Steve's pop picks

Now that the NME is free, I've being checking out their recommendations. Here is some stuff I like:

El Vy - really good - bit like Lloyd Cole
The 1975 - Love me - Like a combinations of Fashion-era David Bowie (my favourite) and Duran Duran 
King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard - Hot Wax - Brilliant sound, a bit reminiscent of early Jon Spencer Blues Explosion but more surf garage - Great use of a flanger and great bass sound
Potty Mouth - Cherry Picking - Again, lovely bass. Reminds me a bit of Belly.

Review of An Irrational Man

Interesting film but no more than that. Woody Allen writes really good dialog, not just in itself but in the sense of dialog that moves the film along. My partner took exception to Joaquin’s prosthetic belly. I can’t say I noticed. 

Woody Allen is a very functional film-maker nowadays, though I found some of the focusing of his shots rather odd. He doesn’t use the very wide aperture look (which is good cos I really don’t like it - most of the time it’s style over substance) but he often leaves most of the screen just a bit out of focus. Unfortunately, if it’s not immediately obvious where the point of focus should be, it makes it look like a mistake

The Martian Review

This is a good popcorn movie, with a nice balance of introspection and action. Matt Damon is a good lead and the other characters are well drawn. What was Sean Bean doing though?

Making of Dads Rock On

TTB Dads Rock On from Steve Green on Vimeo.
I have just completed a music video for The Tall Boy: Dads Rock On from his latest EP, Take it to the Kids. I thought I would share with you the details of the way I put it together.

Filming

The basic idea for the video is a pretty simple one. It was Matt’s idea, I can’t take any credit for it. The idea was that he should do some embarrassing Dad dancing to the song, and that I should film it. 
All filming was done using my trusty 550D with the 18-55mm kit lens. I use the Cinestyle Color Profile with the settings as per the recommendations to get as flat a picture as possible. I have also recently installed the Magic Lantern software. I turned on the zebras, to get the maximum dynamic range out of the sensors. Magic Lantern also gives you good control over the ISO range, adding a whole load of intermediate steps that you don’t get from the out of the box camera.
I had my Rode Videomic Pro on the camera - not strictly necessary but I’ve only just bought it and I wanted to check it worked. Incidentally, I have seen a few reports on the Videomic Pro that suggest that the battery is incredibly difficult to change quickly - I don’t know whether they have changed the design but I tried it several times and it couldn’t be simpler. Perhaps they have changed it
The camera was set on a tripod for all the shots except the last two - the feet close up and the top half of the body where I wanted to make sure I got the arm movements. With the IS on I find I can keep movement down to a level where it’s not distracting. I’ve got a huge problem with the modern shaky cam style of filming - why when lighting, hair, make-up, sound etc still has to be perfect, is it acceptable to make it look like the camera is being held by a monkey?
Lighting was a lot of natural light (a large bay window behind the camera position) supplemented by my Neweer LED light with the orange filter over it. With the camera white balance set to Shade I find that this combination gives skin tones that are pretty close to the skin line without the need for a massive amount of tweaking during the post production phase.

Importing

 I imported the footage onto my Macbook Air by popping the SD card straight into the card slot. I’ve experimented with various ways of doing this but for this project I made sure that Final Cut Pro was running before inserting the card, which makes the FCP import window open automatically. I think that, now I’ve figured out the best way of backing up my work from FCP libraries, this is the way I’ll keep doing it from now on.

Editing

 The first step was synchronizing the takes on the timeline. After fiddling about with the multi cam option for a bit I finally figured out that FCP tries to use the record time to put the clips onto the timeline, even when you tell it to use the audio to match them up. Luckily, the Synchronize clips option works a treat - I simply selected all the clips, together with the sound file of the track, pressed the button and voila! a perfectly synchronized compound clip.
 It was at this time that I noticed my first mistake - you can see the lighting stand in one of the key clips (where Matt is playing the guitar). A quick round trip to Motion was required to fix this. Integration between FCP and Motion is non-existent so the sequence was:

• Right click (or 2 finger click on the magic track pad) on the clip in the FCP browser and select Reveal in Finder. 
• Open Motion, create a new project and Drag the clip onto the time line 
• Create a copy of the clip 
• Mask the lighting stand on the top clip 
• Slip the bottom clip over so that the background wall replaces the lighting stand 
• Blur the edges of the mask so I couldn’t see the join. 
• Use share to write the new file out to disk, accepting the default settings 
• Switch back to FCP, import the file and drag it into the multi clip. 
• Using the audio waveform as a guide, synchronise with the audio track (this was really easy in this case because the track starts with two clicks) 
• Delete the old clip with the lighting stand visible and we’re done! 

