It’s a glorious day. Unanimous sea and sky, clear horizon; it’s the kind of day that makes you feel positive and ready to tackle the world.

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One of the matters absent from yesterday’s confessional, is that on Tuesday I had a meeting with my accountant about when to incorporate a new business. I was in two minds about instructing my accountant, because he’s the accountant for my other companies, and I harboured a concern that, should I ever fall into dispute with my other companies (which I don’t expect I would, but never say never), he would be conflicted. He also has a loyalty to those companies. On the other hand, he’s able to look across the whole scope of my business and financial interests, which is an asset. So I chewed on this decision for a while, called one of my closest friends - a lawyer, who always gives excellent advice - ran it past him, and landed on appointing my existing accountant to look after my affairs as I march into my new, independent future.

I had the initial chat, and he advised that I shouldn’t delay incorporating - I’m already spending money on this production, I need to incorporate immediately. So, I have a brand new company, which is the…let me count it up: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven – it’s the seventh for me. Amazing. I founded the longest running one (which is still running as a going concern) in 1999, when I was a teenager. This new one feels just as significant, in its way.

People have been asking me to explain what the new company does, and I can’t really say, which is not a situation I’ve been in before. It exists as a blanket vehicle for all my activities which are currently in film and video, but will shift about into different things. At the present moment, it’s a vehicle for this film, and I can run production expenses through it, which is important.

Setting up a bank account has proved difficult. It’s hard to escape the feeling that the environment in the UK has really sharpened against small business, and particularly new business. It’s easier for me to navigate because of my experience: I was able to field the questions of the bankers, who asked various absurdities, like how much money would arrive from overseas, or how much money would I spend outside the UK over the next twelve months, broken down into exact figures by specific country. I had to explain the elementary – this is a new business, that’s not how it works; it’s insane to ask these kinds of questions. I gave them an answer that I hope they’ll be satisfied with, we’ll see.

The whole process seemed very suspicious, hostile even, there are a lot of barriers being thrown up, many more than when I first started in business. In the late ‘90s, early millennium, the UK was a great place to be, people arrived from all over the world to be part of it. This was at the height of the New Labour, Blair government and London, in particular, was tremendously exciting, one of the most exciting places to be in the world; everyone wanted to be part of it. The arts were thriving, it was a technology centre, it was a cultural centre. It’s sad to see how far we’ve fallen. The UK has become a smaller, more jealous place, it’s lost all of its self-confidence. This is partly attributable to the legacy of the 2008 crash and the financialization of the British economy over the past forty years, we can’t ignore that. All governments, since the Thatcher government from ‘79, have played their part in it and it would be an error to single out just one, but the particular character of the moribund, defeated, exhausted nation that we have now? I pin it squarely on the fourteen years of Conservative government from 2010; it was a disaster for Britain, most especially Brexit, which was their fault and their responsibility.

It was sobering to have the experience of trying to start a new business and finding all of these barriers, which had not existed when I was younger. There’s a seam of political discourse in our media about why British productivity has slowed, why British economic growth has been stagnant for more than a decade, and has fallen so far behind that of the US. This is often a tortured discussion – “Why? Why is this??”. It’s because of this unsympathetic, unconducive environment. There are barriers everywhere, an atmosphere of suspicion, people and institutions don’t seem to want to help startups.

Again, when I first started out, Britain was eager to help its young people to go out into the world, be entrepreneurial, do things, start things. I now get the sense that the precise opposite is true – there are questions, roadblocks, interrogation, suspicion. And a general atmosphere of negativity and pessimism, a reproachful atmosphere, in a way. That’s why our economy is not doing well, it doesn’t require all these tortured discussions to discover the answer: the culture and psychology of our nation needs urgent revision.

I’m hopeful Andy Burnham can do it, but I’m not sure government is, as yet, correctly diagnosing the issue. They’re looking at the spreadsheets, but not the larger, cultural factors, the national consciousness which has taken such a kicking and is badly dented by austerity and the Brexit wars. As Gramsci observed, culture precedes politics.

Anyway, there’s my gratuitous political digression for the day. I have my latest company, and I go back to creating its inaugural work, with positivity, because it’s such a lovely morning.

This morning’s reflection is one of those that are more personal, a touch raw. I don’t want this to be read as self-helpie, although I make this journal publicly available, its main purpose is as my own record, a map of what I’m doing, thinking and feeling. Don’t take the below as self-help babble, it’s just an account of my thoughts, as they drift through…

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This morning, a family friend posted a photo from a couple of summers ago to a WhatsApp group that we’re part of. My wife audibly gasped. I’m in the photo, and I’m a fat bloke. “I didn’t realise how bad it was”, my wife said, “it just doesn’t look like you at all. It’s funny what memory does. I just don’t remember you being like this. I can’t stop looking at it”.

Over the past year I’ve lost four and a half stone in weight; 63 pounds, or 28.58 kilos. It’s an old cliche that the body reflects what’s going on in your mind, I was unhappy in my life and work, and my weight had ballooned beyond all proportion. I definitely had become “a fat bloke”. I was carrying a huge amount of weight; I’d pant and gasp when walking up hill or tackling steps. I’d been an intermittent gym go-er for at least a decade, but working out didn’t touch the sides of the weight gain.

The process of reckoning with where I was in my life, and that I needed to make a change, accelerated last year when my wife had taken the kids to her sister’s for a week and I was alone in the house, in front of the mirror, looking at the fat bloke staring back at me. What happened?

It struck me that, before anything else, before my mind is going to right itself, my body needs to take the lead. I’d read an article in The Guardian about weight loss, the piece argued that there’s a kind of Calvinist shame around weight loss and, in particular, about GLP-1s. People who are taking GLP-1s often hide it, feel a sense of guilt that it’s a form of cheating, that to lose weight you have to suffer through it, that it should be a penitent experience. Why? There’s a technology, it solves this problem.

Later the same day I was scrolling on Bluesky and I noticed an animated discussion of the article, particularly between people with sedentary jobs: people who work in the creative arts, writers, journalists; including big names, people who I admire. Many were reposting the article and confessing to all being on GLP-1s. I made the decision there and then to climb on board, I signed up to an online pharmacy, bought Mounjaro and started injecting it. It was one of the best decisions I have ever made.

I lost all that weight in under a year. I have now come off the drug, but I wouldn’t hesitate to return to it if I ever packed on weight again. I’ve never felt better. It’s changed my relationship with food, it’s changed my relationship with my physicality, I feel good, I’m able to exercise better than ever, I’m able to accomplish this walk far easier. As part of the walk I have to climb a cliff face, up a vertiginous set of steps, and I’m now able to do so without hyperventilating by the time I reach the summit. One day my six-year-old asked if he could step on my scales, the reading showed his weight as two stone. God - I was climbing those stairs, up the cliff, carrying two six-year-olds on my back.

Dropping the weight was the key to changing my entire outlook, getting healthier, getting in shape. It led me to reflect on the source of my unhappiness, the first step into embracing the decision that I had known for a while I needed to take, but had not yet taken.

Once you’ve made a drastic lifestyle change, it becomes easier to make subsequent life changes. The big one followed: as anyone who’s read the opening entry in this journal will remember, I left the business that I’d built and run for more than twenty-five years. After that, the most recent revolution: a reckoning with my alcohol consumption.

Like many people who work in the arts and entertainment, I drink too much. I’m a child of the ‘90s, and 90s Britain in particular. The legal drinking age in the UK is eighteen, but with our national pub and drinking culture, most people of my generation would start at fourteen, fifteen years old – at fifteen you could reliably get served in a pub, the law was nowhere near as stringently enforced as it is in the US. And so, of course, over time I developed a drinking habit.

The whole film business is built around parties and drinks receptions. We were young, and I had a thriving film company in the heart of the most exciting area in London, with huge offices, with people coming and going. I was there late every night, going out to bars, and meet-ups, drinking through what was a convivial, optimistic time.

It was an easy thing for my drinking to become excessive. Again, an old familiar story - I developed the habit of drinking for emotional reasons: as a support, to cure boredom or dissatisfaction, to mask problems, as a pick-me-up. A few weeks ago, I decided to follow both the weight loss and the liberating process of quitting my company with the next logical life change, which is to drastically reduce my alcohol consumption.

Now, I am not an alcoholic. But I have learned a few things about alcoholism which may be of use to anyone stumbling across this journal:

1. “Alcoholism” isn’t a particularly useful concept. Alcoholism exists in the form of someone who has a physical dependency, who wakes up every morning and drinks first thing, stops when they go to bed; but those people are rare. Far more common are “problem drinkers”, and so the preferred term in the alcohol recovery community is “alcohol use disorder”, deployed to describe people who drink excessively and for unhealthy reasons. I fall into that category.

2. This was a shocking revelation for me: the effect of alcohol is not a universal one. Not everyone experiences alcohol in the same way, people with alcohol use disorder derive from alcohol a particular, euphoric sensation which most people do not. I thought everyone experienced that sensation when drinking, but apparently not; it’s only some people, I am one of them.

