wevee is a site that a tempts to do something with the vast amount of old film — and there’s a lot of stuff of the Midlands on there. The interface is very slick — you can trim the ends of the clip and place them together on a timeline (very much like simple video editors such as iMovie) and there’s some audio to use too. I was quite disappointed that you couldn’t use the audio from one clip with the pictures from another — meaning you can’t do cut-aways, and that does mean that you can either swap from speech to music (a bit jarring) or drop to silence (or have music over everything). I was enjoying cutting the “modern city” stuff with shots of riots and demolition, and wanted to mix it up that little bit more than the site would let me. At the moment it’s difficult to see how just uploading the archive films to YouTube wouldn’t achieve wider exposure — the editing isn’t really enough, however well the interface is designed, to drag people in. Maybe people sharing stuff might help — but apart from encouraging a little bit of creativity alongside the viewing,...
