Excited For The Year Ahead | The Friday(ish) Update

Welcome to this week’s edition of the Friday(ish) 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?

2024 is properly here!

I had a pretty stumbling start to the year. My wife’s birthday is in early January which means we often take a bit of time off work to celebrate. This helps to ensure that her birthday doesn’t get entirely overshadowed by Christmas(!) whilst also allowing us to have something fun to look forward to in what are often the darkest weeks of the year.

With the fun of that trip out of the way, however, I’m now writing this from my regular desk at the co-working space we use. I think they’re meant to be “hot desks” but I think I’ve now managed to sit in this exact same spot for around two months running!

And, as I hinted in my New Year’s Day update (published last week), I am buzzing for the year ahead.

Before I went away, I recorded the preliminary voiceover audio for the next video. This is a slightly different way of working that Georgia and I began experimenting with last year.

Previously, I have recorded an entire video in-situ including any costume, set and lighting which are used for each section. Any animations or archive footage which are used have then been placed over the top of that “a-roll” footage of me. This means that, even when you can’t see me, the audio which is being used is the audio that was captured in whatever environment/location/set you can see when I am on screen.

There were benefits to this way of working (for example, if we changed our minds about whether we wanted me on screen or not, it was easy to make that change). Nevertheless, it wasn’t the most efficient way of working. For videos in which we want to film on-location outdoors, it’s also largely impractical: filming an *entire video* in the park or on the beach would not be such a fun day!

It’s experiments about this which can massively expand the type of videos we make which are keeping me incredibly excited about the year to come. I’m really keen to increase our output, to hopefully expand our team a little and to find more “important”, less well-covered topics and stories to report on.

And, if you’re signed-up here, you’ll be helping to support those developments along the way. So thank you so much!

And outside of work?

My weekend away with my wife was lovely.

We went up to London and managed to pack in quite a few activities over the few days we were there. We went bowling, took a trip to an indoor funfair, went to the theatre, went shopping and had a beautiful fancy meal at a Michelin star restaurant thanks to a deal we found online!

I think both our highlights of the trip was seeing the Royal Shakespeare Company’s stage adaptation of My Neighbour Totoro.

The show is a gorgeous piece of theatre with a live, onstage orchestra and some of the most amazing puppetry I’ve ever seen. It’s full of jaw-dropping visual moments in which set and performance combine to just completely astonish.

I’m always of the opinion that you can make great art on a shoestring budget. This was the complete opposite of that. Having worked in theatre, I have no doubt that this show cost a humungous amount to make (possibly millions of pounds?). But the result is gorgeous and we were both beaming come the end!

What have I been reading/watching/listening to?

I guess my “outside of work” section was also a “what have I been watching” section this week. But, let’s add in something I’ve been reading too…

Whilst away for the weekend, I also found time to finish reading Alice Cappelle’s Collapse Feminism.

Some of you will know Alice from her YouTube videos on various political and cultural topics, from her unique perspective as a French creator who makes videos for an English-speaking audience. If you’ve not, you can find them here: https://www.youtube.com/@AliceCappelle

Alice announced the book some months ago in a community post and I instantly set a reminder in my head to ensure I picked it up when it was released. It was really exciting to see a political creator transitioning into writing a book and I knew Alice would put together something really insightful.

The book does a couple of things at once. Firstly, it provides an intro to some key feminist ideas. Secondly, it aims to explain and analyse a handful of different gender-based communities and movements which have emerged online in recent years. This includes some that many people are aware of (incels, girlbosses) and many others that are slightly less mainstream (the cottage core community, “fitgirls”).

The book covers *a lot* of ground and I did occasionally wish it had focused on fewer communities in order to explore those it did outline on a slightly deeper level. I sometimes felt that it would pique my interest on a certain group and then whisk me away to something new before I got a chance to completely understand it.

Nevertheless, it was an interesting read and there was even a nod to one of my videos in there which was very kind! If you like Alice’s work, I’d definitely suggest giving it a look.

That brings us to the end of this week’s edition of the Friday(ish) 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!!