Final Touches | The 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?

This week has been a slightly new experience for me. As I mentioned in my previous video, for my current video, I decided to hire a freelance editor to take some of the strain off the editing process. This meant that, while I sourced much of the archive/stock footage for the video and put together a “Production Script” in which I detailed what I was imagining might be happening on screen at each moment, I’ve not had to spend nearly as much time with my head in Adobe Premiere Pro as I usually do. Nevertheless, Neil, who I’ve been working with, has been thundering away bringing my weird thoughts to life and I’m just waiting to receive the edit for approval through as I type!

The current plan is to release the video for everyone on YouTube on Friday 29th July but it’ll be out on Nebula and for Patreon supporters at the relevant tiers a few days earlier.

Outside of working on the upcoming video, handing over some of the editing has meant that I’ve also been able to make some headway on researching and writing my next video. I’ll leave announcing what I’m working on for a week or two (it’s nice to have a little bit of suspense) but it’s going to involve a bit of news/media analysis which I know many of you enjoy and is on a topic that has been eating-up an increasing amount of time and attention of late.

And outside of work?

Home life has been relatively busy this week, with every single evening having involved some kind of activity! Towards the beginning of the week, a friend of my partner and I was down visiting and so we spent a couple of evenings catching up with them. I’ve also been to the theatre and to the cinema a couple of times! And that’s not even counting the hours-worth of running that I’ve managed to pack in.

In fact, after such a jam-packed week, I’m now very much looking forward to this evening when I have nothing at all to do but cook some dinner and then slump on the sofa!

What have I been reading/watching/listening to?

I think I might have mentioned in a previous post that, recently, one of the cinemas near me started offering a pass which, for £10 a month, allows you to see as many films as you want. My partner and I signed up a few months ago and have basically now moved into the cinema… This week, we saw both Elvis and Top Gun; both of which I had middling expectations for but really enjoyed.

I loved the style of Elvis. It really was like a fever dream. Visually stunning as one would expect from Luhrmann and very “pacy”—even with a relatively long runtime, it felt like it packed loads in. Nevertheless, even knowing only the broad strokes of Presley’s life, I did feel a bit like it just hit the obvious beats without teaching me anything new. Although maybe there isn’t much more to say and I’m being nitpicky!

Top Gun was the real surprise for me. I know lots of friends who I wouldn’t necessarily expect to be action film fans had said good things about it. But, particularly as I hadn’t seen the first one, I kinda thought it wouldn’t grab me all that much. However, I really, really like it. The stunts are obviously great and it’s just so much fun!

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!!