3. For those people, it is very, very, very difficult to reduce alcohol consumption through willpower. Now, as I said, I’m not an alcoholic and I can go for long stretches without drinking. I don’t drink, for example, through the month of January, I take a month’s break after the heavy Christmas weeks of eating and drinking. I also try not to drink during the week, and most of the time I don’t, but I will be constantly assailed with alcohol noise during those periods. It takes willpower, I need to consciously think about not drinking. I want to drink, that’s the point: at any moment where I face a setback, a disappointment, a moment of stress, I’ll reach for a drink to medicate with.

This is the pattern I need to stop, and following my positive experience with GLP-1s I thought “there must be something for alcohol” – there is. A few weeks ago I started taking Naltrexone according to a protocol known as the Sinclair method. Naltrexone is a cheap, generic opiod blocker, it interrupts that euphoric sensation that the disordered drinker derives from alcohol. The theory is that over time the drug retrains your brain, the euphoric reward stops and so the craving for it stops, the noise stops, and you no longer feel like automatically reaching for a drink. It takes the willpower out of it.

I’m about a month in and I have noticed a powerful difference. They say the average time for it to complete its work is about six months. For some people it’s as short as three months, for others it can be longer - up to a couple of years. For me it’s been so far, so good.

I looked at myself in that photo this morning: overweight, unhappy, drinking too much and it was a useful reminder about how quickly things can change for the better with the right commitment. A year on and I’m now a healthy weight, I’m fit, I go to the gym nearly every day, I do this walk every morning, and I’m now rapidly reducing my alcohol consumption. All of that puts me in the best position possible to navigate this next phase of trying to build a new career and realise my ambitions.

Last night I spent some time looking back over the project, looking back over some sources of inspiration, and I know exactly what I’m going to be doing once I return from this walk; I’m already thinking, with enthusiasm, about the first sequence that I’m going to tackle during this morning’s edit, and making this film as strong as I can.

Yesterday was pre-occupied with housekeeping. I got reacquainted with the project, I filed my tax return, I set up a meeting with my accountant to discuss incorporating a new company and associated tax affairs.

And I launched that little business idea. I spent the afternoon setting it all up, it will mostly be automated, there are a few things for me to do; we’ll see how it works. The first phase is a few weeks of dummy run, to test likelihood of success before I put any money into it.

I’m conscious that, as with any big project, particularly one on which you’re working alone without other people to keep you honest, it’s easy for these other ideas and subplots to become sources of procrastination and resistance. I want to be careful not to fall into that trap, so nothing else today, apart from jumping back into the edit and powering on.

I have returned from a wonderful, restorative holiday.

I had a chance to do very little, spend time with the family, have important conversations with my wife, and read, which I haven’t been doing enough of lately, and reading really is the key to everything. I remember Werner Herzog once being asked what advice he would give to young filmmakers, he said “Read. Read. Read”. I’ve certainly found that to be good advice throughout my life, there is no other source than reading for inspiration, for developing your mind, for developing your intellectual personality, taste and indentity. And reading is not on phones, it’s not scrolling, and it’s not bullshit. It’s books. And I hadn’t done enough of it recently.

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Almost all the archive that I’m going to get came in while I was away. There are some outstanding bits and pieces here and there; if they dribble in, fine, if not, I’ll cope. I have most of what I need, including most of the critical materials. I’m ready to restart the edit.

The infernal heat persists. I hit wildfires while I was away, which, of course, was alarming: the shape of the landscape, everything parched, and brown, rather than green; rolling vistas of brown, dusty earth where fields usually are. Down here at my photo spot the sea is flat and heavy, shifting slowly under the weight of the sun.

It’s high tourist season, school holidays, and I was in a tourist spot, but there were very few people around, far fewer than I would have expected. In a way, it was great - it made for a light, airy break, we didn’t have to queue for anything. But on the other hand, it suggested to me that people are just not spending money. It does feel like some form of reckoning is coming, the heat feels as if it has a metaphorical quality, there is a sense of gathering portents.

I’ve been speaking to other guys I know who run businesses, and all of them are fairly glum, reporting that revenues are down, things seem difficult, costs are ever increasing. These are headwaters that I recognise from previous collapses. I remember 2008 very well, and the vibe, the portents were similar.

2008 was my first one. I didn’t understand about how to read the movements in the water, but I felt them, and I remember asking older entrepreneurs who were around at the time - it feels like something’s coming? “Yeah”, they would affirm.

We were about to launch a second business, with a new product line. My primary business had been running for several years by that point, and we’d been working on the new one for about four years. I remember sensing those disquieting signals and wondering whether we should be pressing ahead with this new company at all. Partly as a consequence of the sunk cost fallacy, and partly through inexperience, we did press ahead. It was a mistake, the 2008 crash came and that company failed.

I’m now much more attuned to the signals, and I’ve got that sense right now, I think there’s going to be some form of big downturn. Particularly given the rumbling disturbances in the general atmosphere - the continued global political instability, combined with whatever’s going to come from AI, together with a climate crisis long-threatened and which has obviously now arrived. There is troubling smoke on the horizon.

Ultimately, what can one individual do? I suppose you have to cut your cloth, but I’m conscious of the threats as I make plans for the future.

I had some more business ideas while I was on holiday, which I added to the list. I’m going to set aside some time and act on one of them this morning - a kind of wild and crazy idea which should only take a very limited amount of time to set up and determine whether it’s worth anything. I won’t specify what it is in this journal just yet, but the general theme is to run a test to see if I can stake a limited amount of capital in a particular area and make a fairly predictable return in a short amount of time. If the answer is “yes”, then I will expand it from there. Anyway, an interesting experiment I plan to run before getting back into the edit.

This week was a short one, because I left for holiday. Phase one of the reset is more or less complete, and I noticed that the sensation of beginning something new is very similar to the experience of recovering from addiction.

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20.07.26

Today is the first day of the school summer holidays. It’s a challenge to maintain my routine, including the morning walk, around the demands of childcare and juggling schedules. Everything has to be negotiated a little bit more. It does mean that I get access to a lie-in, and don’t have to snap out of bed on the school clock, but that’s not something I really want to take advantage of anyway. I do like to rise early and make sure that I get my walk done and my photo taken; maintaining a stable rhythm is more challenging when the kids are around.

I hosted a family birthday party over the weekend, so I was on the barbecue most of Sunday, before sitting down in the evening to watch the World Cup final - Spain emerged victorious, which was excellent news.

It recalled for me the scene in Heat in which Al Pacino asks Robert De Niro, “So you never wanted a regular type life?” De Niro replies, “What’s that? Barbecues and ball games?” Pacino smiles, “Yeah”.

I remember watching that scene when I was fifteen years old, and thinking, “Yeah - who wants the regular type life?” At this stage of life, I fucking love barbecues and ball games.

One thing that this project has highlighted to me, though, is the difficulty of having to do too much. I’m the only person, other than my music collaborator, working on this film, and it’s too much work, basically. It means that I can’t do more than one thing at a time, when ideally the project needs to advance on multiple fronts. As I’ve been pulled back onto chasing archive, everything else is suspended, which makes the process desultory and excessively time-consuming.

This is a problem that accompanies the asset of being multi-skilled. I always prided myself on having multiple skills, and being able to produce, write, direct, edit, and work on several films simultaneously. I was (am) able to complete a feature film project up to and including being able to author the manufacturing master for the commercial DVD. And it’s a huge cost saver - whereas other productions paid a producer, writer, director, and editor to all simultaneously be engaged on the project, with two, sometimes three people in the edit suite every day during post-production, with me, there was always just one. The escalating day-rate bills for all of those people never materialised.

But the flip side is that doing it all yourself can become exhausting and manufacture a false economy as things take longer and deadlines extend. There’s also a danger that it can compromise the quality of the work. A single, coherent vision can improve the quality of the work, but not having another source of creative input, and having to rush or cut corners as the time becomes squeezed can weigh on quality.

I’m trying to keep these lessons in mind as I move towards new commercial activity. The most successful people that I’ve worked with, and the most successful projects that I’ve done, have all systematised the workload and delegated effectively to others; even if that means spending more money than you necessarily have to. Paying someone else for something that you can do yourself may save time and money in the long run, even though it may have a greater up-front cost.

I always felt that we failed to get that balance right at my former company. We often calculated that it was quicker for us, the company directors, to do the work ourselves, rather than train, and delegate to, others. But I think that ethic prevented us from establishing proper systems, part of which is accepting that maybe the job is not going to be done as well as you think it would be done if you did it yourself.

It’s needs must for this project, but going forward I’m conscious that I will have to do things differently. As I make this film, I am trying to think about process as a solo operator, and how I can learn and establish processes that I develop from here. That’s going to be a part of my decision-making around what I do next: I have to be able to set up systems and processes, fail fast, and be able to delegate as quickly as possible. I’m asking those questions as the film progresses: what am I doing that could be delegated? What am I doing that could be set up as a process or system? Accomplishing systems for revenue will allow me to focus my own energies on my core creative work. When I look back over the past twenty-five years, I can see that I would have had much greater space for my own creativity had I been more consistent about designing and maintaining good systems for everything else.

21.07.26

It’s taken a solid week, but we’re entering the endgame in this huge archive run. I’ve shaken pretty much every tree, and anything that’s left up there and yet to fall out is hanging by a thread. Whatever’s left should arrive over the next few days or so.

