Week Three
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.
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.