After a gap of a couple of years, I’ve fired up my camera (otherwise known as shoving my iPhone in a tripod) and and posted something to my YouTube channel, in this case a video review of Marc Burrows’s excellent biography of Sir Terry Pratchett, the Magic of Terry Pratchett.
I’ve tried to put a little extra into this video. I was inspired by a beautiful video published by Geoff Marshall a few weeks ago, about an American road trip he took while feeling a little down. He could have just sat in his chair in his office and talked, but instead he broke it up, with his talking head pieces being filmed out and about, interspersed with shots of him, well, walking about.
So rather than just sitting in my library, as I’ve done in previous videos, I got up and headed out, literally. Sure, there’s an element of artifice here: in the shot of me walking through the woods, I had of course walked through the woods, put my backpack down, setup my phone on its tripod, then walked back away from it the way I’d come, just so that I could turn again and walk towards and then past it.
And then, a few minutes later, I had to go back and refillm that whole thing again, because I’d left the copy of the book I was reviewing in the backpack. Suspension of belief might allow the viewer to believe that I’m first walking past a camera that just happens to be there, and then sitting down in front of a camera that just happens to be there; but it might struggle with me holding a book in my hand when I sit down that I hadn’t been carrying while walking on the way there.
In the end, I was really happy with it. As with all these things, it wasn’t perfect; I noticed a few things in the edit that I had to “patch” with some captions, but that’s always the way with these things. I was talking off the cuff: no script, no autocue, no producer. And I think I managed to bring something extra to the table beyond a simple review, by getting some thoughts in about the nature of biographies.
People seem to like it, which is the main thing. I was particularly happy that Marc Burrows tweeted to say that he felt that I’d hit the mark in identifying what he was trying to achieve.
And he followed that up with a very welcome retweet:
That wasn’t the only retweet. I got a few but I was obviously pleased by one from the Irish Discworld Convention:
So when you’ve got time, please check out the video. And check out Mark’s book – I put a link in the video.
That’s all…
Jonny Nexus 