A principle that I’ve long known, but have had occasion to reacquaint myself with, is that you need to be assertive to get anything done. I put in a load of these requests back in April, and there’s been a large measure of slow-walking and avoidance, I suspect this is a tactic designed to weed out the people who are not that serious, or who won’t follow up, and the requests can then be quietly dropped.

As soon as I started being pushy and quoting the legal statutes and these agencies’ responsibilities, they started delivering - straight away, overnight. So that’s something to remember: if you want to get things done, you need to be a bit pushy, throw your weight around a little bit.

That is not the way I generally like to behave. I’d prefer it if people responded in a timely and accommodating fashion to polite requests. Sometimes they will, and some individuals have been great, but quite often they think that if they ignore me, I’ll go away. And in those instances you have to wade in with your size twelves.

Anyway, it’s all coming together at a good time. I’m off on a family holiday with the kids soon; I’ll hopefully come back to a clean slate, everything sitting ready for me to begin again. I’m feeling positive about it.

22.07.26

I’ve been wrapping up on my epic archive and materials run before departing for a short holiday, and it looks like mission accomplished. I’m about 90% there with everything I wanted to achieve, and the full record of what I need for the project is taking shape.

I corresponded yesterday with a leading human rights lawyer, very well-known internationally, who has done work in the area which the film is about. I learned that he’s putting together a project to catalogue some old human rights related cases, where there’s still more to be investigated and where there may have been miscarriages of justice. I found that very interesting - it may be something that I look at off the back of this project.

I’ve really been putting the hours in recently, starting early and working into the nights. It feels like I’ve been working more intensively than I have done for several years. I’ve always worked fairly intensively, but it’s ramped up over recent weeks, and I find the hours go past without me really knowing where they’ve gone. I’m enthusiastic and excited by the work I’m doing, and, yes, a little bit apprehensive at the same time, but that is a sea change from the preoccupation which I have had over the past number of years, and the dogged sensation that I needed to escape.

A chunk of my day was dedicated to thinking about, fantasising about, escape. It’s an amazing sensation to feel that preoccupation lift, feel myself restored to being engaged in my work, back in the world. And thinking optimistically about the future. The escape obsession used to manifest itself in all sorts of strange and subtle ways - I used to routinely track the lottery, for example, “if I could just get a lottery win, then everything could change”. That kind of crazy utopian thinking, when I didn’t need a lottery win, all I needed to do, as I’ve written before, is to say “no” in order to say “yes” to the alternatives.

I spent most of my life as a heavy smoker. I gave up over a decade ago, and it was something I thought I would never do, no-one who knew me thought that I would ever do; it was so intimately tied to my identity - that’s what I did, I smoked. It was only after I stopped smoking that I understood how much of my life smoking consumed, and I don’t mean physically, as in the damage that it does to your health, or even the act of smoking, I mean the mental energy that was dedicated to smoking. Smoking was such a pervasive part of my life and unconscious, which would seep into my conscious thought throughout the day. Anytime I went out, anywhere – to a party, the pub, a barbeque – right before leaving the house my thoughts would run, in a state of heightened anxiety:

“Do I have enough cigarettes? If not, I need to take a route that passes a shop where I can buy cigarettes. Do I have cash to buy cigarettes? If not, I need to go past an ATM, and then past the shop to buy cigarettes. Do I have a lighter? Let me check. No, I don’t. Let me hunt for a lighter. Okay, I’ve got the lighter. But what’s the lighter like on fuel? It might run out. You can never have one lighter. Let me have a backup lighter. Have I got two lighters? Let me check both are working.”

That would be a ritual before I did anything. And then I would smoke all the way to the tube station, and when I exited the tube at the other end.

Same thing if I was flying:

“How much time do I have to smoke before I get on the plane? I’m going to Los Angeles, twelve hours on the plane. I’m gonna need to smoke heavily before that. Where can I smoke in the airport? Do they have smoking areas in the airport? Do I have to be outside of the airport? How long have I got to be outside of the airport before I need to go through security, realistically, how late can I leave it? I’ve just landed - where’s the baggage reclaim? Is there a smoking area before I get to the baggage reclaim? Can I have a cigarette straight away when I get off the plane? Or do I have to wait for the baggage first?”

The smoking noise was constant. But I only really became conscious of it once it lifted, once I’d stopped smoking. That was when I realised that, Jesus, I have all of this headspace back that was being squatted in by tobacco.

That’s the sensation that I’ve started to notice over the past week or so, it’s a form of recovery from addiction. My headspace has returned, my enthusiasm has returned, and I have the time to think about and enjoy what I’m doing, because this preoccupation with escape has vanished. It’s a remarkable thing. It shows you that you can’t be half-stuck, you need to commit wholly to change before you will experience the effects of that change.

In any case, the project is in a good place, and I depart on holiday for an interval. Seaverses will resume, for my readership of three guys, all of whom I appreciate - thank you, guys - upon my return.

I’ve been wrapping up on my epic archive and materials run before departing for a short holiday, and it looks like mission accomplished. I’m about 90% there with everything I wanted to achieve, and the full record of what I need for the project is taking shape.

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I corresponded yesterday with a leading human rights lawyer, very well-known internationally, who has done work in the area which the film is about. I learned that he’s putting together a project to catalogue some old human rights related cases, where there’s still more to be investigated and where there may have been miscarriages of justice. I found that very interesting - it may be something that I look at off the back of this project.

I’ve really been putting the hours in recently, starting early and working into the nights. It feels like I’ve been working more intensively than I have done for several years. I’ve always worked fairly intensively, but it’s ramped up over recent weeks, and I find the hours go past without me really knowing where they’ve gone. I’m enthusiastic and excited by the work I’m doing, and, yes, a little bit apprehensive at the same time, but that is a sea change from the preoccupation which I have had over the past number of years, and the dogged sensation that I needed to escape.

A chunk of my day was dedicated to thinking about, fantasising about, escape. It’s an amazing sensation to feel that preoccupation lift, feel myself restored to being engaged in my work, back in the world. And thinking optimistically about the future. The escape obsession used to manifest itself in all sorts of strange and subtle ways - I used to routinely track the lottery, for example, “if I could just get a lottery win, then everything could change”. That kind of crazy utopian thinking, when I didn’t need a lottery win, all I needed to do, as I’ve written before, is to say “no” in order to say “yes” to the alternatives.

I spent most of my life as a heavy smoker. I gave up over a decade ago, which was something I thought I would never do, no-one who knew me thought that I would ever do; it was so intimately tied to my identity - that’s what I did, I smoked. It was only after I stopped smoking that I understood how much of my life smoking consumed, and I don’t mean physically, as in the damage that it does to your health, or even the act of smoking, I mean the mental energy that was dedicated to smoking. Smoking was such a pervasive part of my life and unconscious, which would seep into my conscious thought throughout the day. Anytime I went out, anywhere – to a party, the pub, a barbeque – right before leaving the house my thoughts would run, in a state of heightened anxiety:

“Do I have enough cigarettes? If not, I need to take a route that passes a shop where I can buy cigarettes. Do I have cash to buy cigarettes? If not, I need to go past an ATM, and then past the shop to buy cigarettes. Do I have a lighter? Let me check. No, I don’t. Let me hunt for a lighter. Okay, I’ve got the lighter. But what’s the lighter like on fuel? It might run out. You can never have one lighter. Let me have a backup lighter. Have I got two lighters? Let me check both are working.”

That would be a ritual before I did anything. And then I would smoke all the way to the tube station, and when I exited the tube at the other end.

Same thing if I was flying:

“How much time do I have to smoke before I get on the plane? I’m going to Los Angeles, twelve hours on the plane. I’m gonna need to smoke heavily before that. Where can I smoke in the airport? Do they have smoking areas in the airport? Do I have to be outside of the airport? How long have I got to be outside of the airport before I need to go through security, realistically, how late can I leave it? I’ve just landed - where’s the baggage reclaim? Is there a smoking area before I get to the baggage reclaim? Can I have a cigarette straight away when I get off the plane? Or do I have to wait for the baggage first?”

The smoking noise was constant. But I only really became conscious of it once it lifted, once I’d stopped smoking. That was when I realised that, Jesus, I have all of this headspace back that was being squatted in by tobacco.

That’s the sensation that I’ve started to notice over the past week or so, it’s a form of recovery from addiction. My headspace has returned, my enthusiasm has returned, and I have the time to think about and enjoy what I’m doing, because this preoccupation with escape has vanished. It’s a remarkable thing. It shows you that you can’t be half-stuck, you need to commit wholly to change before you will experience the effects of that change.

In any case, the project is in a good place, and I depart on holiday for an interval. Seaverses will resume, for my readership of three guys, (all of whom I appreciate - thank you, guys) upon my return.

It’s taken a solid week, but we’re entering the endgame in this huge archive run. I’ve shaken pretty much every tree, and anything that’s left up there and yet to fall out is hanging by a thread. Whatever’s left should arrive over the next few days or so.

A principle that I’ve long known, but have had occasion to reacquaint myself with, is that you need to be assertive to get anything done. I put in a load of these requests back in April, and there’s been a large measure of slow-walking and avoidance, I suspect this is a tactic designed to weed out the people who are not that serious, or who won’t follow up, and the requests can then be quietly dropped.

