Posts tagged as writing

A quiet week, as I was working until Sunday night last week teaching.

It’s an admin-oriented time of the year. I finished up all my book-keeping for the previous year to ship to my accountant. This was largely up-to-date thanks to regular FreeAgenting, but there were still a few bits and bobs to catch up on. I also sent a few invoices, and paid a few bills related to the studio fit-out in the autumn.

I spent a day or so presenting a demo of the state of Hallin to the direct client. We worked out what would be necessary to do before we shipped a beta to staging. I finished up that code, wrote some appropriate end-user documentation, and shipped that off to them for testing.

Over on my personal site, I wrote up the Spark AR filter I made one afternoon last week. It’s not so much a technical write-up as it is an exploration of environments for making software toys:

It’s a while since I’ve worked on a platform that’s wanted to be fun. I’ve made my own fun with software, making tools to make art or sounds, for instance. But in 2020, so much of the software I use wants me to not have fun.

[…]

Twitter is now very hard to make jokes on. The word ‘bot’ has come to stand for not ‘fun software toy’ but ‘bad actor from a foreign state’. The API is increasingly more restricted as a result. I’m required to regularly log in to prove an account is real. My accounts aren’t real: they’re toys, automatons, playing on the internet.

I get why these restrictions are in place. I don’t like bad actors spreading misinformation, lies, and propaganda. But I’m still allowed to be sad the the cost of that is making toys and art on the platform.

You can read more (and see the filter in action) in Fun With Software, over at infovore.org.

Finally, a longer-term personal project that I’m calling Ninebarrow began to take shape - or, at least, take a little more solid form. No huge developments here just yet; there’s little more than thinking on it, so far, but I’m writing it down for the sake of tracking the progress of that project, if it happens, over time. Here is where it began.

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.