gilest.org

Weak notes for Friday, 18th October 2013

Here's a new thing for me to try: weak notes.

They're like week notes, without the obligation to actually write them every week. I'll just write them as-and-when, whenever there's something worth writing. A weaker variety of notes. Weak notes. So then.

This week was about planning and preparing. Writing and re-writing scripts for a couple of films at GDS. We don't normally write scripts for the films we make, but these ones are a bit different. Both of them have very specific things to say. They're not so much about telling a story, more about explaining a concept. So a script seemed to be the best choice.

Robert Brook and I have been bashing our heads together and throwing ideas around. Developing a thing. Watch this space.

There's a lot of stuff in mid-air at the moment. Hopefully some of it will soon start hitting the ground. Or the fan. One of those.

Oh, one more thing. I made a gif for the government. A government gif. Then @phl remixed it, Doge-style.

A few links

• Some software I've been making use of: Clear for todo lists, and Day One for notes synced between iOS and OS X (not as a journal, which is what it markets itself as).
• Before moving to Day One, I was using OnePad which is lovely. Like a page-a-day diary for your iPhone. Keeps things simple, works fast. I'd still be using it, if it synced to the desktop at all. But sadly it doesn't.

Playing around with blogging tools

I downloaded and tried using Ghost the other day. This was after a week of experiments - first with Textpattern (again), which is wonderful but still so clunky to use for some things (such as inserting an image into a post). Then with Wordpress, for which I found quite a nice theme but which I still feel uncomfortable about when I stop and think about the constant need to stay on top of security.

Ghost feels nice, once you're inside it. The editor is lovely, and the default theme looks great. I'd hesitate, though, before using it for anything important - simply because it's still got so far to go. I can't wait to see how it develops in the next two or three years.

This week's spare ideas

• An app for storyboarding films. There are one or two "pro" storyboarding apps, but this wouldn't be like those at all. It would have two columns, with big boxes in pairs. On the left you write your voiceover script. On the right you draw what appears on screen. In my head, this app would let you drag those boxes around to easily re-arrange them. And it would let you insert and delete rows. Yes that makes it sound like a spreadsheet, but it would horrible to storyboard in a spreadsheet. The idea in my head is something that's not like a spreadsheet.
• A blog called Dear Internet, where invited contributors write a letter to the rest of the internet describing something that's happening where they live, but which for some reason has not been mentioned on the internet. "Dear Internet," people would say. "Here's what's happening in my town."

Filed under: notes
(18 Oct 2013)

𐡸