Year: 2005

The joy of draft scripts revolves, in part, around gems like this:

‘Astronauts in space can’t taste a thing, because there is no air.’

Frankly, that’s the least of their problems.

Technically, this is day five, but I started writing this back on Monday, so… ach, whatever.

Up at stupid o’clock this morning to catch an early flight to London, to meet the gang and get cracking on the Christmas Lectures. ‘The gang’ are, it transpires, a small group of very lovely people and – at least as important – all damned clever. Having hoovered up as much of the scripts as I felt able to in a day, I joined researcher Tom and AP James heading over to Albemarle Street for my first visit to the Royal Institution for something like twelve years. It’s both timeless, and unrecognisable – the lecture theatre and prep room lab are still there, but with notable changes. It’s a curiously bitter-sweet feel – I’m hugely excited to be back there, but what have they done to Faraday’s study? And so on.

In the photo are Tom and James, fiddling around in the old prep room. Above them hangs a decrepit model of Saturn, which didn’t look much better when I made it fifteen years ago.

Mechannibals, incidentally, isn’t on tomorrow. Again. So far we’ve seen three shows, then its slot got usurped by the snooker. The following week it got gazumped by some nautical geezer who’s been dead for two centuries. This week… it’s just not on.

Apparently it’s not returning to the Sunday slot at all – rather, it’s going to pick up with programme 4 on 16th or 17th November. Then it runs for another four weeks, after which the snooker kicks it out again, then the last show should be on the week before Christmas.

I could speculate on likely causes and plausible implications, but I think I’ll refrain. Draw your own conclusions.

File under ‘I didn’t know that’: for historical reasons, Avid editing software doesn’t use QuickTime formats. Thus, it’s normally impossible to move media between Avid and, say, Final Cut Pro without using something like Automatic Duck‘s convertors. However, Avid do offer a freely-downloadable QuickTime component for their Meridien uncompressed and barely-compressed format.

Install it, restart Final Cut, and you’re good to go. OK, so it’s a bit weird in that you can’t always preview the footage without error dialogs, but the clips will render if you stick them in a sequence.

Our brilliant graphics chappie was outputting Meridien 2:1-compressed renders from After Effects, which were fine for the Symphony online but naff all use for the ancient Media Composer 7 offline. So… I installed the filters on my PowerBook, rendered the graphics to DV, and spat them out to tape, which the offline could then read. All a bit belt-and-braces, but it does work.

I note this here because I had to scoot off and find the codec download page again, as I’m trying to use the graphics masters to make menu backgrounds for the DVDs.

Five years ago, DVD burners cost something like $5000. Then Apple started fitting them to Power Macs as a standard feature. When I bought my G4 tower back in mid-2002 I remember working out that the DVD burner accounted for almost half the cost of the machine (admittedly knocked way down to £1000 as end-of-line stock).

That built-in DVD burner was one of the very early ones, able to write a complete disc in a little over an hour. Which is a tremendous thing, but not when you’re hoping to write a couple of dozen discs. However, it’s a standard piece of kit, so… it turns out one can just rip out the factory-fitted DVD burner and slot in a new one.

XLR8YourMac have a clumsy but incredibly useful Drive Compatibility Database; I bought a Pioneer DVD-110D from the local PC components shop for a hair over – get this – thirty quid. Apple have an excellently clear video showing how to remove the optical drive caddy from the G4, then it’s merely a matter of swapping the drive unit over and bunging it all back together. Oh, and slipping off the front bit of the drive tray, so it doesn’t jam on the G4’s natty bezel door thingy.

Boot up again and basic things ‘just work,’ but for some more funky stuff in iDVD and the like one needs to give OS X a little kick to reassure it that, yes, the drive will play ball. Download and run Patchburn, restart, and you’re done.

So… I’m now burning DVDs eight times faster. The drive will go twice as fast again, but I was a cheapskate with the blanks I bought.