As soon as I started being pushy and quoting the legal statutes and these agencies’ responsibilities, they started delivering - straight away, overnight. So that’s something to remember: if you want to get things done, you need to be a bit pushy, throw your weight around a little bit.

That is not the way I generally like to behave. I’d prefer it if people responded in a timely and accommodating fashion to polite requests. Sometimes they will, and some individuals have been great, but quite often they think that if they ignore me, I’ll go away. And in those instances you have to wade in with your size twelves.

Anyway, it’s all coming together at a good time. I’m off on a family holiday with the kids soon; I’ll hopefully come back to a clean slate, everything sitting ready for me to begin again. I’m feeling positive about it.

Today is the first day of the school summer holidays. It’s a challenge to maintain my routine, including the morning walk, around the demands of childcare and juggling schedules. Everything has to be negotiated a little bit more. It does mean that I get access to a lie-in, and don’t have to snap out of bed on the school clock, but that’s not something I really want to take advantage of anyway. I do like to rise early and make sure that I get my walk done and my photo taken; maintaining a stable rhythm is more challenging when the kids are around.

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I hosted a family birthday party over the weekend, so I was on the barbecue most of Sunday, before sitting down in the evening to watch the World Cup final - Spain emerged victorious, which was excellent news.

It recalled for me the scene in Heat in which Al Pacino asks Robert De Niro, “So you never wanted a regular type life?” De Niro replies, “What’s that? Barbecues and ball games?” Pacino smiles, “Yeah”.

I remember watching that scene when I was fifteen years old, and thinking, “Yeah - who wants the regular type life?” At this stage of life, I fucking love barbecues and ball games.

One thing that this project has highlighted to me, though, is the difficulty of having to do too much. I’m the only person, other than my music collaborator, working on this film, and it’s too much work, basically. It means that I can’t do more than one thing at a time, when ideally the project needs to advance on multiple fronts. As I’ve been pulled back onto chasing archive, everything else is suspended, which makes the process desultory and excessively time-consuming.

This is a problem that accompanies the asset of being multi-skilled. I always prided myself on having multiple skills, and being able to produce, write, direct, edit, and work on several films simultaneously. I was (am) able to complete a feature film project up to and including being able to author the manufacturing master for the commercial DVD. And it’s a huge cost saver - whereas other productions paid a producer, writer, director, and editor to all simultaneously be engaged on the project, with two, sometimes three people in the edit suite every day during post-production, with me, there was always just one. The escalating day-rate bills for all of those people never materialised.

But the flip side is that doing it all yourself can become exhausting and manufacture a false economy as things take longer and deadlines extend. There’s also a danger that it can compromise the quality of the work. A single, coherent vision can improve the quality of the work, but not having another source of creative input, and having to rush or cut corners as the time becomes squeezed can weigh on quality.

I’m trying to keep these lessons in mind as I move towards new commercial activity. The most successful people that I’ve worked with, and the most successful projects that I’ve done, have all systematised the workload and delegated effectively to others; even if that means spending more money than you necessarily have to. Paying someone else for something that you can do yourself may save time and money in the long run, even though it may have a greater up-front cost.

I always felt that we failed to get that balance right at my former company. We often calculated that it was quicker for us, the company directors, to do the work ourselves, rather than train, and delegate to, others. But I think that ethic prevented us from establishing proper systems, part of which is accepting that maybe the job is not going to be done as well as you think it would be done if you did it yourself.

It’s needs must for this project, but going forward I’m conscious that I will have to do things differently. As I make this film, I am trying to think about process as a solo operator, and how I can learn and establish processes that I develop from here. That’s going to be a part of my decision-making around what I do next: I have to be able to set up systems and processes, fail fast, and be able to delegate as quickly as possible. I’m asking those questions as the film progresses: what am I doing that could be delegated? What am I doing that could be set up as a process or system? Accomplishing systems for revenue will allow me to focus my own energies on my core creative work. When I look back over the past twenty-five years, I can see that I would have had much greater space for my own creativity had I been more consistent about designing and maintaining good systems for everything else.

This week I initiated a reset on my feature film project. I stepped back from editing in order to acquire the materials that I will ultimately need to complete the film. I also had a full creative review.

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13.07.26

Friday’s session in the music studio was extremely helpful. It was of immense value to the project in every respect apart from music - we didn’t actually get any music done, we didn’t even discuss music.

My composer reviewed the film with me and agreed that it is not working. He heard my doubts and admonished me for being fatalistic, reassured me that there is a strong film here struggling to be born, and argued that the issue is that I haven’t fully committed to my own ideas. He asked me to restate my original concepts for the film and said, “These are all great ideas, but I’m not seeing any of them. You’re being too restrained, you’re not using the full range of your creativity, you’re stuck, and you’re stuck at a point in any project where people get stuck, and you know how to break through.”

It was such an important, encouraging and reassuring conversation. I’m grateful to him for it. He also said, “Look, try it a couple of different ways, take a ten-minute section and experiment with it, you’ll find the answer. But you need to be more radical.” He was absolutely right. I’ve been falling back on the very kind of unconscious, habitual approaches to filmmaking and storytelling that I’d developed over years in a context where I wasn’t stretching myself and I didn’t enjoy the work that I was making. At least not all the time. Sometimes I did, but a lot of the time I didn’t. I’m still falling back on those old patterns and worn reflexes.

It was very useful to be able to reframe the whole situation, and basically I need to rebuild the film. Not from scratch, the core content is there, but it’s how it’s being presented and constructed that needs to change. I had thousands of ideas over the weekend and I’ve been making notes constantly. But the doubts have also been hammering at the door: “Will this work? Will it feel gimmicky? Is this idea a good one or is it in fact crass and shit?” I’m going to have to shut that voice out and focus on implementation.

The second tension, which has haunted this project over the last couple of months, is that a good part of my mind is occupied by what comes next. Anyone who reads this journal will know that the question of where money is going to come from has been dogging me. These twin motivations of trying to find a new method of earning as well as trying to make this film are competing. I need to get the film finished in order to get onto the money making, but thinking about the money-making has prevented me from finishing the film.

I have to break out of this cycle, but I have this lingering fear, as anyone would do, that the money will run out, and it’s pulling me away from the film. The seductive thought is that it might be better to drop the film, sort out the income stream first, and return to the film later. But all my experience lets me know that, if you don’t commit fully to a project of this size, it won’t get made. Struggling to follow through on what I know to be true because of these fears is also why I’ve been making poor creative choices – I’ve been trying to look for the fast option. The more creative option, the new ideas, the experimentation: all those are time-consuming.

What came out of Friday’s session was that I’d been trying to take a safe, quick option, because it’s quick. Conversely, the quick, safe option actually costs time in the long run, because the film becomes unsatisfying and unsuccessful, and so it drags on. Whereas more time invested in the initially longer, more complicated option may ultimately help the film cohere quicker. These are the paradoxes that live within us.

A few years ago I visited one of the great music engineers and producers as part of a film that I was making. We were discussing one of the most influential American musicians of the ‘60s and ‘70s, who died young and who this producer made his name working with. In describing the musician’s ethic and ability, the producer said to me: “You know, if it’s not great – do it again. And if it’s still not right, do it again. You know? Do it the fuck again.”

14.07.26

This week has started with a reset.

It’s clear that I need to acquire all the archive I can, as quickly as possible. Post-producing the film incrementally (which I always do), leaving gaps for materials that are coming in over time, gaps for graphics and animation - I don’t think that approach is going to work with this one. What I need to do is build the film from all of its elements, as complete as possible, minute-by-minute as I go. That’s how I’m going to find its voice and form.

So I need to get on top of these outstanding requests, follow them up, and start applying pressure, including pointing to statutory obligations, because some of these agencies are just not acting in a timely manner at all. After that, I will be working with all that there is and committing to it, rather than guessing, speculating or hedging.

I spent a bit of time with inspiration yesterday - watching back through old films, going back over my notes and ideas, trying to shake off the assumptions that I’ve had over the last few weeks and look at the film from a completely fresh perspective. I’ll continue doing that today, reframe my mind from what is there now to something new.

15.07.26

Yesterday continued the reset, and the process of trying to gather in all materials now rather than leaving things open-ended.

I spent all day (and it was all day) on an archive hunt. I split up the archive into different batches for different parts of the film and mapped out the steps to address each in turn, with a resolution that I would not move on to the next batch until I’d come to the end of the first.

That process did bear some fruit. It took hours of scouring databases and reviewing filings, but I managed to track down a good 50% of what I needed for batch one. The big outstanding element from that batch is a critical set of photographs. The photographs are held in a library collection in the US, and it seems that the library may be relocating, a move which isn’t projected to complete until 2027 - alarming. As an example of the drift that has dogged the last few weeks of the edit, I’d actually emailed the library’s director of special collections back in May, and I haven’t had a reply, which shows you how these threads can dangle unless you’re on top of it all.

I finally called it in time to watch the World Cup semi between Spain and France, with a couple of beers.

Today I resume trying to pin down where these photos are.

