A New Video Has Appeared! | The Friday(ish) Update

A very late posting this one! I wrote the post and completely forgot to actually post it! So, enjoy, last week's Friday Update!

Welcome to this week’s edition of the Friday Update, in which I give a little insight into what I’ve been up to for the past seven days.

What have I been up to this week?

We released a video!

On Thursday evening (UK time), my latest video Why British Cities Keep Going Bankrupt went live.

Regular readers of The Friday Update will know that we’d put a lot into this one.

After many years of making “video essay” style work, this was an experiment with including a bit more “on the ground” reporting and interviews in my projects.

It was a bit of a nerve-wracking release.

Some of you may know that the “YouTube Studio” (essentially the website’s back end for creators) includes a feature which ranks a channel’s latest video out of ten, based on how its performance compares with that of the channel’s nine other most-recent videos at the same time after release.

For the first couple of hours, the video was languishing at 10/10; which was obviously pretty disheartening after putting so much work in.

It also didn’t help matters that I’d clicked the “publish” button whilst in the car on the way to a friend’s wedding; and my laptop was running out of battery. Not great for being able to switch-out thumbnails etc.!

Nevertheless, as the video wasn’t doing so hot, I switched-out the thumbnail and video title and the number of views began to pick up.

As things stand, it’s managed to climb all the way to 3/10, and looks like it will (at last briefly) by 2/10 shortly.

So, it looks like we’ll survive to make another video!

Thanks to everyone who’s watched it so far—I hope you got something out of it!

And outside of work?

Towards the end of last week, I went on a top secret filming trip in London.

I don’t want to reveal too much about it just yet (maybe in the next Friday Update!), but it’s going to make for a very, very special video next time around.

It was also some of the most exhilarating and anxiety-provoking filming I’d ever done!

Alongside getting to witness some very interesting events, it also meant I ended up with a day free to catch up with one of my oldest and best friends who lives up in London.

It also happened to be some of the best weather we’ve had all years; and so we eat some street food and had a few drinks in the sun!

Later on, we took a wander along the canal from Kings Cross to Camden, which I’d never done before, and was lovely.

The amount of traveling I’m doing lately is occasionally having me miss my sofa and kitchen(!), but I’m very grateful to have the opportunity to spend so much time exploring the country whilst filming!

What have I been reading/watching/listening to?

In my preparation for my upcoming Nebula Original film Boomers, I’ve been watching a bunch of documentaries lately.

I watch a fair few documentary pieces anyway, but my goal lately has been to watch them with a bit more of a critical eye: to try and find inspiration for formats and approaches which I find particularly engaging and fun.

My initial pitch was to make something vaguely Micheal-Moore-esque. By which I mean grounded in decent research, but also provocative and occasionally a bit cheeky.

But, I’ve been really keen throughout to ensure I’m not just borrowing Moore’s style entirely and that I’m really taking the time to discover how I want to make movies instead!

Among a bunch of different films I’ve watched over the past few months, my favourite has to be CJ Hunt’s The Neutral Ground, which I rented on iTunes, but which I believe also aired on PBS in the US.

The film follows the events surrounding the removal of confederate monuments in New Orleans. What begins as a film largely about the debates and votes of a city council, ends being much more charged than that, as Hunt follows conflict over the removal of statues over the Charlottesville, which soon becomes host to the now infamous “Unite the Right” rally.

This description maybe makes the film sound rather serious and tense. And, it certainly is: the film ends up covering a protest in which a right-wing Neo-Nazi drove into a crowd killing counter-protestor Heather Heyer.

But, Hunt has worked as a producer for The Daily Show and, while this is nowhere near as silly as a segment which might appear on that show, his presenting style does inject a lightness into the piece which really lifts it.

His slightly irreverent, yet always inquisitive approach makes the piece a really riveting watch; even as these events gradually receded from the topical to the historical.

If you find the film being shown on TV at any point, or have a spare evening and a spare £5, I’d certainly recommend renting it.

That brings us to the end of this week’s edition of the Friday Update. I hope you’ve found it mildly insightful.

Thanks as ever for your generous support and I’ll look forward to updating you more next week!!