuring live footage shot at the Flynn of Waldo's box juggling and ball bouncing, their odd-object passing routine and Woodheads comedy champagne glass balance gag.

 

The video was shot in a single day by the Fine Mess Productions crew of David Giancola and Andrea Grayson. They bring solid professional credits to this job and created a technically fine product. Keppel, the musician in the Waldo-Woodhead team, wrote and performed all the music for the video.

 

Keppel said "The Show Must Go On" is the team's initial offering in a planned series of Abbott and Costello-style comedy videos for children.  lt's unfair to judge it from an adult juggler's point of view, other than to say that I enjoyed seeing the 13 minutes of show footage it includes. A better judge of its success is undoubtedly my five-year-old daughter, who has requested to watch it several times!

by Bill Giduz

 

SOFTWARE

 

JuggleKrazy. By Colin Wright & Andrew Lipson. Shareware version available from the Juggling Information Service. The registered version is available in juggling shops in the UK, or by mail order for 25.99 pounds (postage included) from Solipsys Ltd.; Merseyside  England.

 

JuggleKrazy (JK) is a shareware juggling pattern animator which runs under DOS on the Pc. It is

perhaps the best yet. JK lets the user specify juggling patterns by augmented site swaps or by "ladder diagrams".

 

On starting the program two windows are displayed. On the left is an editor window which displays the description of the pattern and on the right is an animation of the pattern performed by a stick man using large stage­balls. The movement of both the juggler and the balls is smooth and realistic, although for cross-armed patterns, it is not possible to tell which arm is the upper one. This is partly a limitation of JK's notation and partly of the rendering of the juggler.

 

JK's notation is a natural extension of the site swap notation. One can optionally specify the throwing and catching positions and the throwing time. This is sufficiently flexible that most patterns are easy to specify. For example, here is the description of 4 ball Mills Mess provided with JK:

 

4 from (-1.3,0.0) to (0.2,0.0) 4 from (1.3, 0.0) to (-0.2,0.0) 4 from (-1.3, 0.0) to (-0.2,0.0)

 

The first throw is a "4" thrown from across the body to roughly the center, whereas the second is thrown from the usual side of the body.

 

JK also comes with a hypertext on-line help system. This is a plus and a minus - finding information on certain topics requires quite a careful search. The registered version of JK includes several on-line tutorials, including one introducing JK's notation. Unusual for computer software, the tutorials are useful, fun, informative and easy to skip through quickly if necessary.

 

JK seems pretty robust in general, although I have persuaded it to crash several times. It is a useful tool for exploring new patterns, but since it is limited to patterns containing at most about 100 catches, it is not suitable for scoring, an entire routine. This is a nice program add well worth the registration cost of 20 UK pounds. 

-by Alan MacDonald