Expanding on my previous post: there’s something peculiarly wonderful about finishing projects, some aspect of the TV process that seems to fundamentally agree with me. Something to do with timescales of a few months, packaging everything up at the end of it, and being able to say, ‘I could have done this or that, maybe more of that would have been better – but you know what? What I did was this, and that’s the end of it.’ The residue of weeks of deliberation and toil, impassioned debates, hair-tearing creative bursts, late nights, surmounting seemingly-impassible obstacles, and bashing against failing or inadequate or inappropriate kit to force it to bend to your will… is a small pile of tapes.

There’s always a moment, late on in the dub process, where you line up the tapes on a table, regimenting them in neat, serried rows. Then you… look at them. Often the editor and dubbing mixer will join you in silent contemplation. You’ll never see those tapes again, yet they’re what you’ve been working towards all along. They’re the physical embodiment of all the effort, toil, and creativity of all the individuals involved in the series. Tens of thousands of pounds buys you, in the end, a few hundred feet of iron-carrying tape, wrapped up in neat blue boxes with discrete sticky labels bearing obtuse technical details.

Of course, the real product of TV happens in people’s living rooms, as they watch the show. But as programme makers we never see that. The tapes are our offering to the deities of transmission; having nurtured their contents, we set them free (via courier), wish them well, and… hope.

It’s a bitter-sweet moment, leaving one in a state of mildly perplexed euphoria which can last as much as several weeks. In this case, I barely have time to enjoy it, since I’m frantically trying to clear the decks in Glasgow in preparation for the new London job on Monday. Pity.

Yesterday: waving a fond farewell to the transmission masters, I filed a small mountain of paperwork, handed over the clear-up notes to Duncan the production secretary, and… cleared my desk. Today I’m messing about trying to do DVDs of the show so the cast and crew can actually see it, and I still have to write half the billings, but otherwise – Scrap It! is finished. Thirteen weeks since I started on it, and we’ve delivered thirteen shows.

I’ve never worked that fast, but it’s been an absolute blast. OK, so some of it we got away with by the skin of our teeth, and the dub was a bit rushed, but it’s been one of the most fun jobs I can recall. It’s not really for me to judge, but overall I’m delighted with the show, the commissioner seems extremely happy, and while it’s still a tad early to say with confidence, it’s looking like we even brought it in on budget. Which is something of a miracle, frankly.

Transmission is on Discovery Kids from November 7th (a week on Monday!), at 7:25am, 12:10pm and 4:00pm. The billings are somewhat out of date (we never did shoot the nose pump mentioned in the first episode blurbs…), but that’s probably because I haven’t had chance to write them yet. Well hey, we only worked out the series running order a week ago!

Oh, and the pig? At some point, I brought in a very cute cardboard pig made by Dave Pitt for The Big Bang, many years ago. I think it was supposed to be an example of the level of finish we were aiming for, or something. Anyway, it ended up as set dressing… then the graphics guy got his mitts on it… and now it’s animated all over the titles and graphics sequences, despite having come from an entirely different series. But hey – everyone loves the pig.

Philip Greenspun has one of the most original takes I’ve heard on the whole ‘teaching of Intelligent Design’ debacle – that scientists should cheer it on. His logic: only by crippling the intellectual development of a generation of students can scientists be guaranteed ongoing careers. If there’s nobody to replace you, your employment prospects go up. Win!

[giggle]

As a rule, I don’t get phone calls offering me work. Unusually for TV, I’ve never really moved in those circles, instead falling from job to job. So the call from Mentorn this lunchtime was something of a surprise.

More of a surprise was the call from Pioneer this afternoon, asking if I’d like to direct a documentary. Er… yes. When?

Next month. Bother.

Ah well. In accordance with the Bus Queue Postulate I’m now waiting for the phone to ring once more – meanwhile, many thanks Patrick for pointing them in my direction.

Monday. That’s when I start. We have eight weeks to put five shows together, then they go out on Five from Boxing Day. Live. It’s… the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures.

The astute observer of my CV may recall that I worked on the Christmas Lectures back in 1990 – which was, in fact, the last time I worked in London, before I was even a student. So, I’m unreasonably excited about the whole thing. I only vaguely know where I’m going to stay, it’s only just dawned on me that I may not be able to leave London for Christmas itself, and the pay is rubbish. But… it’s the RI.

Yay!