He’s coming home…

Up at 5.45am as per usual again today – it’s been nice to have a little while off early mornings. Got K to the station then despite the early wake-up I was feeling energised and motivated enough to sit and plough through a wapping 26 pages of the new screenplay, bringing me within about 10 pages of hitting my self-imposed 1st April deadline.

I’m really quite pleased with it all, too. It needs going over and refining, but all first drafts do. The crucial part is that a) I’ve got it down on paper how I saw it in my head and b) I’m actually pretty happy with what I’ve written. Just have to see if I can finish it off now.

The rest of the day was spent catching up on the weekend’s emails and other correspondence. I’d managed to keep away from the computer the whole time which was actually really refreshing. Saturday we chilled at home all day – another total and rare blessing – and then spent the evening with Gramps at the ‘rents. Sunday we chilled in the morning before I headed to work, then got dinner and chats with Gramps again before they leave tomorrow, although it wasn’t a late one as we were obviously both up early-doors tomorrow.

After all my brother’s exploits in the Sun last week (see this article and it’s related links. He’s the dude in the goggles in the pic, plus featured in many of the videos), I got a call from him this morning to let us know he’s on his way home this week.

While that sounds like fab news – and for us, it is – it’s actually really gutting for him. It seems he’s torn the ligaments in his ankle playing some post-ops rugby in camp and now can’t stay out there for the week or so of wrap-up session they’ve got and then their wee company/commando jolly to Cyprus on the way home. Instead, he’s trying to resist letting them put a cast on it and eyeing a spot on the AeroMed home this Thursday. Like I say, fab news, but gutting for him.

Multi-media 2

Up again around 8am – second lie-in in a row! – and ran K down to nursery before popping in to see a friend who’s right at the end of her pregnancy and trying desperately not to let Baby come along yet. She was feeling awful today and really struggling, but she’s almost full term and there shouldn’t be any issues, which is something I tried to reassure her of.

I ran home quickly before popping down to the nursery to film an interview with K and the nursery manager for her course, which she then has to come home and edit into something coherent for her tutor to observe her clinical practice. Or something.

Had a look around the nursery, too, which is absolutely lovely. It’s a private nursery just down the road from where we live and it’s so beautifully set out with so many stimuli for the children. I dropped in on the babies (3-18 months) who were all unbelievably cute and gorgeous. The nursery itself is a large private house that’s been converted for use and the back garden is jam-packed with awesome play equipment which really let’s the kids throw themselves around and have fun.

Popped home again (lots of popping today, clearly) for half-an-hour before going back to collect K and coming home to polish up the multi-media stuff for the Royal’s scratch performance tonight, when I’ll finally get chance to see the whole piece as one and work a little on the timing of the various elements.

The majority of the afternoon was spent between Photoshop and Final Cut Pro, making logos and composites in the former and editing together a montage of war footage in the latter, all of which went pretty quickly and easily, to my surprise. I wasn’t sure I’d get it all done for the rehearsal/performance tonight, but in the end I did it fairly comfortably, which I was really chuffed with.

Headed to Northampton and dropped K at her appointment, then went on to catch up with a couple of friends I’ve not seen in ages. Suze, who I’ve worked with extensively for nearly 8 years, gave me some really good ideas of how to try to engage the Youth Theatre groups we’ve been struggling with recently, which I’m hoping I’ll be able to put into practice over the next term to try to pull the young people into the sessions and get them to engage.

After a quick coffee and catch-up, I moved on to the scratch performance, which started a little late but was hugely useful in working out how and when my pieces can slot in most unobtrusively, in order to best support the work that the group are doing on the stage.

Late start meant late finish again, getting away from the Royal around 9pm, which was quite a bit later than I’d wanted to get out, then picked K up from her bro’s house where she was babysitting while our niece was out with them for her birthday meal. I did get to see J, though, to wish her a happy birthday, which was really nice because I wasn’t expecting to see her.

Dinner, then, was incredibly late, getting home as we did around 11pm, which then meant I wasn’t getting to sleep until well after midnight as I was wide awake from the food. Ho hum. At least I get a proper lie-in, veg-out session tomorrow morning. Bliss.

Multi-media

Between organising some other bits and pieces today (and having a “lie-in” until 8am) I spent a lot of the day putting together the multi-media stuff for the Royal’s New Connections project, which was quite good fun.

