We didn’t do any filming last week, but I’ve managed to schedule five more shoot days for later this month and into October. A few of these will require supporting artists, so I’ve contacted the people who helped out with our office shoots, along with a handful of others.

We’ve also planned more Zoom interviews with the actors, and I put together a video presentation that’ll be used in an office scene. One thing I’ve learnt from filming the computer game and Zoom call sequences is that you don’t need to capture actors watching the entire video. It’s enough to shoot them reacting to sections of it. The sound can be added later, which makes things a bit easier.

On the post-production side, I’ve started prepping media. One of our earliest shoots was up on the South Downs, near Chanctonbury Ring. We got some great visuals, but it was a windy day – the large reflector kept blowing around and two of the radio mics kept cutting out. So, although we came back with some decent material, a fair bit of it isn’t the greatest quality. The challenge now is to sift through it all, selecting the good media and avoiding the bad. Where to start? I began by syncing each take’s video with its three audio sources (two lavalier mics and one boom) in Resolve. From there, I built a “scene timeline” and broke everything down into smaller “phrases”, clip by clip, line by line.

The idea is that I can now select the best pieces and stitch them into a coherent whole. Originally, I thought I’d start with the video, but a conversation with ChatGPT has nudged me in a different direction. Apparently, when you have dialogue-heavy scenes, it makes sense to prioritise the audio first, something editors call “radio editing”. I’ll continue working on this next week.

I’ve run into tricky media before on other projects. My experience is that, with enough patience and attention to detail, you can create a good result – provided there’s enough coverage. Fingers crossed.

If you know a better way of doing this, please let me know.

On a slightly different note, I’m convinced that Automatic has captured the zeitgeist. More and more people are commenting on the bureaucratic tangle in modern society. At a party on Saturday night, I was chatting to a guy who mentioned a book called “The Unaccountability Machine” by Dan Davies. From what I gather, it argues that business and political leaders often hand decision-making over to processes, creating what Davies calls “accountability sinks”. To my mind, we see this all the time with political leaders insisting there’s no alternative to a sort of plodding, mindless managerialism. This book was well-reviewed in The Financial Times, and there’s also an interview here with Davis by Harsha Perera, which is worth a look.

This week – a shoot at a petrol station.