One Creative Thing » video

Preview day!

minim — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 21:36:26 +0000

Today I have sent the site preview to my client, negotiated a little, created my first 2 training videos and posted them to YouTube (think I’ll probably have to remake them due to screen furriness and general burbling – this video-making thing is hard! – it’s a usable start for this client at any rate, who doesn’t have time for me to train her one-to-one), did some fluting for only the second time since the root canal and took delivery of my very own copy of Structural Functions in Music (very excited about this). I am now repairing my disk permissions and – after a restart because Finale is choking on the sheer number of instruments in Carrion Comfort – am about to do some composition work for my lesson tomorrow.

Achievements? Tick

And just because it totally made my day, here’s my friend Omar from the Durham Midwinter Composers Masterclass proposing to his girl.

The dayjob takes over

minim — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 23:57:01 +0000

I spent pretty much the whole of today messing about with Drupal and pulling together the quote for the website I’m suggesting it for. Learnt quite a lot. Not least that 4 pages is stupidly long for a quote. Fortunately I managed to cull it a bit and get it down to 3 – two pages of itemised options, as the client requested, plus one explaining things like what Drupal is, about standards-compliant code and why I’m qualified to do the job. Plus: I did get to watch another four episodes of Dollhouse while I tinkered. And I made moussaka for dinner. And went for a walk (in the afternoon). No music whatsoever though

Shakespeare and Company (and content)

minim — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 22:17:03 +0000

Today was our last day in Paris and this evening has been – understandably – a little fraught, with the packing and calculations of how long it will take to get to Gare du Nord tomorrow and so on. I’m also feeling rather frazzled at the prospect of tomorrow as a whole – getting the flat all cleaned and tidied and parents out to get to the Eurostar, then getting us all home from St Pancras, and then finally the most stressful thing of all – getting us out of the house again to go to the premiere of my new piece Deconstruct: Point, line, plane. I don’t know that any of my other premieres have ever had me so worried as this one. I know I’ve built this piece exactly how I wanted it to be. I’m confident that it can work, but the criticism I received about it when it was still in its embryonic state just makes me doubt just a little bit, even while I know that it didn’t want to be anything other than what it is. And then there’s the question if whether the performers have just decided to change it… And if they have, is it still under my name or have they correctly listed it as an arrangement. I tell you, the sooner Wednesday rocks up, the happier I’ll be!

But we’ve had a lovely last day in Paris. Ran some errands, and my Da finally took me to Shakespeare and Company – and what a gorgeous bookshop it is!!! Most of the books upstairs aren’t for selling – they’re for sitting about and reading! And they’ve got a piano up there, waiting to be played, so we were all happy – the Da nosing around the poetry section, me reading snippets of Julia Child on French bread, the mama playing Debussy on the piano (and drawing quite a happy crowd: Mama: ‘It’s just you there, isn’t it?’ Me: ‘No, but they’re not listening, they’re all reading books, aren’t you?’ Small throng: *assorted giggles*).

And then we visited Notre Dame. And for the first time I noticed the lovely chapel and column paintings – don’t know how I missed them before – so clean and clear. Really gorgeous.

I should stop procrastinating with photos and ‘fess up though that I’ve done precious little Creative Pact work today – I really think I’m reaching the end of what I can do on the iPad for this project. It’s been great and really useful, and I’m VERY glad I didn’t bring the laptop (especially now I’m on the verge of having to lug lots of lovely foodie shopping back to Blighty) but I really need to be working in PHP now, which means I need my books and a server and an Internet connection I don’t need to reset every 30 seconds. Um… On second thoughts, I guess that’s not so much an iPad limitation as a limitation of circumstances, due to not having packed the PHP book and only having rubbish Internet. But still, feeling a little hamstrung and like I’m treading water. I have managed to achieve a tiny bit, but it was only setting up template pages for the contact page (will contain a PHP form) and a page to hold the Tate’s video interview with me, which I can’t tell if I can embed because Vimeo just tells me it’s Flash, which obv won’t work on the iPad – going to have to wait till I get home to see if that should even have a separate page at all or just a link to Vimeo (suspect the latter, which means I’ll need to work out the best styling for putting about a paragraph of text into the right column and making it all look nice). So not a complete fail there, but a bit wussy, really. Still, planning in being at home and working in it for pretty much the whole of Wednesday and Thursday, so I think I’m still in with a chance to get it ready to fly on the 30th…

Taking a walk down memory lane

minim — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 22:44:36 +0000

Baked some brownies tonight to take to work tomorrow for my second-last day (because a bunch of lovely colleagues won’t be in on Friday) and while I was waiting for them to bake, I found a link to a video of a live performance by Tripod posted to YouTube. Which of course set me off watching a bunch of other Tripod videos, which ultimately got me thinking that I hadn’t seen any Doug Anthony All Stars clips in far, far, far too long. Which I quickly rectified. And so should you (Disclaimer: not if you’re a sensitive person, a PC person, in any way likely to be offended by pretty much anything. Oh, and if you’re at work, it might be best to give them a wide berth too… genius, but nobody ever said genius needed to be tasteful! That said, this one’s pretty tame for them…): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71cEL7v1WGc&feature=related. To give a little context, these guys were HUGE back when I was at school. They used to be on every week on a stand-up programme called The Big Gig. Invariably childish and offensive, invariably brilliant. Great voices, stupid jokes. (I loved them so much, I even took to wearing a tiny plait in my hair in homage to Paul so it’s fabulous to find they’re just as funny as they ever were)

Watched a video about designing a website

minim — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 20:15:01 +0000

on CSS-Tricks, which now has me all fired up to get back to designing both raspberryblue.com and my new personal site. It’s not much of an achievement, I know, but I’m poorly today and this is about all I’ve been capable of in between naps. iPod cosy is about 2/3 done now.

Got Pro Tools working with Leopard!

minim — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 23:19:16 +0000

Which may sound like a small thing, but given that only versions 7.4 and above have the Leopard tick of approval and mine is 7.3, it made me very happy. In the end I had to run the prebind script utility and then make use of Digidesign’s neat little troubleshooting utility which includes a Terminal script to delete the databases (so you can start again with clean ones – deleting the databases apparently is the answer to many and varied Pro Tools issues). AND I managed to get it to import the video too! So that’s working, but now I have a heap of decisions to make about software upgrades to get this film score up and running…

Started playing with FinalCut Express

minim — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 11:56:55 +0000

Installed it and now trying to work out how to piece together the film score to the film.

Received and watched the first cut of the film about me

minim — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 17:58:32 +0000

The one the Creative Spaces project filmed at the Tate and my “studio” (ahem) back in December. I actually sound like a Proper Artist. Feeling pretty good about myself now

Posted first video on Flickr!

minim — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 21:55:00 +0000

Really enjoyed the editing and so forth, although my camera work is rather dodgy – looking forward to playing around a bit more with this