I suppose I could have tried to auto synchronise the new clip but I thought it might not work and, since I was only synchronising one track I thought it would be as easy to do it manually
The next step was to separate the video from the audio for all the tracks and delete the unwanted audio. After doing a few I discovered that separate audio works if you select multiple tracks so I did that. Note that after you done this you have to be really careful not to time slip any of the tracks as you no longer have a reference point to resync. I didn’t have a problem in this case but I suppose an alternative is to mute the audio on all the tracks you don’t want to hear. There’s probably a clever way of doing this that I’ll have to figure out in the future.
So now I had a big stack of tracks on top of the audio track and I had to figure out how to cut them. This was where I made my second mistake - I should have done the basic colour correction before starting to cut - it would have saved a bit of time, but I didn’t think of that til later.
Dads Rock On as a song is in two parts - very cleverly linked by the chorus. In the first half our hero stumbles across a gig being played by one of the heroes from his youth while in the second half he decides to get his own band back together and get out on the road. I decided that the first half should mainly feature the Dad dancing elements with short stabs of close up guitar action while the second half would reveal our hero as the singer and guitarist, intercut with more stabs of dancing. I decided that the close up of his face should be reserved for a couple of key phrases to emphasise the journey in the song. The next phase was all about selecting the right clips in the right sequence.
The way I did this was to make all the tracks except the one I wanted to use invisible, then cut that track roughly on the beat. I would then select where I wanted to the clip to end, cut again and then make the before and after sessions invisible. I decided to do this, rather than delete the unwanted sections as FCP tends to drop tracks that are above the main timeline down to the lowest possible level. This would have resulted in a jumble of tracks. By just making the tracks I didn’t want invisible I kept the clips lined up, like a conventional editor. This turned out to be a good decision and I would definitely do this again if I was working with a multi cam or synchronised track.
Once I had got all of the right clips I wanted, I concentrated on getting the cuts exactly right. Dads Rock on is a very beaty track so it made sense to cut very rhythmically on the beat. This took several passes through until I was sure that it was ok.

Colour correction

Once I was happy with clips and the timing, I did the colour correction and the shot-to-shot matching. As I said before, this would have been easier if I had done the colour correction before starting to cut, but heigh-ho, lesson learned. In doing this I use the workflow suggested by Denver Riddle on his excellent Color Grading Central website. That is, for each clip:

• Optimize the dynamic range using the exposure controls. Generally I set the low and high to give maximum dynamic range, then use the mid to bring the skin tone back in to line (in this case Matt’s skin was around the 50% mark) 
• Correct the colour balance for skin tones. In this case it was pretty much bang on, thanks to the orange filter on the LED light. There was just a very slight green cast to the shots, probably due to the green curtains. 
• Next shot-to-shot matching. I probably should have followed Denver’s advice and used a secondary for this but in most cases I just messed with the primaries until all the shots matched the look I was going for. The only shot I had to use a secondary for was the head shot, where for some reason there was a much lower contrast between Matt’s face and the background. For this I used a secondary with an oval mask and just raised the exposure on the outside until it matched the other shots. 

Applying the look

Finally, it was time to apply the look. This was when I realised the power of compound shots. When you drag them to the project timeline, they appear as a single clip and any effects or colour correction apply to the whole clip rather than the individual shots. This is incredibly powerful and, in fact, better than other NLE’s where you generally have to apply looks on a track-by-track basis.
Anyway I thought the FCP Indie Red effect might suit the video so I whacked it on. Although I like the effect, I thought it boosted the highlights too much so I went back into the compound clip, lowered all the highlights to 75%, then tried again. For some reason, FCP doesn’t seem to recognise changes to compound clips once they are on the timeline, so I had to delete and re-insert the clip to get the changes. I don’t know if there’s a better way of doing this but since there was only one clip it didn’t take too much time. I reapplied the effect and this time I was really happy with it.
I uploaded it to Vimeo and sent a link to the client. However, when I looked at the on-line version myself I was more than a bit disappointed - what had been a vibrant red leather colour on my Mac had been turned into a dull brown wash! Back to the drawing board…
I decided to go for the good old standard bleach bypass look. Rather than use the built in effect I thought I would have a go at one of the methods Denver Riddle recommends. This involves overlaying a copy of the clip, turning the saturation all the way down to zero, and changing the composite mode to screen. This produced a lovely result, increasing the dynamic range very nicely without crushing the blacks and highlights (which the built in effect does).

Finishing off

The second time I uploaded to Vimeo I selected 720p upload rather than 1080p. There is no discernible difference in quality (in fact I think the 720p version is slightly better) presumably because it is not as heavily compressed.
I uploaded to Vimeo and this time was rewarded with a rendering that looks just about identical to the one I get on the Mac.
That’s all there was to it! It was a lot of fun, I learned a lot about FCP and I hope you learned something too.

Richard Branson's campaign to review the West Coast Mainline Procurement

Richard Branson is running a sustained and successful campaign (in pr terms at least) to get the Government to review the recent awarding of the West Coast mainline franchise to First Group, rather than his own Virgin Group. The main thrust of his argument is that First Group have promised to pay too much back to the Government and that they will be forced, by economics, either to renegotiate the franchise mid-way through, or to walk away before the end. There is of course a precedent for this: both GNER and National Express have walked away from the Eastcoast mainline franchises, leading to the effective renationalisation of the service. In both cases Virgin came second in the bidding process as they offered less money to HMG. While I have some sympathy for Branson's position I suspect that the Government's hands are tied in a way that no-one I have heard or read has made clear. I'll explain: I assume (although I don't know) that the franchise renewal process took place under EU procurement rules. The procurement process requires that you set out the criteria by which you are going to judge the bid and how you are going to score the criteria beforehand. Once you have started the process, you cannot change the criteria without starting again. The rules have nothing to say about what criteria you use, or whether they have to make sense, you just have to state what they are and apply them equally and fairly to all bidders. From the fairly gnomic utterances of the Department for Transport, I would guess that there is nothing about the sustainability and realism of the revenue projections in the criteria, so there is no way that, legally, the DfT could halt the process for review, even if it wanted to. In fact, under the new rules that came into force earlier this year, FirstGroup would be able to sue the Government for loss of earnings if they delayed the process, having awarded the franchise. At Stonivale, we have substantial experience of running successful EU procurements that deliver value for money, both for the public and for the company doing the bidding. If you would like advice, either in helping to respond to a Tender or in formulating an Invitation To Tender (ITT) so that you get the best value for money and reduce the risk of a challenge, why not contact us?

