Meeting the publishers - and writing for my Dad

Yesterday I went for a meeting with a publisher who wants me to write a very simple guide to making digital video. The company seems a pretty good one – producing 100 new titles a year (that’s pretty prolific) on all kinds of subjects from travel to lifestyles to natural history.

It was a good meeting. These practical guides are quite new to them, but the first one – on how to do very basic things with your PC (like opening and closing windows and writing word documents) proved increadibly successful, so they’ve branched out into titles like researching family trees, building websites, and of course, Digital Video.

The book will be aimed at the complete novice – and it sounds like many of their readers are older people who have missed the technological revolution. In other words, I’m writing a book aimed at my Dad.

I can see exactly how the book should work and fleshing out the chapters and tutorials was very easy because it’s so clear what the novice needs to know about digital video. I’m also quite passionate about it – I think video is fast turning into a medium which is as natural to some people as writing. I also think that being video literate is soon going to be almost as important as being literate with words – if you can’t post to youtube, or carry on a video skype conversation or communicate your business online visually you’re likely to be left behind.

Strangely, I received a copy of the last book I wrote (or rather updated) this morning (you can see it here, if you’re interested - http://www.amazon.com/New-Digital-Video-Manual-Date/dp/1847320457/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1204134233&sr=8-3 )


Anyway – writing a book for my Dad makes me a little nervous because although he’s the target market – he’s also almost impossible to reach with new ideas. He has (and I think it’s fairly common among the older generation) a view that you don’t just start playing with a piece of technology, you read the manual and understand it thoroughly before you start. You have to know what every button does.

So, for example, my Dad won’t use Word because there’s a whole row if icons at the top of the screen which he doesn’t understand. I, on the other hand, use word every day. looking along the row of icons at the top of the screen now – I still don’t understand most of them, but I know that it doesn’t matter. I’m not scared of any of them (except that mirrored P icon which does something very odd to my whole document).

I have to key into a mindset which says “unless I understand everything about how something works, I can’t start messing around with it” and that’s tough.

I guess the only way is to go step by step very slowly through everything and make every tutorial lead to something obviously and instantly useable.


Another new project
I’ve also got the go-ahead to start work on another new venture – a newsletter for one of the main manufacturers of budget video editing software and hardware. It’s going to be a monthly email sent out to subscribers giving them tips and ideas on how to expand their use of the software…. So lots of small but highly focussed articles, and 30-40 word news items. Writing for the web is always an exercise in minimalism (apart from this blog – in which I frequently ramble on for ages!).


As usual, deadlines here are tight. Part I of the newsletter is to be in by the end of the week. The book needs to be finished by the end of April.

It’s all do-able – or appears so now!

Editing
The next stage of editing is nearly done now – with my fake commentary slipped in, all the interviews and cut-aways edited into place, all I need to do now is fine-tune the script, add some music, rescue and balance the sound, correct the colour of the pictures, get the propper narration done and edited in, do the fine edit and add titles and captions.

Actually, looking at it that seems like quite a lot – Oh, I’ve just remembered – I still need to get some footage from NASA – of the unfurling of a solar sail in a test in 2005…

Here's a first (very rough) edit of the opening part of the new docunentary on colonising other worlds... I've used my own voice in place of the professional narrator so I can refine and edit the script, and there's no music. Also, the images and sound aren't balanced and there's a lot of trimming to be done - so don't be too critical yet!