Irregular Weeknotes 004

It’s irregular weeknote 004. Regular enough.

This was a hard week. Didn’t move. Week started glued to screen editing, and thought, I’ll move after this, then got sick.

Earth Percent/Sing Wild Seeds Project

TL:DR Stuart Candy wrote about the early project here. I’m doing an edit of footage from the project. It is taking a really long time, but I got somewhere with it coming together. Editing is this kind of difficult time sport, where you think it will take you a certain amount of time and it takes alot longer to do. It’s been a hard challenge using multiple footage types, lighting, audio to make it something workable and good as it wasn’t intended we film it, so we’re stitching observational footage together from iphones. Finishing it off next week and getting it graded. Pleased with result though, tweaks into early next week, really brings what we’ve done to life.

We want to experiment with the approach in a digital/scaled way. I like that we’re using the language experimenting as we’re not ‘testing’ a UX/UI flow because we’re more curious to see what happens. So I’ve been offering up ways for the team to think about this in a low-fidelity way so we can run multiple experiments. Was pleased this week when I played with some off the shelf tech and embedded into a page to show what could be done. Better to show than describe. Here’s a software called SoundPipe embedded into a wordpress template so people can leave a recorded audio message. Of course, we could code this, but just wanted something quick/easy/low fidelity to test with.

Narrative Consulting

I’m supporting someone with a bit of narrative framing on their wrap up communications from their project prototyping services in the public sector. This is the kind of work I’m really enjoying getting into, shaping stories to move people to take action/influence decision makers. We met Monday, did a long run down and preparation for a workshop with key people from their governance board and we’ve got a plan to run in a couple of weeks.

Film Work

Had a good catch up with my producer Reece Cargan for Don’t Say Gay to retro our pitch from a couple weeks ago. He runs Randan (previously Bombito) and works on slates that are LGBTQ+ centered. We did a big talk through plans for shooting and budget plans. We are moving people, it is coming… going to hit go on a big part of the project next week to collect letters from people who experienced Section 28.

Had our first feedback session with the lovely Harry Faint who runs Film Ankoth on our short queer folk horror script. Great notes, he really gets what we’re trying to do, and he’s brilliant at giving feedback in a measured and supportive way. Main takeaway for a short was to cut straight into the action, and perhaps consider a less ‘finished’ ending. It’s a short, not a feature. So we’re going to schedule round two of writing and come back up to a treatment level, focusing on the story.

Got sick mid-week

Between Lou and I, we’ve both been sick, me in the latter half of the week. It’s always frustrating, especially as we were due to record our already delayed ‘monthly‘ podcast. When we started we really wanted to keep a commitment to monthly releases but I don’t have a voice, and we’ve both had to sleep out fevers so despite it being frustrating we didn’t force ourselves and said, just wait. So if you do listen to it (and two people told me they did this week which was super nice!), you’ll have to wait until November. No voice = no podcast.

School of Good Services

All our newsletter and new course release delayed due to illness but we did some mega 2025 planning despite being sick. So we are now locking down our U.S/Canada dates, a potential Oz trip and we’ll be in Japan late March, early April. And, we’re shelving some courses and developing a new design leadership/leading design style course. Shorter ones to be released later in the year. Felt good to do some proper forward planning, but too sick to release it yet. More soon.

Renovations

Cleaned our barn up. Had remnants of ghosts of renovation past, we just had not cleaned up. Filtering stuff, recycling things and re-organising our barn has genuinely made me feel lighter.

So what better way to celebrate than invite a bunch of folk over and light up a crazy cardboard skeleton that Lou made over 20 years ago.

Listened:

Discovered Kyyberwall, breakbeats slap

Read:

Too many video reviews of sequencers. I finally made the plunge and bought a Polyend Tracker +. I can get into a good bit of gear that builds music like spreadsheets. Don’t get me wrong, Ableton is that but I just wanted something to work with in a super tactile way.

Toxic Technology – via I think Eliot F

“This relentless focus on the short term only creates the conditions for accumulating risk, and toxic technology”

Moved:

Folks, I DID NOT MOVE this week. I was glued to a screen Monday to Wednesday editing mostly, then got sick. I feel terrible about it but I’m so tired. Hoping for illness reprise next week and back into it.