Head down on production for Longridge. That meant a few phone meetings with the production team, finalising a few more participants, and lots more pre-interviews with video subjects.

That’s all done, now, and the video shoots will be taking place over the next couple of weeks.

I also spent some time preparing a few more scripts for non-interview films, and getting drafts of them out for review. One - just trying to describe in simple terms, the round-trip of a browser request - flummoxed me for a long time; it got lost in hundreds of words on DNS and ended up baggy, boring, and over-long.

A few days away from it and I found a different approach. I sat down and worked out what the point of this film was - what I wanted learners to come away from it with. I knew this in my head, but needed to emphasise it to myself, so it was time to write out the big ‘beats’.

Seeing them laid out gave me a slightly different direction on the same story, and allowed me to bring it in well within our time limit. Yes, it simplifies a few things, but it still tells the truth. The change is it now ‘spends’ its time on the key beats, and pulls focus on things that we don’t need to know about (yet). If you write for a living, you likely know this lesson innately; for me, it’s reminder of muscles I need to keep exercising.

Finally, before I head off for a vacation, I generated a “revision B” of the boards for Dent and ordered them - along with a plastic solder stencil. They should be with me when I return, and perhaps we’ll have more joy. I’ll be head-down writing Longridge then, but a project for spare moments.