Outsourcing considered harmful*

Following the G4S debacle there is a lot of debate over the usefulness of oustourcing in the public sector, inlcuding a number of calls for outsourcing to be halted altogether
I have been both sides of the outsourcing fence, as a supplier and a customer, in both the public and the private sector. I like to think I have more of a perspective on it.

In a way, there should be nothing too controversial about outsourcing. It is simply a decision to buy a product or service from a supplier that you used to do yourself. So when you start out you might do your accounts yourself. As you do more business you might decide to put all your receipts in a box and pay an accountant to do it.
A company I worked for in the early 90s made their own pcs. They had good reasons for doing it then (it was much, much cheaper). They'd be mad to do that now.

Questions to ask before you outsource

Before you make the decision to outsource, ask the following questions:

Why am I outsourcing?

There are good reasons for outsourcing and there are not so good reasons. The good reasons come down to three key reasons:

• Will I save money?
• Will I free up time (to make more money)?
• Will I get access to skills that I don't have in-house?

The first two are pretty much self explanatory, but you need to decide which of these you are going for and make sure you select a supplier that delivers the one you want. Outsourcing is not always cheaper but it should always free up time for you to devote to your core business. Whether that's important to you very much depends on whether you can use the extra free time to make more money.

What are you outsourcing?

The third one requires a deal of thought. One of the big mistakes that businesses make is not understanding what is core (that is, what you do that is special and makes you, you) and what is non-core. For example, say you make and sell hand-crafted furniture from a studio in rural Yorkshire. Nobody will care if you outsource your payroll. They will care if you start selling furniture that's made in China.
In my opinion, you should hold onto the core as hard as you can - otherwise you could end up being a sales organisation for your supplier, which is probably not what you went into business for.

Do I have the skills to select and manage the supplier?

The kind of person that is good at managing the in-house team is probably not the kind of person that can write a good invitation to tender, see through all the supplier BS and negotiate a good but fair contract that leaves both sides feeling like winners. All too often however, the person who does or oversees the job currently is thought to be the best person to bring in a supplier. (There are obvious conflicts of interest here as well, which many businesses seem able to overlook). Of course you could buy in the skills to select and engage the supplier (from someone like me *slight plug*) but then you would have to be sure you had the skills to engage a consultant ;-) At any rate you would still need to make sure you had the skills to manage the supplier once the contract was under way.

What is my Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement?

Take the time to figure out at what point you should be walking away from negotiations with a supplier. Is it when the price is too high? Maybe they want you to guarantee a certain amount of business? Maybe they want to own the IP that is created? Too many companies do not work this out beforehand and end up giving too much away during the negotiations. This also happens a lot in public sector procurements where the process is so long drawn out and painful that any deal is seen as preferable to no deal at all. It is also very common in large businesses that have separate buying or procurement departments - the people negotiating the deal are not the ones who have to live with the consequences.

Bad reasons to outsource

There are lots of bad reasons to outsource. Here are some that I have come across at one time or another:

• Outsourcing to get rid of a problem employee or team.  Don't do this. Man up and deal with the problem
• Outsourcing to transfer risk to a supplier. This happens in Government all the time. It is usually done to reduce the risk to the individual (they can blame the supplier if it doesn't work out). At the end of the day, however, the business will still suffer if the product or service is not delivered and on top of that, you've added the risk of supplier failure. G4S is a classic case in point
• Outsourcing for 'flexibility'. A lot of outsourcing specialists will sell their ability to scale up and down to fit the needs of your business. In practice, it will probably be just as hard for them to provide you with the staff with the experience in your business as it would be to do it yourself (G4S again). Also, companies that specialise in this tend to move their staff around a lot, so you will be paying for the privilege of their staff gaining valuable experience in your industry.

 

Need help?

If you need any help deciding whether to outsource, selecting the right supplier, and making sure you have the right contract in place to make sure you get value for money, why not get in touch with Stonivale for an initial chat

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*This is a geek reference to the famous article by Dijkstra: "Go To statement considered harmful", published in 1968

Project Management, G4S and the Olympics

There's been a lot of speculation around concerning the failure of G4S to recruit and train enough security staff in time for the London 2012 Olympics.

Buckles buckles, and poor Tommy Atkins picks up the pieces

According to G4S' CEO, Nick Buckles, they will end up losing between 30 and 50 million on this contract. G4S are going to pay for the extra soldiers who will be forced to give up their recovery time to fill the gap. While I would bet much on Buckles still being in a job in a month's time, surely the most serious outcome is that some of the troops in Afghanistan will be required to stay out there for longer to cover for troops that have been drafted in for the games.
Some commentators have expressed surprise that Buckles was only made aware that they weren't going to make it 9 days before the story broke. I'm afraid that, with over 20 years experience of delivering complex projects (and this was not a particularly complex project), I was not surprised at all.

2000 to 10000 in 9 months, a slow-motion train wreck

Now I haven't worked for G4S, but I can make a pretty educated guess as to what happened: G4S were originally contracted to supply 2000 security staff. This was upped to 10000 staff following a review in November 2011, leaving them with less than 9 months to find an extra 8000 staff. Just to be clear, this represents a 400% increase. Now I'm willing to bet that the Project Manager in charge, and the recruitment team knew that this couldn't be done as soon as they were told about the change. The project manager may have even told people higher up the food chain that it couldn't be done. They would then have come back to him/her and said that it had to be done. They may have even offered extra money and people to do it. The PM probably took on some extra staff to try and avert the impending train wreck.

