crisis over

looks like the crisis is over -I've now got more work than I know what to do with again. That's how it goes!

Yesterday I went for a meeting with a publisher who wants me to write a very simple guide to making digital video. The company seems a pretty good one – producing 100 new titles a year (that’s pretty prolific) on all kinds of subjects from travel to lifestyles to natural history.

It was a good meeting. These practical guides are quite new to them, but the first one – on how to do very basic things with your PC (like opening and closing windows and writing word documents) proved increadibly successful, so they’ve branched out into titles like researching family trees, building websites, and of course, Digital Video.

The book will be aimed at the complete novice – and it sounds like many of their readers are older people who have missed the technological revolution. In other words, I’m writing a book aimed at my Dad.

I can see exactly how the book should work and fleshing out the chapters and tutorials was very easy because it’s so clear what the novice needs to know about digital video. I’m also quite passionate about it – I think video is fast turning into a medium which is as natural to some people as writing. I also think that being video literate is soon going to be almost as important as being literate with words – if you can’t post to youtube, or carry on a video skype conversation or communicate your business online visually you’re likely to be left behind.

Strangely, I received a copy of the last book I wrote (or rather updated) this morning (you can see it here, if you’re interested - http://www.amazon.com/New-Digital-Video-Manual-Date/dp/1847320457/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1204134233&sr=8-3 )


Anyway – writing a book for my Dad makes me a little nervous because although he’s the target market – he’s also almost impossible to reach with new ideas. He has (and I think it’s fairly common among the older generation) a view that you don’t just start playing with a piece of technology, you read the manual and understand it thoroughly before you start. You have to know what every button does.

So, for example, my Dad won’t use Word because there’s a whole row if icons at the top of the screen which he doesn’t understand. I, on the other hand, use word every day. looking along the row of icons at the top of the screen now – I still don’t understand most of them, but I know that it doesn’t matter. I’m not scared of any of them (except that mirrored P icon which does something very odd to my whole document).

I have to key into a mindset which says “unless I understand everything about how something works, I can’t start messing around with it” and that’s tough.

I guess the only way is to go step by step very slowly through everything and make every tutorial lead to something obviously and instantly useable.



I’ve also got the go-ahead to start work on another new venture – a newsletter for one of the main manufacturers of budget video editing software and hardware. It’s going to be a monthly email sent out to subscribers giving them tips and ideas on how to expand their use of the software…. So lots of small but highly focussed articles, and 30-40 word news items. Writing for the web is always an exercise in minimalism (apart from this blog – in which I frequently ramble on for ages!).


As usual, deadlines here are tight. Part I of the newsletter is to be in by the end of the week. The book needs to be finished by the end of April.

It’s all do-able – or appears so now!

A publishing company approached me today wanting me to write another book on digital video. This one’s aimed at complete novices. It’s quite short – 20,000 words, but sounds like a good project.

Just to set the record straight – you don’t get rich writing books. I’ve written (or contributed to) 4 so far – this will be my 5th – and I’ve learned that:
1) the advance is generally pretty small because you’re also offered royalties on sales
and
2) the advance is all you get because specialist factual books rarely if ever sell enough to start paying royalties.
So you need to negotiate an advance that will pay for you to write the book.

That’s not to say that writing a book isn’t a good experience – it is – and it can allow you to explore areas that you can’t in the tightly word-controlled world of magazine writing and you can be a little more in-depth, exploring the issues behind whatever it is you’re writing about.

This one looks like it’s going to be basically a set of extended tutorials showing people who are just discovering youtube how they can make their own digital videos, so it’s fun but not too technical. The emphasis will be on being creative not on obeying all the rules of TV.

Anyway – it will give me enough money to pay for the narration on a couple of documentaries – so that’s one problem sorted. I’m just not expecting to retire on it.
More on that as it develops, and eventually turns into a panic…(the deadline is 2 months – which seems do-able right now…

Financial crisis
Ok – things not going too well financially this year so far. Two of the magazines I write for have gone through complete re-designs. This has lead to in one case nobody knowing if the magazine is to survive and in the other the reviews section (a major part of my work) being replaced.

Another magazine (Imagine FX) has decided to take its reviews section in-house. Added to this, George’s arrival has meant I have had to take lots of time off. Now, the poster I’ve been doing of the human body has been abandoned.


So – needing to get some work in I’ve spent today phoning round and finding out what’s going on with all the magazines, invoicing for the work I’ve already done and not yet got paid for and trying to come up with ideas for features and articles to try to get things going again.

It’s not easy since the re-designs of the magazines mean that nobody – even the editors – are entirely sure what kind of articles they want right now.

Still, I’ve made a good stab at it and I’ll have to see what the response is over the next few days.

I’m not as concerned this evening as I was this morning, but I’m a bit worried that I need to start doing more commissioned work in order to pay for the documentary projects I’m working on (the first one looks like it’s heading for completion – which means I’ll have to find 1500 for dubbing and narration…. Then there’s the rest of the documentaries I’ve got planned for this year which I don’t even want to think about.