In order to get it all to run properly and easily for the technicians operating it on the night, the best way of working it is to put it all into a Powerpoint presentation, which can then either be automated or run with single-push button progression. The only problem with that is that I absolutely hate Powerpoint. Apart from anything else, it’s so inflexible – there’s so many things I want to do with the transitions and other things, but you have a choice of 3 or 4 options which have no adaptability and no ability to customise them to your wants/needs. Frustrating to say the least.

In the evening I headed into MK Theatre to talk to their script writing course writers about possibly directing a show-case of their work, or part of it. Not sure if it’s going to work out with my dates and availability at the moment, but we’ll see if we can make it work somehow. It’d be great fun to work on some new pieces, but also educational to work with new writers on the first performances and developing/evolving the script.

Hurriedly rushing off from there, I headed over to Northampton to the Royal for their last rehearsal before the scratch performance of their piece for the National tomorrow. Frustratingly, they didn’t get around to a full run-through as the stagger-through took too long, which meant I didn’t really get to look into the timings for the piece, but I did at least get to sit down and go through the presentation with the director, who was very complimentary and had a couple of notes for me to take away.

A later night finish than I’ve had in a while, not leaving until 9.30pm, but it actually feels pretty cool to be back and involved in some proper live performance – something I’ve not really done for almost 3 years now. Exciting stuff.

New avenues

As part of what I think industry and teaching call “continuing professional development” – in other words, learning new stuff – I spent my day today at the Castle Theatre in Wellingborough training as an Arts Award adviser.

Arts Award is a qualification that young people from 11-25 can take which can not only help boost their confidence and push them out of their comfort zone, but also, potentially, set them up for moving forward with a career in the arts. Encompassing all art forms from theatre and film to stone masonry (really), young people can do projects on Bronze, Silver and Gold levels to achieve certificates which will doubtless then carry weight with applications to Arts colleges, universities and – potentially – lead to avenues for employment.

It’s a great scheme and a really exciting thing for me to be able to deliver. Initially, I’m looking to set up a scheme within the Grove in Dunstable, but I can also register myself as an independent centre meaning I can run and assess young people on the award independently of a venue. It’s a great string to my bow and could open a lot of doors for me.

Yesterday I ploughed through a huge heap of work and finished off very proud of myself for getting through my to-do list, then had a really hard session at the Grove with the Youth Theatre. There are two participants who are really hard to engage and it’s totally baffling me – I don’t know what to do to get them into the fold. Having tried just about all areas of drama this term, the other practitioner in the sessions and myself are at our wit’s end trying to find out why they come and what they want from the sessions – it seems impossible to please them.

On a brighter note, the rest of the group really enjoyed it and seemed to get a lot out of it and we got some really good feedback to signpost where they’d like to go next term, which makes things much easier for us in eliminating the guess work from the planning process.

Got back and chilled out with K watching some random TV as she unwound after her exam which , after considering she’d probably just about managed a pass with 50%, she rocked up to uni today to discover she’s got yet another 1st. Can people please comment on here to show her that she needs to stop underestimating herself and realise that she’s actually pretty damn clever. Enough said. Love you.

Day Off – for real

I’ve been kind of promising myself a day off for quite the little while now, but not until today did I actually give myself one. Acutally, it was entriely unintentional. I looked into my diary last night and realised I had nothing booked in for the day – in itself something really rather exceptional – and when I woke up this morning, perched with laptop on the sofa bed (on which I’m currently residing as K has a virus of some sort that is as-yet undiagnosed and we don’t want to run the risk of passing it on, which sucks big time) I thought to myself that if I didn’t have to be anywhere today and I didn’t have any deadlines today or tomorrow then what I should really do is just enjoy the emptiness for the day.

Which is just what I set about doing. I managed to spend *almost* the entire day sprawled on the sofa bed watching some old Season 2 Episodes of Entourage (my inspiration of choice at the moment), surfing the ‘net, spending way too much time on Facebook and writing 14 pages of my current script, which has taken me up to 59 pages now and just a little behind my target for getting a first draft done by 1 April.

I haven’t spent a day doing practically nothing for a really, really long time and it was actually completely awesome and much, much needed. It’s amazing how much you can relax and recharge with a day of not doing anything at all. That’s really what weekends should be about but is something both K and I seem to be 100% terribly at keeping clear and free to chill out. We keep promising that we’ll be better at marking things out, but it’s a habit we don’t seem to be able to break. People are so nice they keep asking us to do things. And we appear to be incapable of saying, “no”.

But that’s all for another day and another time. Right now, I still can’t sleep because I apparently didn’t do enough today – ironic, huh? – to send me to street straight away. So I’ve got Devil Wears Prada on in the background and trying to work out if that attitude would work for CF Talk. I’m thinking not…