 

Classic mistakes

[As an aside, in software development circles, this is known as a classic mistake, adding people to a late project. There's a whole book on it, The mythical man month, which I recommend to anyone who's interested in why software projects go wrong. ]
What I'm guessing happened now, is that the PM and the team struggled on, knowing that they were not going to make it, but equally knowing that no-one in senior management would be interested in hearing the bad news until it was obvious to everyone. There's a name for this in software development circles too: The Death March Project.
I think (though I don't know) that the Olympics security debacle was a symptom of a corporate culture at G4S that is all too common in UK business: The people at the top think that they can get things done by demanding it, they don't like to hear bad news, and moreover, dismiss those who say that a thing can't be done as whingers, even while they are relying those same people to do the thing that can't be done.

"Star Trek is not like real life" shock

If there's one thing that I've learned in 25 years, it's that if you're relying on a person to do a thing, and they tell you it will take three months, and you tell them that it has to be done in two, it will take three months - if you're lucky. Real life isn't like Star Trek.
Another thing that is common to these sorts of organisations is a Mickawberish belief that something will turn up, and if you are lucky, you will get away with it. Again, 25 years of experience tells me that you are never, ever lucky. In fact, if something only takes the amount of time and effort you thought it would, and not more, then you can count yourself as lucky.
I have two prescriptions: one for the CEO, and another for the Project Manager:

 

A better way for the chief

For the CEO - This, like many aspects of leadership, is simple. Simple but not easy. What Buckles' successor has to do is to change the culture of the organisation so that open communication of bad news is encouraged and acted upon. And in case you think I'm being hopelessly idealistic - I have actually done this, for a team of 30 people, and it does actually work. The way you start is, the next time that someone brings you bad news, just take the time to actually listen to their concerns, engage with them in a way that shows that you understand and negotiate some changes that will make a difference. Then you keep doing that every day. Within 6 months, you will really see the change.
Imagine if someone had come to Buckles in November 2011 and told him that there was no way that they could go from 2000 to 10000 in 9 months and instead of just telling them to make it happen, listened to their concerns and responded to them. They might have figured out that the best that they could do was 5000. They could have gone back to LOCOG with that figure, LOCOG would still have had to get the troops in but they would have had 9 months to plan it and it would certainly have kept G4S out of the headlines.

 

A better way for the Project Manager

Too many PMs, when faced with a project, and a management like this, just give up. They stop planning and they stop reporting. This is the wrong thing to do. When the project goes wrong it is then the PM's fault, fair and square. What you should do is keep the plan up to date and keep reporting openly and honestly. Here at Stonivale we have a simple way of reporting progress, using red, amber and green statuses that are clearly defined and consistently applied:

• GREEN - All tasks are on time and the project is on time
• AMBER - One or more tasks is forecast to finish late but the project is still forecast to finish on time
• RED - One or more tasks is late and the project is forecast to finish late.

We insist on weekly reporting, not monthly as is common (and was the case for the G4S project). Senior managers tend to sit up and take notice if they are getting a report week after week that is telling them their project is late.

Does any of the above look familiar? Need help with sorting your projects and programmes out? Contact Stonivale for a chat. We might be able to help.

Not just consultancy

I was musing to my wife the other day - trying to explain how I conceptualise my skills - what makes what I do special, and a bit different from other people who might have the same role. I explained that what I like to do is to chat with people, find out about the problems they are having, and then try to work out ways that they can solve the problems. Sometimes the solution might involve technology, sometimes training, sometimes changing processes, sometimes changing the way that they think about the problem.
She said to me, "That's just consultancy!"
Instinctively I shrink from describing what I do as consultancy, and, over the past few days I've been trying to figure out why.

Three problems I have with consultants

Consultants tell you what you want to hear 

 

I think that a lot of businesses bring in consultants to justify what the MD or CEO wants to do anyway. They come in, listen to the Boss, write it all down, add some charts, take the money and away we go.

Your problem is always solved by what the consultant has to sell

The second problem I have with consultants is that a lot of them come in to sell you their own solutions off the shelf. Whatever your problem is, the things that they just happen to sell are the solution. So the process improvement consultants will sell you CMM, or EFQM, or Scrum, the software vendors will sell you a new CRM or an ERP system (if you're really rich and unlucky) and the system integrators will sell you lots of different systems which will cost a fortune to glue together.

Consultants charge too much, with no guarantees

The third problem is that they're so expensive. A one-man band will cost you £350-£500 a day, a consultant from a small to medium-sized consultancy will cost £600-800 and if you go to the big beasts then you can expect to pay anything up to £1500 a day. And whats worst about this is the risk is all yours: once they have delivered the report, or the new project management templates, or the shiny new website they are out of the door and it's up to you to turn all that spend into something that actually benefits your business.

Another way

I'd like to propose another way. My way has two parts to it: a new way of working and a new way of getting paid.

A new way of working

It's very simple really: This is how it works:

1. I work with you to figure out what your real problems are;
2. I work with you to figure out what is the simplest and cheapest thing that can be done to solve that real problem;
3. I work with you until the problem is solved or until you don't need me any more.

 A new way of getting paid

Instead of doing half the solution, taking the money and leaving you to do the rest, the consultant should have an up front conversation about how much you expect to gain from solving the problem. Then we can talk about how much and when the consultant should be paid.