It’ll be a while before any money starts to appear from any of this work – typically 3 months between having an idea and getting paid after it’s published… still, if I can get through to next month, the regular cheque from my royalties on science photo library should come in (I hope it’s a good one) and that should keep me going for a bit.

It’s not all bad though….
One of the manufacturers of domestic digital video stuff has come to me asking if I can write them a regular newsletter – this will bring in 500 a month and unlike most of my work, I’ll actually have the people making the products actively involved without having to pester them.

In addition, I’ve now got somebody renting my property in Manchester, so that’s another £400 per month coming in.

Tutorials and helpdesksAnother two tutorials – both video based – and a helpdesk had to be done this week as well as an article for PC plus on 3d videomaking (the kind of 3d where you have 2 cameras and wear 3d glasses to watch it – I’ll have a video up in a couple of weeks!)There were two After Effects tutorials – both on After Effects, but for magazines aimed at different markets – one for Digital Video needed to be quite simple – allowing people who’d never touched After Effects to get to grips with it.

The other was for animators and filmmakers who really know their way around the package and want to know how to use the new tools in a really professional way. It requires a little mental gymnastics to switch between the different styles of writing. Still, I think I managed it.


I also took advantage of the commission to do something I’ve been meaning to do for ages – to construct a logo screen for my documentaries.

With my main PCs both down while I create a duplicate of my main hard drive in the hope that I can ensure myself against its destruction, I'm working on lisa's laptop.

I've quite got the hang of this now - putting all my files on external hard drives and memory sticks, and nipping effortlessly from one computer to another whenever it suits me.

it's a kind of nomadic exsistence, allowing me to set up and work on virtually any machine anywere. I'm certain that some day all computing will be like this, but right now, it's a little forced.

Not every computer is running the same software, so I'm constantly halted in whatever I try to do by the fact that the tool I need is on another machine. Having more than one computer right now means that you're constantly nipping from one to the other because there's not one machine that has everything you need.

I do look forward to the day when I can just carry around a simple remote control (or even just a pin number) and log into any computer, TV, phone, ipod or fridge anywhere in the world and instantly use it as though it's my home machine... however, that day is not today, and I'm going to have to wait for my computer to start working again!

why macs are so crap

I finally got to write the tutorial for Computer music magazine on editing today. I had to write two tutorials on how to edit a rock video using cheap software on a Mac and a PC.

The PC version was relatively straightforward and as expected, the mac version was a real pig.

Obviously, the fact that I'm using cheap and free software means there aren't the options i'd like and that's a bit frustrating, but worse than that is the Apple ethos which pervades everything they do.

It's not that the mac does things differently to the PC - and that I'm used to the way the PC works - it's more that the very thing the Mac is sold on is fake.

let me explain:

Macs are sold on the idea that they're the arty person's computer. They're creative where the PC is businesslike. However, in truth, the mac makes it very very easy to do the things its programmers think you'd want to do. The predictable dull, businesslike things work perfectly and intuatively in just the way you'd expect them to.

However, if you deviate. if you want to do something different. if you have, horror of horrors, your own creative idea of what you want to do or how you want to do it, the architecture makes it virtually impossible.

The mac is built on the impossibly arogant notion that the programmers will have thought of everything you might want to do and planned for you the perfect way to do it. This is almost never true in real life.

It's a bit like having a car which has just one button on the dashboard marked "go home". Press the button and the car will go home. It's a triumph of engineering - the easiest car to drive ever created.

Unless you want to go somewhere other than home.

in which case you have to take the engine out or buy a new car.

and this extends to other apple products: take the ipod - beautiful piece of design and I wouldn't be without mine. But what if you don't want to use the clumsy Itunes? what if you just want to drag your tunes from the desktop to the ipod - you can do it with every other mp3 player on the market. But with the ipod, all your files are renamed and re-positioned so you can't tell which song is which file. so when itunes stops working -or when you're on a computer you haven't installed it on or when you're using your machine for something else and don't want to have it getting in the way - you're stuffed.

By contrast, the PC allows gives you options - creative possibilities - everything you want to do can be done several different ways and if one doesn't work, proves difficult, or you just don't like it, you can pick another.

Now that's an artist's computer.

Pop videos

Headlong back into work yesterday, I’ve got a tutorial to write for Computer Music magazine. Basically they want me to show people who’ve never touched video before how to make a pop promo on PC or Mac.

The software they sent over wasn’t really up to the job, but luckily they were able to switch for more workable programmes (Sony Vegas for the PC and Imovie for the Mac). I did the PC edit fine using the 2 camera shoot they’d done at a live venue, but since imovie can’t syncronise two tracks of video at once, I’m going to have to adopt a different approach for the mac version (which is good anyway because it will make the feature more interesting).

The band who sent the footage are going to shoot some more over the weekend – a bit of a pain for them, but I’m sure they’ll get a lot of publicity out of it – not to mention a free video on youtube.

Although the tutorial is easy enough to do, it’s a bit frustrating knowing that if I was using Premiere or FCP, I could produce a much better piece of video. Still, it should give a good set of pointers to people new to video editing.