Head down on Longridge this week.

I wrestled with a script for an animation early in the week, and just couldn’t get it to anywhere I was happy with. I clearly need to zoom back out a level, and reminder myself what work this video is doing. Then I can work out what I want to show in it. I have a feeling the trick is, for what I want it to convey, to say far less. There’s a follow-up piece of text that I can go into further detail if I want to.

Another four-minute script went a little better, so that’s in review now.

Otherwise, I’ve mainly been thinking about production tasks: finding interview subjects, performing pre-interviews, writing them up as quasi-scripts for the production crew.

I’m fortunate that I learned a bit about this during making Future Speak, where Kirsty - the excellent producer - ran a lot of these. “Pre-interviews” are where the interview subject gets phoned up ahead of the ‘real’ interview… and we discuss what we’re going to ask them. This does a few useful things. Firstly, it prepares them for the questions they’ll definitely get asked; for documentary-type work, there’s nothing to be gained by anyone being surprised. Secondly, it allows us to help the interviewee frame their responses in the way we’d like - we can tell them a bit about what our target audience might or might not know, or ask them to be prepared to explain particular things in more detail. Finally, it also allows us to be surprised. When somebody says something interesting or exciting - great! We can dive deeper and add it into our script. Or if an expert in a field offers a better way of framing something than I might have asked - let’s put that in, too.

I take notes in writing, but ask if I can record them, just in case I miss anything or want to return to them. Piezo proves invaluable in that regard. There are lots of ways of recording audio from apps - such as VOIP calls or hangouts - but I’ve found Piezo to be reliable and remarkably simple; no messing with routing, just click some buttons and hit record. Really useful to have.

Several interviewees all lined up and prepped, and a pile of short scripts drafted. Week 349 should see me sorting out the final interviews and submitting final scripts.

But with Dent benched for a little while, that was my week.