16.07.26

Yesterday was another fruitful day in tying up these hanging archive threads, I managed to crack the library and extract what they had. I’ve got more requests in and logged with various agencies. I managed to do a sprint through newspaper articles and headlines that are relevant to the subject of the film. And so I’m building a decent repository of the archive I need, rather than it being a disparate process of waiting for material to trickle in while time burns.

Being more active and intensive on archive over the last few days has helped push it through, and will grease the wheels of editing. I probably should have performed this exercise sooner, but you live and learn.

This is also where an AI assistant comes in handy. I use AI constantly when doing this kind of work, it’s very good for setting up a prioritised action list, identifying the correct URLs, where I need to go, who I need to email, step-by-step walkthroughs on the databases so that it’s easier to navigate them, sign-ups and so on. I don’t have to constantly read FAQs and orientate myself around the various systems that I’m switching between hour by hour. It’s also very useful in tracking: logging what has been done, tracking what remains outstanding, and systematising everything. It can even do some downloads and file extractions on automation, if necessary. AI deployed in this manner can be a significant time-saver.

Still, it’s slow going, and it can feel like progress isn’t being made on the film itself, but this is all erecting scaffolding - I’ve previously written in this journal about how there’s a false economy in trying to work the edit and being busy in post without having sufficient materials. The reset continues.

17.07.26

More archive requests and chases.

I managed to get insulted by a Southern State official with the weary, ironic courtesy that is characteristic of the region:

If you really want that report, which provides no information…someone will have to search to see if the record was created and/or still exists. Such an old record would most likely be stored in somewhere in a cardboard box in a warehouse or storage facility which is not well organized, so it will take numerous hours to search for the right box and then to search through it to determine whether it exists or not. I have been general counsel to the City for more than two decades and my experience tells me that the City PD did not routinely create [those] reports. If you really want it, please send a check for $300 and upon receipt we will direct someone to hunt for the record. However, I need your written agreement that if we burn through more than that $300 in search of the record that you will reimburse the City for its actual cost in searching for the report. If it turns out that the report is easily found (which I highly doubt) then in that case we will refund to you whatever funds remain after expending the funds required to pay for the efforts of the lowest paid competent person we have who is competent to search for the report and duplicate it if it exists. On behalf of the City, we apologize for the delay in responding.

It’s frustrating and unnecessary, but goes with the territory. I responded to say, “look, do you want to just be reasonable?” We’ll see what happens.

Other than that, a huge trawl through the newspaper archives, which yielded a comprehensive record of news coverage for every part of the film. It’s interesting to see the story evolve through newspaper headlines over what might be a ten, twenty year period, you get a real sense of the arc and how the events were experienced and interpreted contemporaneously.

Today more chasing, more requests - we’re getting there; all coming together.

More archive requests and chases.

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I managed to get insulted by a Southern State official with the weary, ironic courtesy that is characteristic of the region:

If you really want that report, which provides no information…someone will have to search to see if the record was created and/or still exists. Such an old record would most likely be stored in somewhere in a cardboard box in a warehouse or storage facility which is not well organized, so it will take numerous hours to search for the right box and then to search through it to determine whether it exists or not. I have been general counsel to the City for more than two decades and my experience tells me that the City PD did not routinely create [those] reports. If you really want it, please send a check for $300 and upon receipt we will direct someone to hunt for the record. However, I need your written agreement that if we burn through more than that $300 in search of the record that you will reimburse the City for its actual cost in searching for the report. If it turns out that the report is easily found (which I highly doubt) then in that case we will refund to you whatever funds remain after expending the funds required to pay for the efforts of the lowest paid competent person we have who is competent to search for the report and duplicate it if it exists. On behalf of the City, we apologize for the delay in responding.

It’s frustrating and unnecessary, but goes with the territory. I responded to say, “look, do you want to just be reasonable?” We’ll see what happens.

Other than that, a huge trawl through the newspaper archives, which yielded a comprehensive record of news coverage for every part of the film. It’s interesting to see the story evolve through newspaper headlines over what might be a ten, twenty year period, you get a real sense of the arc and how the events were experienced and interpreted contemporaneously.

Today more chasing, more requests - we’re getting there; all coming together.

Yesterday was another fruitful day in tying up these hanging archive threads, I managed to crack the library and extract what they had. I’ve got more requests in and logged with various agencies. I managed to do a sprint through newspaper articles and headlines that are relevant to the subject of the film. And so I’m building a decent repository of the archive I need, rather than it being a disparate process of waiting for material to trickle in while time burns.

Being more active and intensive on archive over the last few days has helped push it through, and will grease the wheels of editing. I probably should have performed this exercise sooner, but you live and learn.

This is also where an AI assistant comes in handy. I use AI constantly when doing this kind of work, it’s very good for setting up a prioritised action list, identifying the correct URLs, where I need to go, who I need to email, step-by-step walkthroughs on the databases so that it’s easier to navigate them, sign-ups and so on. I don’t have to constantly read FAQs and orientate myself around the various systems that I’m switching between hour by hour. It’s also very useful in tracking: logging what has been done, tracking what remains outstanding, and systematising everything. It can even do some downloads and file extractions on automation, if necessary. AI deployed in this manner can be a significant time-saver.

Still, it’s slow going, and it can feel like progress isn’t being made on the film itself, but this is all erecting scaffolding - I’ve previously written in this journal about how there’s a false economy in trying to work the edit and being busy in post without having sufficient materials. The reset continues.

Yesterday continued the reset, and the process of trying to gather in all materials now rather than leaving things open-ended.

I spent all day (and it was all day) on an archive hunt. I split up the archive into different batches for different parts of the film and mapped out the steps to address each in turn, with a resolution that I would not move on to the next batch until I’d come to the end of the first.

That process did bear some fruit. It took hours of scouring databases and reviewing filings, but I managed to track down a good 50% of what I needed for batch one. The big outstanding element from that batch is a critical set of photographs. The photographs are held in a library collection in the US, and it seems that the library may be relocating, a move which isn’t projected to complete until 2027 - alarming. As an example of the drift that has dogged the last few weeks of the edit, I’d actually emailed the library’s director of special collections back in May, and I haven’t had a reply, which shows you how these threads can dangle unless you’re on top of it all.

I finally called it in time to watch the World Cup semi between Spain and France, with a couple of beers.

Today I resume trying to pin down where these photos are.

This week has started with a reset.

It’s clear that I need to acquire all the archive I can, as quickly as possible. Post-producing the film incrementally (which I always do), leaving gaps for materials that are coming in over time, gaps for graphics and animation - I don’t think that approach is going to work with this one. What I need to do is build the film from all of its elements, as complete as possible, minute-by-minute as I go. That’s how I’m going to find its voice and form.

So I need to get on top of these outstanding requests, follow them up, and start applying pressure, including pointing to statutory obligations, because some of these agencies are just not acting in a timely manner at all. After that, I will be working with all that there is and committing to it, rather than guessing, speculating or hedging.

I spent a bit of time with inspiration yesterday - watching back through old films, going back over my notes and ideas, trying to shake off the assumptions that I’ve had over the last few weeks and look at the film from a completely fresh perspective. I’ll continue doing that today, reframe my mind from what is there now to something new.

Friday’s session in the music studio was extremely helpful. It was of immense value to the project in every respect apart from music - we didn’t actually get any music done, we didn’t even discuss music.

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My composer reviewed the film with me and agreed that it is not working. He heard my doubts and admonished me for being fatalistic, reassured me that there is a strong film here struggling to be born, and argued that the issue is that I haven’t fully committed to my own ideas. He asked me to restate my original concepts for the film and said, “These are all great ideas, but I’m not seeing any of them. You’re being too restrained, you’re not using the full range of your creativity, you’re stuck, and you’re stuck at a point in any project where people get stuck, and you know how to break through.”

It was such an important, encouraging and reassuring conversation. I’m grateful to him for it. He also said, “Look, try it a couple of different ways, take a ten-minute section and experiment with it, you’ll find the answer. But you need to be more radical.” He was absolutely right. I’ve been falling back on the very kind of unconscious, habitual approaches to filmmaking and storytelling that I’d developed over years in a context where I wasn’t stretching myself and I didn’t enjoy the work that I was making. At least I didn’t enjoy it all the time. Sometimes I did, but a lot of the time I didn’t. I’m still falling back on those old patterns and worn reflexes.

It was very useful to be able to reframe the whole situation, and basically I need to rebuild the film. Not from scratch, the core content is there, but it’s how it’s being presented and constructed that needs to change. I had thousands of ideas over the weekend and I’ve been making notes constantly. But the doubts have also been hammering at the door: “Will this work? Will it feel gimmicky? Is this idea a good one or is it in fact crass and shit?” I’m going to have to shut that voice out and focus on implementation.

The second tension, which has haunted this project over the last couple of months, is that a good part of my mind is occupied by what comes next. Anyone who reads this journal will know that the question of where money is going to come from has been dogging me. These twin motivations of trying to find a new method of earning as well as trying to make this film are competing. I need to get the film finished in order to get onto the money-making, but thinking about the money-making has prevented me from finishing the film.

