No Paine, No Gain

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?

Okay, a very belated Friday Update this week. In fact, it’s as close to the next Friday as it is to the last. And that’s because things have been busy here at Tom Nicholas HQ (still not an actual place).

Working on the Treason Fest 2023 mini-series has been an absolute blast. It’s been really fun to experiment with a new way of working and releasing videos. That being said, it has also been a lotof work!

One hurdle we’ve been running into (and which we often run into) is render times. This is the amount of time it takes for the computer to export a video file once we’ve finished editing it. With the amount of green screen and creative editing and assets we’ve been using in our videos lately, this can take a long, long time.

All in all, it can sometimes take as much as 12 hours for the computer spit out a final file.

We’ve had a few hiccups along these lines over the past week which have resulted in me and Georgia staring at computer screens, willing progress bars to move faster. This was particularly the case on Friday when every percentage of progress the export made seemed to only add to its export time and we wondered if we’d ever get the video out at all!

In the end, we decided to push the release back to Sunday evening; which seems to have been a good move. The video had a brilliant first 24 hours and feedback has once again been really lovely. The stress and anguish was worth it!

And outside of work?

It’s spring here in the UK which means we’re currently being treated to all the weathers. In a single day yesterday it started out raining, then was gloriously sunny and then began hailing (just as I was leaving the supermarket to carry my shopping to the car!). All of this makes it quite hard to plan evening and weekend activities!

Nevertheless, last Sunday I had a really nice day pondering about town. I went for lunch with some friends to celebrate one of their birthdays, did a little bit of shopping including buying a new jacket and went to the cinema (more about that below).

In fact, my current goal is to spend more time out of the house. Working from home can mean I spent a lot of time between the same four walls and so, whether it’s getting out for some slightly longer runs or working from cafés, I’m trying to make the most of the sunny days when they do come; and I think this is having a very good impact on my mood!

What have I been reading/watching/listening to?

Last weekend, I went to see the Mario movie. And, in truth, I was pretty disappointed.

Maybe I shouldn’t have had my hopes up too high. But, we’ve recently been going through a golden age of both video game adaptions and excellent animation. I was hoping that this could be a brilliant mix of Wreck It Ralph, The LEGO Movie and Into the Spider Verse.

Unfortunately, it was just a bit lacklustre. I guess it was a bit like Frozen II in that it probably wasn’t the worst thing I’ve ever seen but I very much doubt I’ll watch it again. Never mind, hopefully the new Spider Verse film does live up to expectations!

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!!