How much

There's very little point in paying £5k for a new website if it doesn't bring in any new business. As an aside, this conversation (known in Prince2 speak as the Business Case) is a key part of step one of my 3 step plan, above. Maybe you would want to pay £5,000 if you were going to get £50,000 of business from it. I don't know, but it's a conversation we should have

When

I am of the firm opinion that any decent consultant should have enough faith in his own expertise to be willing to be paid by results instead of getting paid whether or not he (or she) makes a difference. Of course there are limits - I wouldn't expect a consultant to shoulder the risk of implementing a new data centre (and I hope neither would you) but it should be part of the conversation.

Do you think this would work for you? If so contact me and we can have a chat.

Lifehacking - look back in exhaustion

I've just finished my short film - Lifehacking. It was a really good experience - hard but good. I've been making short films and cutting together bits of footage taken on holiday and on events for a couple of years but this is a different order of magnitude. Doing a whole film from beginning to end and making it as good as you can make it is a big step up. I've learned so much about sound (I need to get much better - or get someone else), setting up the camera (I feel really comfortable with all the manual modes now and I'm pretty sure I know how to get the best out of the camera in any given situation), and loads about colour grading and colour correction.
The way I put the film together was this:

• First I did a rough cut of each scene as a separate project in Vegas. For each one I would leave it about a week and then go back and see where I could cut more out and where there were transitions that seemed uncomfortable.
• I then went through and did the colour correction and grading. This took many more passes than it would now as I had to learn the effect I was trying for as well as how to do it. The Red Giant Colorista tutorials on Vimeo were really useful for this as Stu Maschwitz takes you through the look he is trying to achieve in real detail. Since the controls are a bit different in Vegas then I had to figure out how to get the same effect. Unfortunately Vegas' secondary colour correction masking tool doesn't seem to work quite as well as Colorista for selecting skin tones so I struggled a bit until I found this Vegas tutorial that taught me all about compositing. Then I was flying! I'm really tired of the modern style of colour grading where everything is a sludgy blue/green/grey and skin is a putty colour (See BBC Sherlock). I went for an old fashioned Technicolor look. I'm especially pleased with the night-time scenes on the sofa as I was able to darken the background and relight the face. Unless you know, you can't really tell.
• I then assembled a rough cut of the entire film and handed it off to my brother Matt to add the music. I then left it for two weeks so that I could come at it fresh.
• Two weeks later I rewatched the whole thing (it was getting really tedious by now and hard to stop my mind wandering) and also listened to it right through without watching. I made a set of notes which I have reproduced below. I then went right through the list, fixing everything I could. The final edit took a full day, including re-recording (ADR) the voice for the entire first scene.

My gear

• Canon 550D with 28-55mm kit lens and 50mm f1.8 - Brilliant. Like Crazy was made with a 7D which is basically this camera in a metal body. Now the 600D is out you can get this much cheaper: For £500 you get a camera that you can make a pro film on. The 50mm lens cost £90 new! Great for shooting indoor scenes if you live within its limitations (No IS - Can hunt for focus in low light - though I now use manual focus with the preview screen zoomed in)
• Zoom H1 Digital recorder. Lovely and small. Great with the Lavalliere as you can slip it in your pocket.
• Audiotechnica stereo mic. Nice neutral sound quality although the output level is a bit low.
• Lavalliere (tie clip) mike. Really handy for outdoor shots where you want to reduce background noise.
• Asus X53E Core i7 laptop - Great! Renders 720p HD straight out of the camera at a little better than real time and a really complicated scene with colour correction and compositing layers at about half speed. I no longer have to bother with transcoding. The only problem is the vertical viewing angle on the screen is very small (the side to side viewing angle is fine, strangely so two people can easily watch the same thing, as long as their heads are at the same height) so you have to make sure you're looking directly at it to make sure you're seeing the colours accurately. When I can afford it I will buy a decent HD monitor.
• Sony Vegas Platinum - I'm a real fan of this. Once you're used to the interface it's really fast to use and you can do anything on it that you can do with high-end pro packages. The only thing that I wish it had from the Pro version (which is 10 times the price) is scopes and the ability to split the preview screen to make it easier to grade across scenes.

I'm now on to my next project, an adaptation of a short story by Checkhov. I will definitely use actors for this one, and hopefully my brother will come in to do the sound.

These are the notes that I took on the rough cut of Lifehacking:

Notes on lifehacking
====================
Sound
=====
Scene 1
-------
- Phone ring too loud - Done
- Less bass on the vocals
- Replace "Bank Account"
- Check "Bank Account"
- Clunk after "Still a bit hot?"
- Clunk after "mystified"
- Vocals are at about -18dB
- Background at about -48dB

Scene 4
-------
- Equalise vocals between 2 takes
Scene 5
-------
- Phone ring too loud. Needs room reverb?
- Reduce top end on vocals
Scene 6
-------
- Phone ring - scene 5
- Equalise vocals between scene 5 and 6
- A couple of vocal glitches. Replace?
Cut scene
---------
-Replace sound with wildtrack without wind-noise
Scene 7
-------
- Vocals a little harsh on top/mid - equalize with scene 6
- Vocal should shift to centre for final headshot

Visuals
=======
- Check beginning credits
- Replace font on Voidstar
- Narrower, smaller sans serif font
Scene 1
-------
-Improve secondary colour correction when seated to darken the fence in the background and pop the face
-Close-up needs colour correcting so it matches rest of scene
Scene 3
-------
- Can cut to seated shot earlier
Scene 4
-------
- Redo colour correction on front shot
Scene 5
-------
- Redo colour correction to darken background while relighting face
- Skintone is good! Replicate in scene 4
Scene 6
-------
- Match skintone with scene 5 and between medium and close-ups