I have to break out of this cycle, but I have this lingering fear, as anyone would do, that the money will run out, and it’s pulling me away from the film. The seductive thought is that it might be better to drop the film, sort out the income stream first, and return to the film later. But all my experience lets me know that, if you don’t commit fully to a project of this size, it won’t get made. Struggling to follow through on what I know to be true because of these fears is also why I’ve been making poor creative choices – I’ve been trying to look for the fast option. The more creative option, the new ideas, the experimentation: all those are time-consuming.

What came out of Friday’s session was that I’d been trying to take a safe, quick option, because it’s quick. Conversely, the quick, safe option actually costs time in the long run, because the film becomes unsatisfying and unsuccessful, and so it drags on. Whereas more time invested in the initially longer, more complicated option may ultimately help the film cohere quicker. These are the paradoxes that live within us.

A few years ago I visited one of the great music engineers and producers as part of a film that I was making. We were discussing one of the most influential American musicians of the ‘60s and ‘70s, who died young and who this producer made his name working with. In describing the musician’s ethic and ability, the producer said to me: “You know, if it’s not great – do it again. And if it’s still not right, do it again. You know? Do it the fuck again.”

This week was bookended by thinking about the score for my feature. My composer became available again on Monday, following a period of absence, and on Friday we had an all-day session at his studio. I had a huge crisis of confidence in the project, from which I emerged in a much better place - more on that next week.

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06.07.26

My musician has returned, ready to resume work on the score. This is, in the broadest sense, good news, but it introduces some additional complexity. To compensate for his absence, I changed the way in which I was editing, and so now I would ideally like to be a bit further along before revisiting the score. I feel that I need to finish what I started, review the film in its totality before taking some big decisions that I’m currently on the fence about.

But it is a huge boon that he’s available again, and is so generous in being willing to help out. We’ll talk later today and get a plan together.

Head down and plough on.

07.07.26

I reconnected with my composer yesterday, it sounds like he’s emerged from a really intense period - sixteen hour days, seven days a week, for 6 weeks on a major project. I detected that he found it energising as well as exhausting, sometimes those sensations walk together, paradoxically.

He observed that there’s nothing like a pressing external deadline to bring matters into focus, and of course one of the difficulties that I have on this project is there is no external third party to keep me honest, which does mean that things can drift. I’m always conscious that the absence of an external deadline can become a problem, but this is a film that I have wanted to make for a while, and I want to take the time to do it justice. Although external deadlines force the discipline of completing the work, they can also mean that you make compromises in order to deliver on time, rather than to the highest standard that you are otherwise capable of. So I think an imposed deadline can be a mixed blessing; as the great Douglas Adams once said, “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by”.

My composer seems enthusiastic to get back on board, it sounded to me like he needs a lengthy holiday, but I’m grateful for his enthusiasm. We’ve organised a studio session for Friday, where I think we’re going to review the film, talk through some ideas, and then he’ll put together some working tracks while I plough through the picture cut.

Yesterday I set aside some time for an interesting foray into AI, making use of Anthropic’s Fable model while it’s still available within a standard plan. As from tomorrow Fable will no longer be available on subscription, you’ll have to pay for it separately.

My relationship with AI is somewhat ambivalent. I’m not one of the doomsayers, who are intensely hostile towards the technology. I see the downsides and, as with a lot of the technology that has emerged over the course of this century, I’d much rather that some of it didn’t exist. But at the same point, complaining about it is like complaining about gravity - it’s not going anywhere. I have a curiosity towards it, and I’m interested in exploring parts of its capability.

As much as I’m not one of the doomsayers, I’m also not one of the evangelists. I don’t think that AI is the answer to everything, certainly in its current form, or that it’s going to replace human competences wholesale. In most cases where I’ve made use of AI, I’d rather have a human on the job. I would never let it write for me, for example; not just because, for me, the act of writing is an end in itself, but because it produces a particular kind of writing that I don’t enjoy. We all see it saturating online writing, and it feels mechanical, lacks a human voice and texture.

If you ask it to evaluate any part of your own writing (I ask it to check for typos/errors), it will instantly seek to adapt your writing into a series of formal conventions which I think correspond to bad writing, and fail to reflect the rhythm and tone of your own voice. Where I’ve seen people argue that you can ask AI to write in your voice, I don’t think it can, if you have a genuinely distinctive writing voice.

So I don’t believe the claims that AI makes for itself, but neither do I catastrophise about it. I find that it can be a useful tool in assisting with busy work, basically. I find it’s very useful in terms of certain processes; I use it for research processes, I use it for formatting and organising. As an example, there’s a whole reservoir of very dull Photoshop work that I regularly have to get through - changing frame size, applying borders and presets and so on - I have set all that up in a pipeline which the AI bashes through automatically. Traditionally you might have an intern perform these tasks, so I can see that it creates a problem with training the next generation, but it is nevertheless useful in clearing out a load of hamster wheel jobs that I’d rather not do.

But what I wanted to experiment with on Fable, before Anthropic raise the drawbridge, was strategising. I find that AI is limited if you ask it to think either for itself or for you. It’s very good if you ask it to research and deliver information that exists out in the world, like an enhanced Google (although you have to be very careful in the prompting to ensure that it excavates its information from high quality sources, with proper references that you can check), and what it can be especially good for is evaluating or extracting patterns from your own thinking; I wanted to see how Fable performed in that respect.

I would never ask an AI “what should I do?” or “should I do X or Y?”. Instead, I wrote a lengthy briefing note in which I went through all of the various business ventures that I’ve embarked on over the past couple of decades, the different products that I’ve launched, the film series and catalogues that I’ve produced, and I recorded my experiences of and thoughts about each one: lessons that I’d drawn, what the outcomes were, where the successes and failures lay. I then made a list of what I perceive to be my strengths, as well as all of my weaknesses, and I wrote down all of the ideas that I’ve had over the past six months to generate revenue alongside my artistic work (fifteen altogether).

I did not ask it about my artistic work at all, I think that’s not the role of AI; I kept it to the business and revenue layer and developed a large, complex prompt. Using AI like this is not a quick process, it is not a shortcut. I was attempting to get it to do something which I might otherwise struggle to do myself, particularly now that I’m a solo operator. Previously, I would have had brainstorming sessions with colleagues and my business partner, and AI is no substitute for that, but AI can access a wider pool of information than people sitting in a room together can, and perceive patterns and nuances that might otherwise prove elusive (confirmation bias is, of course, a risk in both contexts).

In any case, I’m currently by myself so I don’t have access to regular brainstorming sessions, the AI has to perform that role for me in the immediate term. To restate: it was not a short process, I spent hours preparing briefing notes and documents, organising all the information to give to Fable, which then chewed on it for a decent amount of time.

What it did was to surface the knowledge I already had, and organise it for me. It parsed my information dump and found recurring patterns in both my successes and failures; it identified common themes and extrapolated a set of principles from them, which it then tested my current ideas against, made some recommendations, and proposed some action steps. I will now take those recommendations and discuss them with a human as the next stage.

It’s easy for your thoughts to become tangled and circular, particularly when they’re churning huge tides of time - businesses that I might have started twenty years ago, washing in with some drama that happened four years ago; it’s easy to become overwhelmed by all those experiences, tied as they are to memory. Getting the AI to interpret it all extrapolated patterns that I don’t necessarily perceive. All those patterns emerge from me and my experiences, not from the AI, but the AI helps to clarify them.

It was an interesting exercise, one that made me a little worried. The conclusion was that the path to making a new living from where I am today is going to be lengthy and arduous. There are no alternatives, that’s just the truth of the situation; the AI certainly did not blow smoke up my arse. Anyway, I now have some shape to my thoughts around that question.

Onwards.

08.07.26

Yesterday was a good day’s editing, I made decent progress, and checked in with archive – chased some outstanding requests, put in some new ones.

The availability of archive has been a source of frustration on this film. I recently unearthed some promising material in a library collection in the Deep South; its inclusion would transform what the audience could understand, and this material has been lying in a box, undigitised, for decades.

The footage was acquired by a local news station and eventually donated to the library, where it languishes, unnoticed and unseen. I’d been talking to the library about paying to have it digitised, and then I asked about licensing… and the conversation came to a shuddering halt. The money that they were asking for was so unbelievably massive that it would be out of bounds even if I had a respectable budget, which, of course, on this project I don’t.

Archives is an area currently organised to the disadvantage of all parties: filmmakers, journalists, historians, and the holders of the archives themselves. I find this maddening; I interpret it as a form of insanity, a collective punishment. We bury this stuff and apply these enormous, unrealistic fee schedules for what reason?

I’ve done all this tracking down, finding this material, which would be amazing for the stories and the audience, but it will remain behind a locked door; it’s a time sink too.

Back to editing.

09.07.26

Slow progress yesterday. My Mac is becoming quite ancient now, and it’s really struggling as the film evolves and lengthens. It’s been working against me and I need to look at new equipment, but I’m reluctant to spend money at the moment, for obvious reasons. My wife intervened and said, “look, it’s a false economy - you need working equipment. If it’s holding you back, do something about it”. I looked into a new machine, and there’s a chip crunch at the moment, so the prices are all inflated, but I ordered a new Mac and a new SSD - if I don’t do it now, I’m going to have to do it sooner rather than later anyway.

