Sunday 30 August 2015

Craftsy Workshop: a Skype Rehearsal


I have just a few days to prepare for my trip to Denver. It's a wee bit scary and I'm feeling a bit frazzled, as there's still a fair bit of prep to do before I am ready to be filmed.



I'm so pleased that I front-loaded the most time-consuming element and got the main content for the seven lessons planned out months ago, when I was first commissioned. Now I have to go through it all again though, fleshing out the detail and scripting certain sections of it. There will be an auto-cue apparently: though I don't want to be 'reading' what I am saying, the prompts need to be fairly detailed, as there is so much information to get across. 



I'm finding some bits and pieces which need to be changed too - as I rehearse the lessons aloud, I keep tripping on elements which don't quite work properly, or are too complicated. 

Before my holiday, I had to do a run-through of one lesson for my producer in Denver, using Skype, so he could see how it was coming, check my timings, and get a feel for how the class would work generally. Unfortunately, at that point I was still knee-deep in the final editing of my sketching book, so I had no time to rehearse properly. It was a bit ragged, to say the least. I did lots of rambling on too, so took way more time than I needed!




It'll feel better though in a day or two, once I've had the chance to immerse myself in the material and get my head back around what I was doing when I was last working on it. I feel like I've been juggling too many balls of late.


When I get to Denver, we have a whole day set aside for rehearsals, so it feels like I will have plenty of opportunity for fine-tuning. Thank goodness. That feels reassuring, as my sketching book has taken up so much of my head-space recently, I have barely had time to think about Denver until now. Right, back to it...

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