Thank You Tesco Customers For Your Bags of Help

TESCO STORES - We have had some amazing help in 2019/20 from Tescos in the shape of an, Awards for All Grant.

Today we completed the end of project paperwork and thanked Groundworks who administered the scheme. Customers put blue buttons into a perspex voting box to help organisations win a grant. 

The grant enabled us to buy a Zoom F4, multi-track recorder in 2019 so we can do field recording both for film and podcasting. The product is excellent, and coupled with our Sennheiser, phantom power condenser microphones and the Shaw headphone that we added to our kit this week - move over Stephen Spielberg, we are light, sound and action – ready to take off. Well not exactly...

Image: Zoom F4, multi-track recorder. Brilliant kit, not so brilliant service.

 Zoom UK and the Zoom Corporation in Japan have the worse customer support of any company we have ever experienced. No one it seems is interested in supplying any help, support or guidance and even getting an e-mail response has proved less than successful. 

The problem it seems to us is that sound people are even nerdier than IT people, who are even worse than hobbyist photographers. You are meant to be an expert from the womb, we assume - to even get anyone to talk to you.

Having come from a sport that gets the moniker ‘snotty yachties’ which is most certainly anything but the case, in reality, people who are interested in audio, are on another level altogether of ‘aloofness’ or so it seems. Our local Mann’s music shop in Colchester has proved to be a very helpful source of information, but even here they have been struggling to understand everything about the product, how it works and what it can do. It is certainly a very powerful bit of kit in trained hands.

It was my first visit to Mann’s that has been going since the beginnings of time or at least over a hundred years. We will be calling again and found the staff very knowledgeable and very keen to help.

Contrary to what people might think of shirkers HQ, we don’t have all day to read 200 plus page manuals or watch endless YouTube videos, although we have picked up some useful information that way.

Very recently we were turned down for a SEECADS grant by Thurrock Council, EU funding that is supposed to help organisations in the South East in the film and creative field. We even changed our SIC Codes (Standard Industry Codes) to keep the box- tickers at the Council happy.

Image: Brian left gets interviewed by the ABC.  

Unfortunately, we feel that EU taxpayer’s money that was supposed to make the world a better place is getting steered towards the usual suspects, those that pay Council Tax or Rates to the Council. It is certainly not coming to the ABC.

So, we are in the ludicrous situation of having top-notch sound kit; professional low carbon lighting funded by the European Union, but no cameras.

What a total waste, when we could be doing good works. 

Sources of funding from the National Lottery have become much harder to obtain. These grantmakers have gone all ‘community’ this and that. We were told our ideas would not be backed because they were not thought of by a ‘community’. We have pointed out that neither the iPod, iPhone nor the Windows Operating system was thought of by ‘communities’ either. Revolutions are generally not started by the masses. The Russian Revolution was started by a group of people that could sit around a small table.

Community this and that may seem wonderful at first, but these organizations run on volunteers. Who pays for volunteers is an important issue, it is the taxpayers? Free workers are not free, someone has to pay for them.

The music industry has been decimated with free this and that. Great if you are an artist supported by Disney who has invested millions in your career to date, but how can bands fund themselves and develop careers in a world where everything is given away? Who needs to pay for music when there is so much free music on-line?

Somewhat frustratingly, our struggle to get our third National Lottery grant for cameras has ground to a halt here too. The great irony is it is often the poorer end of society spend their money having a weekly gamble in the hopes their lives might change. You would have thought ‘Lottery’ might consider those first, not the well-heeled?

Watching money being given to sports clubs for example with stacks of members with ample funds to lend or donate to their favourite clubs who happen to be millionaires or very well off is also very galling. It’s like watching City bankers with pension funds worth millions, getting excited about their free bus pass arriving.

Millions are paid out in bonuses to those at the top end of the DWP, yet it is claimed that 45% of DWP staff receive benefits. At the ABC we would like to see restricted bankers’ bonuses, or executive pay till all their staff can pay their way with a fair day pay for a fair day’s work. NOT as it is at the moment where those at the top cream off eye-watering wages, bonuses and benefits like share options, but their staff have to be supported by the taxpayer with Child Tax Credit or other in-work benefits.

Let the touchy-feely mob have their ‘communities’ but let’s also aim to create proper jobs where people can pay their way in life. Let’s see the ABC get the camera kit we need so we can continue our shining path and launch the exciting projects we have in mind, spreading ideas, information and enlightenment to those wanting to better their circumstances.

Film director Quentin Tarantino said it is not about knowing all about camera lenses and which one to use, you just need to be passionate about making film and the films you make.

image: Quentin Tarantino.

THANK YOU TESCO STORES but let us hope we see some support coming from Essex councils or organisations in Essex - grant makers that should be getting behind those who are prepared to do the work and get on.

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