Naturally, that pulled me away from the task in hand and sent me off down the misty psychological tunnel known as “yeah, but where’s the money coming from?” I started having a hunt around online - is there something I can do in the near term, just to get some cash through the door, pay for this Mac? I had a look around some of the freelance marketplaces and the casual, short-term work boards and it was just not fruitful. Most of the roles I saw were for video editing on YouTube channels. The money is way below what I’d accept, really, and all I kept thinking as I browsed was, “but why would I make videos for you? Why wouldn’t I just do your entire channel for myself?”

This type of activity is where you clarify who you are - my career history does not lie. It made me realise that making my own way is always what I’ve done since I was a teenager, and it’s not going to change; it’s just who I am. And I’ve muddled through ok so far. But, of course, the successive thought was, “have I done something stupid?”, again. This is the regular flex of the muscle of doubt: have I done something stupid? The position that I was in could have been leveraged in so many ways, and I just threw it all up and abandoned it. There are dozens of people - I see them here on Substack - who would give their eye teeth to have been in my position and have access to the opportunities that came with it. And yet I’ve tossed it away. Isn’t it ridiculously self-indulgent?

I had to remind myself that I’m not one of those people anymore. I’m happy to pass on the benefit of my experience, where I can, and to help those people take my place; but it’s not a place I wanted to be. It wasn’t making me happy, it wasn’t bringing me any joy or satisfaction with my creativity. And that’s why it needed to be brought to an end, and I needed to say “no” to it. The muscle of doubt will waste over time.

I’m thinking this over on my walk, the sea this morning is absolutely incredible. Calm. It helped to calm and settle my thoughts. I’ve had a new business idea, which I think would help elevate the possibilities for the independent, low-budget filmmaking community, but it would be a lot of work. I started thinking about what infrastructure would be needed, what the capital requirements might be. I sat down on the beach for a few minutes and tapped an outline into Obsidian. Ah, but even as I think this, is it what I really want to do?

For anyone who’s reading this, you should know that the description of this newsletter is completely accurate: my photograph and daily walk as it happens. This text originates as a voice note; I’m recording my thoughts as I walk, which is why the prose is a little more unfinished and colloquial than it would be if I was sitting down to actually write. As I continue to walk, I find myself reining that idea back in. The whole point was to simplify my existence and to leave more space for reflection and creativity, not to start another complicated business, negotiating with large companies and looking for capital. Come off it, man. Remember what the mission is.

No one reads Seaverses, I have four subscribers. A readership is not the point of it, anyway, but if anyone was reading, I would ask “what would you do? Take a run at the big league? Or stick with materially much lower rewards, but potentially much greater spiritual ones (although also more precarious and unstable). Keep to my mission of a small solo operation focussed on creativity, or pursue a new income-generating business with a potentially very high ceiling?” Always the eternal question.

I hit a creative block last night in trying to make a particular sequence work, but it cleared by morning. I woke with the answer, a good, creative solution. But I’m also opening a lot of holes in my timeline to be filled with animation, rostrum work, graphics, and the necessity for as-yet-unearthed archive.

In any case, I’m pleased to have broken through the block, and I’m going to resume work on that sequence right now.

10.07.26

Yesterday was a tough day. I have about an hour of the film done (with gaps for animation sequences and for rostrum and graphics work). I sat down and watched what was there, all the way through. And to say that I felt dispirited is an understatement.

There’s always a point in any project where you become aware of the gap between what the film was in your mind when you started out, and what the reality of it is, as it assumes its form. When watching it yesterday, it became obvious that that gap was huge.

The main problem is that I just have such a paucity of material, and it’s struggling for coherence because the materials are so disparate, and because I’m not able to shoot original material that would give it a coherent through line - some of the animation is going to have to try to provide that. I’m trying to do two things at once: anchor the story to the events that are being narrated with actuality, and then add an abstract layer to give a sense of the themes and the emotional register of the film, which is really the core of it. I don’t think the balance between those two things is being struck correctly at the moment. If too much literal, representational imagery is used, it becomes like a bad true crime TV show; but if too much is abstract imagery, that’s a massive drain on audiences over the course of two hours. Finding the balance has been difficult.

In all honesty, I sat there and thought, “I’ve wasted everyone’s time. I’ve been incredibly reckless. This is stupid, I don’t know what this is, but it’s probably the wrong thing to be making. It’s the wrong format. I can’t do it.” Having slept on it I’m not so fatalistic, but I still have grave doubts. I think I just need to complete it, for my own sanity. I also looked at the number of the gaps in the film, and there’s so much work to be done to get these gaps filled, when I’ve already burned through so much time. It is a real worry. I don’t know what to do about that, you just have to plough on through to the end.

I just felt very, very low yesterday. I probably did the worst thing possible in these situations, which is to look back over a few films that I’ve admired recently, as references, and of course, it made what I was doing feel so artistically impoverished in comparison. But then those films were all Oscar nominees and Cannes winners, so the comparison is against the highest bar possible (although, I always think there’s no point doing anything unless you want to try to shoot for the highest bar possible). But, in any case, that exercise obviously didn’t help.

Today I’m off for a session in the music studio, and I’ll have my music collaborator watch it as well, give me his thoughts. The film certainly needs more space. The front actually works pretty well, but over time the inherent thinness of the visuals shows itself. It would be very good as an audio piece; maybe it has to be an audio thing eventually. I don’t know. We’ll see.

Anyway, music day today, and then back to it. I’m going to have to make a renewed push for getting all the archive materials in, which is annoying because it stops me from editing, and chasing these people around the block is a real time drain. But unless I do it, I’m going to run out of material.

Yesterday was a tough day. I have about an hour of the film done (with gaps for animation sequences and for rostrum and graphics work). I sat down and watched what was there, all the way through. And to say that I felt dispirited is an understatement.

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There’s always a point in any project where you become aware of the gap between what the film was in your mind when you started out, and what the reality of it is, as it assumes its form. When watching it yesterday, it became obvious that that gap was huge.

The main problem is that I just have such a paucity of material, and it’s struggling for coherence because the materials are so disparate, and because I’m not able to shoot original material that would give it a coherent through line - some of the animation is going to have to try to provide that. I’m trying to do two things at once: anchor the story to the events that are being narrated with actuality, and then add an abstract layer to give a sense of the themes and the emotional register of the film, which is really the core of it. I don’t think the balance between those two things is being struck correctly at the moment. If too much literal, representational imagery is used, it becomes like a bad true crime TV show; but if too much is abstract imagery, that’s a massive drain on audiences over the course of two hours. Finding the balance has been difficult.

In all honesty, I sat there and thought, “I’ve wasted everyone’s time. I’ve been incredibly reckless. This is stupid, I don’t know what this is, but it’s probably the wrong thing to be making. It’s the wrong format. I can’t do it.” Having slept on it I’m not so fatalistic, but I still have grave doubts. I think I just need to complete it, for my own sanity. I also looked at the number of the gaps in the film, and there’s so much work to be done to get these gaps filled, when I’ve already burned through so much time. It is a real worry. I don’t know what to do about that, you just have to plough on through to the end.

I just felt very, very low yesterday. I probably did the worst thing possible in these situations, which is to look back over a few films that I’ve admired recently, as references, and of course, it made what I was doing feel so artistically impoverished in comparison. But then those films were all Oscar nominees and Cannes winners, so the comparison is against the highest bar possible (although, I always think there’s no point doing anything unless you want to try to shoot for the highest bar possible). But, in any case, that exercise obviously didn’t help.

Today I’m off for a session in the music studio, and I’ll have my music collaborator watch it as well, give me his thoughts. The film certainly needs more space. The front actually works pretty well, but over time the inherent thinness of the visuals shows itself. It would be very good as an audio piece; maybe it has to be an audio thing eventually. I don’t know. We’ll see.

Anyway, music day today, and then back to it. I’m going to have to make a renewed push for getting all the archive materials in, which is annoying because it stops me from editing, and chasing these people around the block is a real time drain. But unless I do it, I’m going to run out of material.

Slow progress yesterday. My Mac is becoming quite ancient now, and it’s really struggling as the film evolves and lengthens. It’s been working against me and I need to look at new equipment, but I’m reluctant to spend money at the moment, for obvious reasons. My wife intervened and said, “look, it’s a false economy - you need working equipment. If it’s holding you back, do something about it”. I looked into a new machine, and there’s a chip crunch at the moment, so the prices are all inflated, but I ordered a new Mac and a new SSD - if I don’t do it now, I’m going to have to do it sooner rather than later anyway.

Subscribe now

Naturally, that pulled me away from the task in hand and sent me off down the misty psychological tunnel known as “yeah, but where’s the money coming from?” I started having a hunt around online - is there something I can do in the near term, just to get some cash through the door, pay for this Mac? I had a look around some of the freelance marketplaces and the casual, short-term work boards and it was just not fruitful. Most of the roles I saw were for video editing on YouTube channels. The money is way below what I’d accept, really, and all I kept thinking as I browsed was, “but why would I make videos for you? Why wouldn’t I just do your entire channel for myself?”