- End credits

Lessons learned from making Lifehacking

Yesterday Matt sent me over a new cut of my short film, Lifehacking, with some music that he had added. It sounds great!
I'm now going to leave it a week and then do the final edit.
In the meantime I have been thinking about the things I've learned from making the film. Here they are:

The Good

The camera (Canon 550D) is great and the 50mm, f1.8 lens is a must have at only £90. It means you can shoot in pretty low light conditions and still get a decent result (see the last scene for an example of this)
Towards the end I got into using the magnify function to check the focus - vital when you've got the aperture wide open.
Sony Vegas is a fantastic editor and my new Asus core i7 laptop just flies. I no longer even bother to transcode the video off the camera, it's fast enough without reformatting - as long as you remember to keep the power plugged in.
I found the tutorial videos on using Red Giant Colorista really useful in learning how to use the colour correction tools in Vegas. Though I found myself wishing I had the power mask feature most of the time!
Using the Zoom HA-1 with a Lavalliere worked very well for recording the outdoor scenes. I found it easy enough to sync the on-camera sound with the recorded sound.
Just going out and shooting, even in quite crowded areas, was a lot easier than I thought it would be. People naturally seem to stay out of your way. I asked before filming the cafe scene but they were more than happy to let me go ahead.


The Bad

The sound for the inside scenes is a bit reverby. I put the mic roughly where the camera was. I should have close miked all the scenes and then recorded some wild-track.
If you have an actor in his 40s, don't write a script that requires that he looks down a lot. Very unflattering.
Some of the inside scenes are not quite in focus. I ended up shooting at f2 or 2.2, rather than f1.8 but it's still very hard when you're trying to guess where the actor's face will be. This would have been so much easier if I hadn't been both the actor and the cameraman.
In one of the outside shots there is a wooden fence going straight through my head. I wish I had noticed this at the time of shooting.
It's best if your lead actor has either very long hair or very short hair, especially if you are going to shoot over an extended period of time. My hair was in between, and when I had it cut, I had to wait about 6 weeks for it to grow back to the right kind of length

Things I'd do differently next time

Get actors instead of doing it all myself. I did it this way out of frustration because I'd been speaking to an actor about a collaboration over the summer and for one reason or another it hadn't happened. Next time I will definitely stay behind the camera
I need to be much better at sound recording. For my next film I'm hoping that Matt will be able to help out with the sound.
Because the script allowed me to read off the laptop screen, I didn't learn all the lines. I think I got away with it, but I wouldn't do that again.
I would also like to get someone to do continuity. It was really hard to remember what position I was in and where everything was between shots. There were a couple of scenes where in one shot I had my arm up and the other I had my arm down, which really cut down the options when it came to the final edit.

First cut of Lifehacking in the bag!

I finally got my replacement laptop on Friday, after a false start on Tuesday when I got to the door of Comet at exactly 6 o'clock and it was already locked. The new one is an Asus X53E, same as the old one, but a Core i7 rather than an i5 as the i5 is now £900! (The trackpad button failed on the old one after less than a month - bizarre. Hope it's a one-off).
I managed to restore all my data, reinstalled Vegas (the on-line registration worked fine, so the rumours that Sony allow you to install Vegas 5 times must be true). The first time I re-rendered scene one I was a bit disappointed - it took longer than the i5. Turns out it was AVG doing its initial virus scan that was slowing it down. The next one I tried was very fast - A fairly complex scene with multiple levels of colour correction, and a scene that I had reversed, takes about 130% of the running time to render. How long would it have taken on my old pc? 10 hours?
Anyeay, Lifehacking consists of 7 scenes that I edited as separate Vegas projects so yesterday I put the finishing touches in to each scene (mainly adding the sound of the mobile phone ring tone) and produced a first cut of the whole thing. It's longer than I thought, nearly 15 minutes. Watching it through (which I promised myself I wouldn't do) it seems very slow to me, but then I've seen every second of it dozens of times.
I'm going to give a copy of it to my brother, Matt, to see if he can come up with any music for the intervals between the scenes and then I'm going to leave it for at least 2 weeks with the hope that coming to it with fresh eyes will help me spot the errors and have a clearer view of the overall flow.
I've learned masses from doing this, which I hope to make the subject of a future post.

