Steve Thompson

In 1999 Tom Kelly and I wrote and produced a musical "Steel Town". It tells of a young man's dream of escaping the Steel Works into the world of music (wonder who that could be?) Tom produced the lyric to the song I'm posting which brilliantly captures how that young man's parents may have felt (who could they be?) As we now know, those who did not escape Consett steel works saw its demise in 1980. We put the musical on at the Custom House South Shields and then we took it home to the Empire in Consett. Tom and I are now re-developing the musical to become a Teesside story. To help this we're running some community workshops complete with fantastic archive film from the North East Film Archive. This video shows a lot of Teesside people but only uses minimal clips from the archives so I feel comfortable showing it here. For more you'd have to come to a workshop.

After Windows 7, Movie Maker changed drastically. There is no time line. In my opinion the timeline is fundamental to video editing (also to music and audio). The lack of a timeline in my view renders Movie Maker in Windows 7 and beyond useless.

 WMM 2.6 

 Luckily there is a work around. Download Windows Movie Maker 2.6 and install on your Windows 7 or Windows 8 computer. http://on-msn.com/wmm26 

HD Format 

 A couple of other things are worth doing also. Windows Movie Maker does not always support HD formats. To get around this you need to install some plugins (very easy and straight forward) You can find the plugins here www.stmedia.org/dl/hdplugins.zip 

 The plugins will give you the following resolutions to save your movie to:

• 1280x720
• 1440x1080
• 1920x1080
• 960x720 

 Look on your drive for your Movie Maker 2.6 which will be in a location something like the following:

 C:\program files\Movie Maker
 OR C:\Program Files (x86)\Movie Maker 2.6 

Copy the prx files to the shared folder as follows…………

 C:\program files\Movie Maker\shared\profiles 
 OR C:\Program Files (x86)\Movie Maker 2.6\shared\profiles 

 If the “profiles” folder does not exist then go ahead and create it.

I was sad to hear this week that Alvin Stardust had died. I spent quite a bit of time with Alvin in the late 80's producing an albums worth of my songs with him. The tracks never saw the light of day so I'll attach a compilation of them to this post. I know Alvin was not his real name but I always called him that and he always referred to himself that way. He called me a while back and we talked about dusting off these recordings and trying to do something with them. Clearly that must have been before he embarked on the album that he planned to release in November but I now realise he was suffering with cancer at the time he called. He never mentioned it of course. I remember him as quite a gentleman always very polite to everyone and never the pop star. He came to Newcastle several times to work on the recordings and sometimes stayed at my home in Whitley Bay. I didn't drive in those days so we got the metro to the studio in Newcastle each morning. He didn't bat an eyelid and nobody recognised him. I did see the pop star side one time however. After one set of sessions he was due to catch an early flight next morning so he was staying in a hotel. I dropped him off there in a taxi and as he went up to reception he said "watch this". He checked in and on some subterfuge or other asked to see the duty manager. When she arrived he turned on the charm and a glowing pop star smile. The manageress asked if he would mind having his photo taken in front of the hotel and insisted on upgrading him to a suite of rooms at no extra charge. As she went off  to make these arrangements he turned and winked at me and said "works every time" !

I've only scratched the surface with IFTTT https://ifttt.com/ but it looks set to become ever more highly regarded with $30M in funding. IFTTT is pronounced like Gift without the "G". It means "If This (happens) Then (make) This (happen). It's kind of a visual programming tool kit for the Internet and social media. It's pretty easy to use and there are lots of "recipes" you can use to get started. The recipes do things like: send a tweet if a YouTube Video gets commented on, send me an email if it will be raining tomorrow or Monitor a Wikipedia Page. You and edit and refine existing recipes or make your own using the easy toolkit. Now they have announced a set of recipes for outer space http://ift.tt/1sReoqS but what really looks like being the next big thing are the recipes for the Internet of things http://nyti.ms/1tjbb7j

Trying the Hootsuite app to post to my site.

"I was near Hamburg, Tygers Of Pan Tang were performing their show. I took this picture while the band was playing a beautiful song called Paris By Air. The audience goes crazy but all of a sudden my mind goes to Steve Thompson, the man who wrote this song so many years ago. Many thanks, Steve!"

I've got boxes of "ideas tapes" (Cassettes) in the attic. Luckily digital ideas are easier to store and access (see pic) Back in the 70's and 80's my various publishers and production companies were always badgering me for more songs - give is more !! make us money !! - oh the stress. Sometimes the very pressure they exerted staunched the creative flow. Lately new ideas have been dropping from me like ... well er... the proverbial dropping off you thing (again see pic). I wonder if my old publishers would be pleased to hear this. The ones I haven't either sue'd or told to F off that is. Sadly, I can't really play you any of this stuff as it is really ruff so just hum along with the picture.

Steve T