This type of activity is where you clarify who you are - my career history does not lie. It made me realise that making my own way is always what I’ve done since I was a teenager, and it’s not going to change; it’s just who I am. And I’ve muddled through ok so far. But, of course, the successive thought was, “have I done something stupid?”, again. This is the regular flex of the muscle of doubt: have I done something stupid? The position that I was in could have been leveraged in so many ways, and I just threw it all up and abandoned it. There are dozens of people - I see them here on Substack - who would give their eye teeth to have been in my position and have access to the opportunities that came with it. And yet I’ve tossed it away. Isn’t it ridiculously self-indulgent?

I had to remind myself that I’m not one of those people anymore. I’m happy to pass on the benefit of my experience, where I can, and to help those people take my place; but it’s not a place I wanted to be. It wasn’t making me happy, it wasn’t bringing me any joy or satisfaction with my creativity. And that’s why it needed to be brought to an end, and I needed to say “no” to it. The muscle of doubt will waste over time.

I’m thinking this over on my walk, the sea this morning is absolutely incredible. Calm. It helped to calm and settle my thoughts. I’ve had a new business idea, which I think would help elevate the possibilities for the independent, low-budget filmmaking community, but it would be a lot of work. I started thinking about what infrastructure would be needed, what the capital requirements might be. I sat down on the beach for a few minutes and tapped an outline into Obsidian. Ah, but even as I think this, is it what I really want to do?

For anyone who’s reading this, you should know that the description of this newsletter is completely accurate: my photograph and daily walk as it happens. This text originates as a voice note; I’m recording my thoughts as I walk, which is why the prose is a little more unfinished and colloquial than it would be if I was sitting down to actually write. As I continue to walk, I find myself reining that idea back in. The whole point was to simplify my existence and to leave more space for reflection and creativity, not to start another complicated business, negotiating with large companies and looking for capital. Come off it, man. Remember what the mission is.

No one reads Seaverses, I have four subscribers. A readership is not the point of it, anyway, but if anyone was reading, I would ask “what would you do? Take a run at the big league? Or stick with materially much lower rewards, but potentially much greater spiritual ones (although also more precarious and unstable). Keep to my mission of a small solo operation focussed on creativity, or pursue a new income-generating business with a potentially very high ceiling?” Always the eternal question.

I hit a creative block last night in trying to make a particular sequence work, but it cleared by morning. I woke with the answer, a good, creative solution. But I’m also opening a lot of holes in my timeline to be filled with animation, rostrum work, graphics, and the necessity for as-yet-unearthed archive.

In any case, I’m pleased to have broken through the block, and I’m going to resume work on that sequence right now.

Yesterday was a good day’s editing, I made decent progress, and checked in with archive – chased some outstanding requests, put in some new ones.

Subscribe now

The availability of archive has been a source of frustration on this film. I recently unearthed some promising material in a library collection in the Deep South; its inclusion would transform what the audience could understand, and this material has been lying in a box, undigitised, for decades.

The footage was acquired by a local news station and eventually donated to the library, where it languishes, unnoticed and unseen. I’d been talking to the library about paying to have it digitised, and then I asked about licensing… and the conversation came to a shuddering halt. The money that they were asking for was so unbelievably massive that it would be out of bounds even if I had a respectable budget, which, of course, on this project I don’t.

Archives is an area currently organised to the disadvantage of all parties: filmmakers, journalists, historians, and the holders of the archives themselves. I find this maddening; I interpret it as a form of insanity, a collective punishment. We bury this stuff and apply these enormous, unrealistic fee schedules for what reason?

I’ve done all this tracking down, finding this material, which would be amazing for the stories and the audience, but it will remain behind a locked door; it’s a time sink too.

Back to editing.

I reconnected with my composer yesterday, it sounds like he’s emerged from a really intense period - sixteen hour days, seven days a week, for 6 weeks on a major project. I detected that he found it energising as well as exhausting, sometimes those sensations walk together, paradoxically.

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He observed that there’s nothing like a pressing external deadline to bring matters into focus, and one of the difficulties that I have on this project is there is no external third party to keep me honest, which does mean that things can drift. I’m always conscious that the absence of an external deadline can become a problem, but this is a film that I have wanted to make for a while, and I want to take the time to do it justice. Although external deadlines force the discipline of completing the work, they can also mean that you make compromises in order to deliver on time, rather than to the highest standard that you are otherwise capable of. So I think an imposed deadline can be a mixed blessing; as the great Douglas Adams once said, “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by”.

My composer seems enthusiastic to get back on board, it sounded to me like he needs a lengthy holiday, but I’m grateful for his enthusiasm. We’ve organised a studio session for Friday, where we’ll review the film, talk through some ideas, and then he’ll put together some working tracks while I plough through the picture cut.

Yesterday I set aside some time for an interesting foray into AI, making use of Anthropic’s Fable model while it’s still available within a standard plan. As from tomorrow Fable will no longer be available on subscription, you’ll have to pay for it separately.

My relationship with AI is somewhat ambivalent. I’m not one of the doomsayers, who are intensely hostile towards the technology. I see the downsides and, as with a lot of the technology that has emerged over the course of this century, I’d much rather that some of it didn’t exist. But complaining about it is like complaining about gravity - it’s not going anywhere. I have a curiosity towards it, and I’m interested in exploring parts of its capability.

As much as I’m not one of the doomsayers, I’m also not one of the evangelists. I don’t think that AI is the answer to everything, certainly in its current form, or that it’s going to replace human competences wholesale. In most cases where I’ve made use of AI, I’d rather have a human on the job. I would never let it write for me, for example; not just because, for me, the act of writing is an end in itself, but because it produces a particular kind of writing that I don’t enjoy. We all see it saturating online writing, and it feels mechanical, lacks a human voice and texture.

If you ask it to evaluate any part of your own writing (I ask it to check for typos/errors), it will instantly seek to adapt your writing into a series of formal conventions which I think correspond to bad writing, and fail to reflect the rhythm and tone of your own voice. Where I’ve seen people argue that you can ask AI to write in your voice, I don’t think it can, if you have a genuinely distinctive writing voice.

So I don’t believe the claims that AI makes for itself, but neither do I catastrophise about it. I find that it can be a useful tool in assisting with busy work, basically. I find it’s very useful in terms of certain processes; I use it for research processes, I use it for formatting and organising. As an example, there’s a whole reservoir of very dull Photoshop work that I regularly have to get through - changing frame size, applying borders and presets and so on - I have set all that up in a pipeline which the AI bashes through automatically. Traditionally you might have an intern perform these tasks, so I can see that it creates a problem with training the next generation, but it is nevertheless useful in clearing out a load of hamster wheel jobs that I’d rather not do.

But what I wanted to experiment with on Fable, before Anthropic raise the drawbridge, was strategising. I find that AI is limited if you ask it to think either for itself or for you. It’s very good if you ask it to research and deliver information that exists out in the world, like an enhanced Google (although you have to be very careful in the prompting to ensure that it excavates its information from high quality sources, with proper references that you can check), and what it can be especially good for is evaluating or extracting patterns from your own thinking; I wanted to see how Fable performed in that respect.

I would never ask an AI “what should I do?” or “should I do X or Y?”. Instead, I wrote a lengthy briefing note in which I went through all of the various business ventures that I’ve embarked on over the past couple of decades, the different products that I’ve launched, the film series and catalogues that I’ve produced, and I recorded my experiences of and thoughts about each one: lessons that I’d drawn, what the outcomes were, where the successes and failures lay. I then made a list of what I perceive to be my strengths, as well as all of my weaknesses, and I wrote down all of the ideas that I’ve had over the past six months to generate revenue alongside my artistic work (fifteen altogether).

I did not ask it about my artistic work at all, I think that’s not the role of AI; I kept it to the business and revenue layer and developed a large, complex prompt. Using AI like this is not a quick process, it is not a shortcut. I was attempting to get it to do something which I might otherwise struggle to do myself, particularly now that I’m a solo operator. Previously, I would have had brainstorming sessions with colleagues and my business partner, and AI is no substitute for that, but AI can access a wider pool of information than people sitting in a room together can, and perceive patterns and nuances that might otherwise prove elusive (confirmation bias is, of course, a risk in both contexts).

In any case, I’m currently by myself so I don’t have access to regular brainstorming sessions, the AI has to perform that role for me in the immediate term. To restate: it was not a short process, I spent hours preparing briefing notes and documents, organising all the information to give to Fable, which then chewed on it for a decent amount of time.

What it did was to surface the knowledge I already had, and organise it for me. It parsed my information dump and found recurring patterns in both my successes and failures; it identified common themes and extrapolated a set of principles from them, which it then tested my current ideas against, made some recommendations, and proposed some action steps. I’ll now take those recommendations and discuss them with a human as the next stage.

It’s easy for your thoughts to become tangled and circular, particularly when they’re churning huge tides of time - businesses that I might have started twenty years ago, washing in with some drama that happened four years ago; it’s easy to become overwhelmed by all those experiences, tied as they are to memory. Getting the AI to interpret it all extrapolated patterns that I don’t necessarily perceive. All those patterns emerge from me and my experiences, not from the AI, but the AI helps to clarify them.

It was an interesting exercise, one that made me a little worried. The conclusion was that the path to making a new living from where I am today is going to be lengthy and arduous. There are no alternatives, that’s just the truth of the situation; the AI certainly did not blow smoke up my arse. Anyway, I now have some shape to my thoughts around that question.

Onwards.