World Sheepdog Trials (July 2005)
It's Friday 15th July
and Katherine and I have just got back from Ireland and the 2005 World Sheepdog
Trials, held at Tullamore. The Irish Trial Committee did a fantastic job producing
such an interesting country fair and on the Sunday numbers in the area of 15,000
apparently came to the event, which is a pretty staggering amount of people. But
the wonderful weather, albeit a little hot, certainly helped the organizers have
such a successful trial. The trial was made up of two days of qualifying, the
Thursday and the Friday. Then on the Saturday there were 42 semi final runs,
followed by 16 finalists on the Sunday for the double lift course. Approximately
240 dogs competed in the qualifying trial from 21 countries and on three separate
qualifying fields. The dogs that ran on each field, each day, competed against
the other dogs on that field and on that specific day and on the second day of
qualifying, the sheep were rotated to different fields. Basically the one field
they ran the little horned hill sheep and the other two fields ran Suffolk cross
sheep, with a quite different approach in their style and speed around the course,
with the little horned sheep being a lot swifter than the Suffolk.
On the Saturday the 42 semi finalists competed on the main field with the
smaller, horned hill sheep. It was an excellent course for the semi finals
on a beautiful parkland field and the sheep were exceptional for that day.
My daughter Katherine came to the trial with me and so we had two cameras
operating, making it a little more interesting, I hope. She was a lot better
at asking for interviews than I am and so we managed to talk to most of the
handlers in the semi finals and finals, although there were some who completely
refused, but not many.
We are planning on producing three different programs of the trial. A 2
hour highlights of the whole event, then a 2 hour program on the semi finals,
and finally a 2 hour program of the top six or seven runs, depending on how many
full runs will actually fit into the 2 hours. For a change we are going to be
producing these programs in DVD, and that's why we are going to the two hours.
The ISDS has had an interest in a program on the top runs of the final day and
that is why we are doing the program on the top finalists. As for the semi final
program, it seemed to me that there was a good reason to include many of these
top competitors into a program, such as Tommy Wilson's run for the United States,
Scott Glen's run for Canada and many others. Without a separate program covering
the 12 hours of the Semi Finals, there would be very little time to show much
of the Saturday's runs in the highlights video. We were glad to have been able
to sponsor Scott Glen in his travels to Ireland and so it's important to cover
some of these runs.
My job right now is to capture the 30 plus hours of footage from the two
cameras onto our hard drives, so we can start the process of scripting,
storyboarding and then editing. The editing is Katherine's job for the rest
of the summer. I hope that you will be interested in theses programs. Rural
Route Videos will be handling these videos for all our customers in North America
and other NTSC customers, like Japan and some of the South American countries
that require NTSC. The ISDS will be handling the programs for the other areas
of the world, Europe, Australia, New Zealand etc. The programs will be available
by the beginning of September, in time for the International in England.
I would like to congratulate all the handlers on their efforts and commitment
and the continued sportsmanship that is shown in this sport, where the almighty
dollar is secondary to the culture of the Border Collie.
The next World Trial has been agreed upon for 2008, although I expect
there'll be a great deal of thought put into it's timing and location over
the next little while.
I'll also be making up some pages about the World Trial event for my web
site.
Martin Penfold
Rural Route Videos
Austin, Manitoba
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