Finished with the Premiership

I have been unfortunate enough to see Everton play twice in the last two weeks. I thought last week was bad enough but this week has convinced me that something must be done. And for me, that something is to stop watching Premiership football.
But why, I hear you cry? (Oh, suit yourselves). Well, I'll tell you: Last week Everton played against Man City plus the estimable Howard Webb. Webb seemed to think that the mere fact of an Everton player successfully challenging for the ball was evidence of a foul on his part. Man City are obviously so superior in every way that it is inconceivable to Mr Webb that any player from the lower ranks can dispossess one of the Etihad anointed without stepping over the line between fair play and foul. This week was the icing on the cake, with the cherry on top. Jack Rodwell sees the ball, Rodwell gets the ball, Suarez falls over Rodwell and referee Martin Atkinson sends Rodwell off! Apparently in today's Premier league it is a red card offence to get the ball if your opponent wants it at the same time (if your opponent plays for one of the top 5 clubs, that is). I presume that players from the other 15 clubs are now supposed to stand around like particularly expensive bollards, while the Galacticos amaze us with their artistry. It makes football about as meaningful as a competition as a Nike ad.
This might all seem like sour grapes but it's more than that. I freely admit that both Man City and Liverpool were better than Everton (although not that much better - it may be a partisan view but of the expensively assembled talent available to Liverpool only Suarez and Kuyt would walk into the Everton side, at least on Saturday's showing. I didn't even know Downing was on the pitch until he got substituted). It would be a funny old world if they weren't - Liverpool have spent over £100m since Dalglish returned while Moyes has spent a big fat zero. No, my central point is that if you interpret the rules of the game in a way that only the most prodigiously gifted are allowed to succeed then you snuff out any possibility of an upset, of the underdog succeeding through hard work, or better organisation, tactics or teamwork. You might as well play top trumps before the start of the match: Liverpool - £114m, Everton nowt. Liverpool win!
Although Webb and Atkinson were culpable in these two cases, they're not the ones to blame. The real culprits are the Premiership and most particularly Sky. They've turned the game I and millions of others love into a product. And d'you know? It's a product I'm no longer prepared to buy.
So farewell beloved Everton, I wish you all the best. There will always be a part of my heart that belongs to you and I'm sure I'll sneak a look at the results every now and then. From now on though, the only team I'll be watching is the mighty Carlisle United of Division One. Come on you Foxes!

Lessons learned from making Buses with Bowties

Buses with Bowties was the first proper go I had at making a film using my new sound recording equipment. I learned a few lessons along the way that I want to share here:

• Make a list of your kit. Print out the list, laminated and put it in the kit bag on the top. Before you go out on location, check the kit against the list. That way you avoid forgetting something really important (like your sound recorder!)
• The lavalliere microphone doesn't work very well plugged straight in to the camera. I think this is because of the lack of ambient noise from the mic. The camera turns its auto-gain right up and the speech is distorted because it can't react fast enough when you start talking.
• Get enough wild-track at each location to cover the entire shooting duration. Otherwise you will spend ages piecing together bits of sound to try and make a decent wildtrack in the edit
• Record all the bits that are supposed to sound the same with the same mic. So if you are doing something to camera with a lavalliere in one shot, use the lavalliere for all pieces to camera (unless you have an obvious mic in shot, as I did for one piece.
• The auto-focus in live view mode is rubbish for close-ups. It's better to switch to a picture mode, focus and then switch back
• Have a big pause at the start of each scene (at least 2 seconds) and hold for a similar time at the end of the scene. Makes editing a lot easier. 
• Consider getting a clapper board and saying "Scene 3, Take 4" at the start of each scene. This will make matching the audio and video a lot easier. If the clapper board is in view at the start of the shot, it will show up in the preview mode when you edit
•  Before each shot check the microphone is on, then the sound recorder, then hit record on the camera.
• At the end of each shot turn off the microphone! Sounds like a pain but otherwise you will forget to do it and will run the battery down on the mic (as I am typing this at work I am wondering whether I turned my lavalliere off!)

You can see the results here:

Buses with Bowties from Steve Green on Vimeo.

Everton 2 Fulham 1

I made my way up to the pub more in hope than expectation for yesterday afternoon's fixture. Everton have consistently failed to beat clubs that are lower in the league than them and the two teams have drawn 27 times between them this season. This one had nil-nil written all over it.
From a tactical point of view I was interested to see how Moyes would react to the latest injury crisis, that is, the loss of Arteta. In the past few games he has employed Mikel wide on the left in order to counter their increasingly predictable (and therefore easy to counter) reliance on Leighton Baines galloping up the left. The answer this time was to play Leon Osman inside him in a similar role to that played by Steven Pienaar before his departure to Spurs in the January transfer window.
The rest of the team lined up like this: A back four of Hibbert (a welcome return in my view as he is a good honest defender of the kind you don't see that much nowadays), Jagielka, Distin and Baines. In midfield, Neville sat in front of the defence, Coleman had an attacking role down the right, Rodwell played through the centre (generally tending to drift left), Osman played down the left as I mentioned  above, and Cahill, returning from injury, played in the hole behind Saha, the lone striker up front.
When in possession Everton played their usual mix of slow out of defence and long balls to the front men. Fulham when defending, used the tactic which has been so successful against Everton this season, namely pressing when the ball is in the Everton half, then quickly dropping back to 2 banks of 5 when the ball crosses the half-way line..
The long ball tactic worked better than usual for Everton, not because they got decent possession straight from it, but because the Fulham defenders tended to hack the ball into touch.
What Fulham seemed to be trying to do was hit Everton on the break, but this tactic wasn't very successful, mainly because Hibbert did a fine job of shepherding Andy Johnson out wide and into the left corner. I don't think Johnson got a single cross in all match and he certainly didn't have a shot at goal.
The interesting tactical battle was the way that Fulham tried to deal with Everton's wide men, Baines and Osman on the left and Coleman and Hibbert on the right. What they did was, whenever Everton got into the danger zone, around the edge of the penalty area, two defenders and two midfielders would form a very tight box to try to deny the attackers space and options. In the end, this proved to be Fulham's undoing as Baines very cleverly feinted to cross but cut the ball back to Osman, who was stood on the corner of the penalty area. He then beat one man and gained enough space to float the ball over to Coleman. Coleman was un-marked since the whole Fulham defence had been pulled over to the left to deal with the threat from Osman.
The second goal was much simpler tactically. A driving run from Rodwell saw him fouled on the edge of the penalty area and the resulting free kick saw Saha combine power and accuracy to thread the ball through a gap in the wall and into the back of the net.
The consolation goal for Fulham came from that usual source, an attack down the right into the space left by Baines. To be fair, it was a very well worked move that required a pin-point finish from Fulham's American striker. However, once again, Everton were undone by a fast break and what seems to be an over-reliance on Distin to cover too much of the left-hand side.

