With ALM, I have three basic flows for telling the story – raw video, motion graphics and posts (text). Though I wasn’t as faithful with imaging everything, I was fairly thorough in my writing. I captured details that I certainly would have been forgotten now. The posts are ready made narrative. It’s another voice, a different Dan, another processing perspective.
What stories do I want to tell, what is the story? Are details like my struggle with Wordbooker worth telling? This geeky stuff might be trivia, but if ALM is about learning how to do a project, how to be low impact and effective, if it’s about an open source approach then these details could be the components of a future epiphany.
The details I choose to include reveal my opinion of what matters. What’s most important and what’s next most important? Including the disaster details means I can turn around and talk about what did work…
“The best gear (approach, attitude) is often not mentioned because it’s never part of the problem, it’s never a cause or contributor to trials and tribulations. Rather, good gear is an invisible assumed element of every solution. Here’s my roster of invisible stuff.”
Now we’re into collaborator territory. This could also make me a field testing force to be reckoned with. The question is – is grabbing collaborators part of my main theme(s)?
I can also bring the blog right into the movie as screen capture while narrating.
Tangents aside, there’s an immediate goal here – to make a first pass on the video, to post it. To revitalize the project and find out what it is, who’s on board. Can there be an online following between trips? How does that work?
Another tangent. Recently I saw Dave Hart and we had a great time just hanging out. When I think about philosophy of projects I am reminded of an argument we had about cam chocks for climbing protection, back on the South Manitou boat when he and I weren’t getting along so great. I gave Roger Bonnet’s argument that cam chocks were overly complicated, expensive poser gear. I can’t remember why Dave liked cams – maybe because they were a sort of one size fits all solution that ultimately reduced the amount of metal (and weight) on a rack. It doesn’t matter what you do or don’t know about climbing, the basic argument was simplicity vs complication. Both of us felt probably felt like we were arguing for simplicity.
Simplicity will emerge as one of my principles of preparing for and approaching a challenge, but my idea of simplicity has to be clarified, rigorously polished until it’s perfectly obvious.
What this all helps me to understand is that I’m ready to take another whack at the index cards and sort the main themes of the project. It’s a great day, except for this burning pain in my adrenals. But that’s another story.