A brief pause while 3d animations render means I’ve had time to clear away some of the admin that’s been building up, and re-asses where I actually am.

As it turns out, the recession, though it’s changed a lot of my plans, hasn’t really done much harm to my overall income…. It’s just made it full of smaller, bittier jobs, which in turn means I’m spending all my thinking time thinking about what I’m doing tomorrow – so my longer term ideas are suffering.

Using the enforced pause, I set up a meeting of everyone in my office along with all my departmental heads and the people in charge of each of my project areas.

In other words, just me.

My meeting overran (or actually, I got a commission to illustrate a cover for Nature so I had to postpone it) so I’m not going to write up the full minutes until next week, but I should have some post-recession strategies by then… and I should know what I’m going to do about all the projects currently waiting for me to get to work on them.


In the meantime, I’ve got my master tape back from stanleys – and managed to save about £200 by getting it to them in the right format on the right disk (a firewire 800 disk and an uncompressed avi if anyone’s in the same situation). I’m now hoping it makes it through Electric sky’s quality control and doesn’t need re-doing.

I also bought a copy of the EDN financing guide for documentaries – a sort of telephone directory for documentary commissioners - and so far it seems everyone commissioning documentaries has set up online submission for programme ideas. This is a shame because I’m very sure these are a waste of time.

I’m sure they’re just like publishers’ slush-piles – designed to give the impression of considering people’s submissions while they’re quietly binned with little serious consideration.

I’m sure that like in publishing circles, the actual work of commissioning gets done by another, less formal system of networking.

One of the things I need to do is start to discover a little more about what that system really entails and whether it’s something I want to get involved in. I don’t mind working hard, but I’m not willing to have my time and energy sucked up and spat out by the TV industry – I’ve got far too much else in my life – so if there’s no sensible way to go, I can always stick to no-budget fun…