The Daily Grind

Last night, I labeled up all the tapes we’ve shot for SciCast, from March 2006 to the Dorchester workshops at the beginning of the month. By my count there are about 125 tapes, covering roughly 90 short films. For comparison, this is equivalent to a series of The Big Bang, which used to run to about that many tapes and items. That was a half-million-quid broadcast series, with usually two edit suites running and a total post-production staff of nine. SciCast has one tank of a G4 Mac running Final Cut, and me.

Mercifully the shooting ratio is rather lower and there are already (mostly) rough cuts, but it’s still going to take a while to clear the backlog. Particularly since I’m off to the BIG Event tomorrow, and will doubtless be shooting a couple more films there. Including – weather permitting – one or two with the large and dashing Cody box kite that just arrived. Oooh, exciting.

I’ve been feeling a little swamped by the scale of the job ahead, and I know it must be frustrating for the schools involved not to be able to see their work. But labeling everything last night and being reminded of the films, and of how terrific some of them are, then laying the tapes in these serried ranks – that’s got me all excited again.

Roll on next week: editing, and… jury service. Great timing, huh?

I like strong coffee. While I will occasionally succumb to the allure of a layer of froth, I mostly take coffee black, without sugar, and most certainly not instant.

I’ve drunk ristretto overlooking the Jet d’Eau in Geneva. I’ve drunk kopi luwak, the coffee made with the… er… ‘assistance’ of civets. But the coffee I’ve made just now is different. It’s not merely strong, it’s exerting a discernible gravitational pull. The mug containing it looks slightly odd, almost as if it had…

This isn’t just coffee. It’s Event Horizon coffee.

Drat. That first submitted SciCast film isn’t going to make it up to the website this week, I fear. I now have the DVD, and the film’s great… but it’s got a Red Hot Chili Peppers track mixed in with the sync sound. Oops. No can do, sorry.

Fingers crossed the makers can unpick the audio and resubmit the film. It’s fun.

Terrific web documentary about the growing menace of minstrelism: The Lute and the Fury. Beautifully done.

[via Flossie]

Pantone mugs! From the London Graphic Centre.

Quite possibly the perfectly-constructed blog post; the right sort of length, human and personal, wonderfully phrased, and with a drop-dead fabulous closing line that effortlessly merges ‘geeky’ with ‘heart-warming’ and ‘social observation’.

Or maybe it just made me laugh.

My local deli makes excellent sandwiches to go with their superb coffee. A few weeks back, I was ordering up an elegantly simple ham salad on a granary roll, and hence enquiring about their mustards. “Oooh, we’re a bit low on mustard at the moment. We’ve got English, but that’s about it.”

A brainwave struck, and I mooted the concept of piccalilli (Wikipedia: ‘this condiment-related article is a stub’). The jolly staff duly scoured their shelves, unearthed a jar, cracked it open, and presented me with both a delicious sandwich and a diverting discussion on undervalued and oft-overlooked pickles. It turned out, you see, that nobody else in the shop could recall eating piccalilli anywhere other than at their gran’s, when they were about six. They all thought it revolting stuff, but conceded that this may have been lack of recent familiarity.

A few weeks later and I returned, once again fancying a spot of ham sandwich to follow my daily constitutional. “Do you still have, behind the counter,” I ventured, “a jar of piccalilli?”

“Yes. Nobody else has had any since you.”

I’m appalled. Genuinely appalled. At least, I will be, once I’ve enjoyed devouring this excellent sandwich.

Mike Davidson single-handedly solves the problem of email, and does so in a way that callously breaks my long-standing signature quote (above). Damn, and I could so get on board with this, too. Five.sentenc.es. (The photo is from a school in Dorchester in which I was running workshops the other week. The walls are plastered with these ‘motivational’ posters, with this one pretty much the first you encounter as you walk in the door. They may have thought I was a bit strange when I pointed out that it’s misattributed…)

Yes, I know reception is always pants, but I hate missing interesting bits of the Today programme, so I’ve been looking for a shower radio for ages. They’re surprisingly hard to find… and then this turns up. Count me in. From here, apparently. I can’t help thinking that this is how John Humphrys should look, too.

We’ve had our first submitted film for SciCast! Yay! I haven’t seen it yet – the disc is winging its way from NESTA’s London office to me in Glasgow – but we’ll see if we can’t get it on the site this week. Best of all – the school who’ve sent it isn’t one we’ve ever heard of. Looks like they picked up the story from Learning and Teaching Scotland, or possibly the Times Educational Supplement who ran a story a week ago in Scotland (odd, since they previously ran stuff nationally in May, but I’m not complaining).

We’ve also had encouraging and positive meetings with the National Media Museum and Scottish Screen, and I’m starting to think about how the site might evolve in the next year. I’ve a vague plan that gets about as far as taking over Europe, if not the world, each stage of which sounds almost frighteningly plausible. Funding, however, is going to be tricky – I think it’s hard to see this happening without industrial support.

Trouble is – where do you find a company or organisation that wants to spend money to identify with the next generation of creative, science- and media-literate, publishing-savvy, web-community-participating citizens? A company that wants to be seen supporting a practical, collaborative, non-competitive, positive approach, in which users develop materials for mutual learning and entertainment? A company that wants to bask in the reflected glory of doing something cutting-edge modern, and yet reassuringly familiar – taking the forty years-old ideals of public service children’s TV, and updating them for the twenty-first century? A company that wants to help people to help themselves, spreading life skills and building a shared resource that will last for years?

Damn, that’s going to be hard. Those are really weird ideals. [cough]

If anyone reading this should happen to want to save me the hassle of knocking on doors, and has six figures to spend (probably low six figures, depends exactly what you want), drop me a line: jonathan(at)quernstone.com. No, I don’t seriously expect this to work, but hey – it’s worth asking. Some odd people read this blog.