A week on Longridge.

I wrote an end-to-end draft of the first of the courses. Primarily, that was writing prose, but it’s more than just long articles: I’m writing a mix of informative essays, the odd quiz, and exercises for learners.

The exercises were versions of ones I’ve run before, but they prove particularly time-consuming - as well as writing them, I need to run them myself to check they work, and write scripts or articles to describe successful outcomes.

But they’re done, and now they’re being reviewed by other members of the team.

I also spent some time on my end of the videos for all three courses. That meant more assemblies of interviews to end the week, once the course content was shipped, and also submitting sample screencast videos recorded at home to see if they’d pass muster with the production team. It sounds like they will - so now I’ve just got to get on with the recording there.

My home screencast recording setup goes like this: I record screen and audio simultaneously. I use Quicktime Player to capture the screen, and record audio from my external microphone as I do - a Red5 condenser mic going into my audio interface. At the same time as recording the audio+video in Quicktime, I also set the audio recording in Logic Pro, where a simple channel strip is setup on a mono channel. When I finish the recording, I open the video and both audio tracks in a video editor, align the Quicktime audio with the processed audio, and then disable the Quicktime-recorded audio. That way, I get the captured video with the processed audio. It sounds and looks pretty good to my eyes and ears.

That made for a full week - not much time for much else. Next week, we move onto writing a full draft of course number two.