Last week was quiet but full of activity. Work is moving along briskly, and there’s more work coming in than we can handle. One big change is that I’m now officially a Creative Director, with a merit raise and yearly bonus—something that actually happened the week before last, but superstitiously, I wanted to have my business cards made up first.
We wrapped up a big project in the house on Saturday, after weeks of jumbled furniture and chaos in the main living space. The walls in the living room are now white, and the bumpout over the chimney is a bright blue and the ceiling a very light blue. All of this took several weeks because the white paint we’d bought to cover the brown wasn’t going on evenly, so I had to roll a bright white over top of that. The ceiling took two weekends because it’s hard to roll a finish coat on with no direct sunlight to see where the bad patches are.
I wired a second breaker in to the panel in the garage, ran a line to a switch by the door, and started putting outlets in along the ceiling. So far there’s one switched light and two outlets, and maybe if the weather warms up just a touch I’ll put on my long johns and go out there one evening this week and get the other four lights hung.
Finn’s final soccer game was on Saturday, and instead of getting clobbered by the Yellow Butterflies they merely got beaten. But who’s keeping score? They all had fun, and we met some more kids in the neighborhood, including the other Finley.
Also, I took Finley out for pizza and a movie on Saturday night: We saw Big Hero 6 and had a blast together at a little movie theater down in Arbutus, which is surprisingly cheap and current in its selection (they were playing Interstellar in 3D the same evening). The movie was very good–I’d say it wasn’t quite as good as How To Train Your Dragon, but the characters were all well-drawn and the story was propulsive.
I shot another video interview this week at work, in less than optimal conditions (about 3 hours of advance notice, overcast weather) and it turned out pretty well. I’m getting the video portion dialed in, having practiced a lot on my own and helping my friend Dave shoot an event last week. The audio is the thing that’s bugging me. I’ve got the subjects miked up correctly, feeding into a high-quality recorder, but the results aren’t what I was expecting.
The audio I got today was low quality. So bad, in fact, that I was afraid I’d made a technical mistake and was pulling the audio in from the built-in mic on the recorder and not the lav mic on my subject. (In order to boost recording levels on the Zoom H4N, you have to select the input device before changes will stick, and I was afraid I’d switched the inputs). I futzed with the levels in Final Cut Pro but didn’t like the results, and brought the original clip into Audacity to boost the levels, clean the garbage out, and split the signal. Once I’d done that the results were much cleaner and I was ready to sync it to video.
So, I’ve got to run some tests on my recorders to see what the issue is. I have a Roland R-09 as a backup, so I’m going to do a 1-1 comparison on recording levels to see what’s what.
Sunday morning I woke up with a slight hangover to the sound of Finn’s voice. She was asking if we would play chess with her, having set up the board while we were sleeping. We’d had friends over Saturday night for drinks and dinner, with emphasis on drinks, and both Jen and I were feeling the effects in the morning. It was my turn to get up, so I made some coffee, organized the board correctly, and we got to playing. She played four games, trying to make sense of the rules, but quickly got better with each. Later in the day, I started rolling white on the walls in the living room, covering over brown paint that dates back to 2006.
Saturday’s schedule called for a soccer game but it was cancelled due to rain. At the local Marshall’s, we found a raincoat for Jen and I found a down coat for the winter, a new fleece, and a sweater. We used the afternoon to clean up the house and prepare for our guests.
The week at work was very busy, which makes this three-day weekend that much more appreciated. Among other large projects, I found myself about five feet from Al Gore on Wednesday evening, running second camera video for a friend. We launched the US version of the New Climate Economy report on Friday, where I shot stills, and then went across town to attend a lunch seminar on infographics with some very interesting speakers.
The update on my yeast is good. It finally started working on Thursday morning and it’s been burbling ever since. The recipe says it only needs two weeks to be done, but I’ll probably transfer it next week and leave it in the secondary for another two.
We took Finn out for pizza and ice cream this evening after another great week of reports from school. She’s doing great and seems to be settling in very well. We have plans, actually, for Sunday afternoon with one of her schoolmates’ families—a family we’ve not met before. Fingers crossed.
I got the sick iMac up and running with the help of some tools and a new hard drive. After some research, I did my first migration from a Time Machine backup, which seems to have been successful. Being able to help friends save money makes me feel good.
Meanwhile, at work on Thursday, I set up and shot a single-camera interview on a Canon 5D with lavalier mics, and after reviewing the footage, I think it went really well. Later that day I shot an event on the roof of our office (we have a swank living roof with tables and chairs and trees) with the same camera and a high-powered 70-200 lens, which worked out great. After getting used to the differences between the 5D MII and the 7D, I was able to quietly move around and capture some great candids as well as the entire shot list. I had a great review this afternoon (it’s actually coming up on one year at WRI) and I left the office feeling really good.
I also successfully made the case for hiring a junior designer for my department based on some rough numbers from the past three years, which will help our productivity and internal capacity greatly. As my role shifts from designer to manager, I’m having problems letting the joy of digging into a single project go (I am never happier than when I’m focused on a task and in the zone) and shifting to head juggler. But thinking in broader terms is something I’ve been itching to do for years now. It’s great to be empowered, trusted, and listened to.
WRI was mentioned briefly in this NYT article, only in passing; from the outside it looks like foreign governments could be buying influence, but as an insider, I see it as solid investment in the future by outside parties with no partisan axe to grind.
FastCompany picked up one of our graphics for a short piece on climate change. One of the first things I did at WRI was to standardize infographics with our branding and a URL, and it’s great to see them all here.
It occurs to me I’ve forgotten to share something I had a large hand in developing–an introductory video for WRI, built by a firm in London called Nice & Serious.
Even though it was gray and rainy, I left work today feeling energized. During the course of the day, I organized my own schedule, engaged a freelance artist I hired on a project I concepted and wrote, art directed a designer I hired on two internal projects, and sat in on a conference with the president of the institution. I began sketching a brand strategy for our mapping products, coordinating a video project with a multimedia firm in London, and was consulted on a Director-level hire by two different people.
It’s amazing the difference a couple of months can make.
I’ve spent the better part of the last three months working on an infographic based on a report about the carbon budget and global warming. We just published Visualizing the Global Carbon Budget today, and hopefully we’ll get some good press and traffic to the site.