Management Patterns: High cohesion - low coupling

In their seminal book, Structured Design  Larry Constantine said that high cohesion (the degree to which the internal contents of a module are related) and loose coupling (the degree to which a module depends upon other modules) were desirable aspects of a well designed programme. I think that these tenets can be taken and applied to the design of organisations and teams.
In an organisation, the equivalent of a module (for my purposes at least) is a team. A team exhibits high cohesion when all of its members are focused on the same business goal, when the communication between team members is fast, accurate and relevant to achieving the goal and when all the resources it needs are either under control of the team or can easily be acquired and accessed by the team.
In an organisational context, coupling is a measure of how teams interact. Team are loosely coupled if the responsibilities of teams are clearly defined and when, on the occasion that a team needs something from another team to achieve its ends, the mechanisms for doing this are clear and well known.
In order for teams to be highly cohesive and loosely coupled they have to be exist in order to achieve a business goal. They have to be made up of people with different skills that when they come together they can achieve something that they could not possibly do separately. A great example of this is a film crew. This consists of a lot of people with specific skills (including technical and organisational skills) that are brought together for a specific task.
The alternative to this is teams that are based on functions rather than business goals. This is the great anti-pattern of matrix management, to which I will return in a future blog.

Defence outsourcing

After hearing about the problems the MOD has with controlling defence spending I was musing on the problems that Government has with high-profile procurement projects that go wrong.
In terms of IT, the Government's record on this is no better or worse than private industry. About 30% of IT software projects fail completely (i.e. get canned). This is true for private and public IT projects. People think that the private sector is more efficient - that's not strictly true.
What happens in the private sector is that the inefficiency is spread across the entire industry. Let's take Search as an example. In order to have Google we also had to have Yahoo, Altavista, Lycos and any number of other false starts that I haven't heard of. As consumers we don't have to pay for the failures (at least not directly). In constrast, if you undertake a big public project that has a large element of R&D then all the chance of failure falls on that one project. Taking the example above, the chance of a publicly-funded internet search solution being successful was at best 25% and probably a lot lower than that.
The solution? Dont't outsource the hard stuff. Outsourcing is fine for things that are commodities or where all the R&D has already been done - no-one, apart from a printer manufacturer would develop their own printer, whether in-house or outsourced, for example. For the more complicated stuff (e.g. fighter planes) we have to ask whether we should bother getting cutting edge stuff developed. I'm sure the Generals, Air Vice Marshalls and Admirals will say that we need cutting edge equipment but there's not much point if it doesn't work
Imagine how well resourced the armed forces would be if everything was bought off the shelf...

Getting business from public sector procurements

All public sector organisations in the UK (apart from the NHS - though this may change under the Government's proposals) have to use an EU-compliant procurement process if they want to do any business over a certain threshold. This can be seen by both the customer and supplier as an imposition and a bureacratic overhead but the process can be turned to your advantage. This blog is for potential suppliers of public sector organisations and gives a number of hints and tips to help you get the business.
Firstly, most public sector organisations have an institutional bias towards being seen to be fair and all are terrified of challenge. Think of it this way - if you are bidding for a private sector contract you may never get to know what are the selection criteria, or even if they have any. The contract may go to the company owned by the golf partner of the MD and you would never know or be able to cry foul. In contrast a public sector organisation will have written decision making criteria and a scoring system. Many of them will publish it with the ITT, but if they don't you can ask for it. You should.
Next, put yourself in the shoes of the poor civil servant who will be assessing your bid, along with all the other responses. They will have a day job, which probably takes up more than 100% of their time. Their priorities are:

1. Get the evaluation over with as quickly as possible so that they can get back to their real work
2. Reach a decision that can't be successfully challenged by the losers
3. Pick the best bid

in that order.
You can make it easy for them. Copy their scoring criteria and paste it into your tender response. Put it as close to the front as possible. Put in a paragraph about what a fantastic company you are if you must (everyone expects it, to an extent) but remember that everyone else will do the same, probably in more detail and the assessor will skip past this to the meat of the bid.
Just as an aside, whenever I see a statement about a company or person I ask myself, if you make the inverse staement, does it make any sense. For example, a company says, "Our offering provides a best-in-class solution tailored to fit your needs", do you think anyone would claim the contrary, that, "Our offering is a mediocre solution with limited scope for customisation", even though it might be true?
Now fill in each of the boxes with your response. You can even leave the box for the score in as this will allow the assessor to print the response off and fill it in at night over a glass of whisky (not that this ever happens).
Put all of the other crap about the details of your solution, quality processes etc in Appendices at the end. It will add credibility to your bid but don't expect anyone to sift through it trying to figure out whether your score for "Capability to build relationships with third age organisations" should be a 6 or a 7 cos they won't

Happy bidding

What's wrong with Everton?

As a life-long Everton fan, I've been concerned by the apparent decline in the performances of the team over recent weeks. Most commentators, including the manager and the team captain, characterised Sunday's game, away to Bolton, as a very poor performance. I don't quite see it that way. Bolton only created three clear-cut chances all afternoon. The problem is, they scored from two of them.
I think that there are a number of reasons to be optimistic and I believe that it is a change in tactics that is needed, rather than for the team to simply 'play better'.
Firstly, I believe that technically, this is the best Everton side I've ever seen. They tend to dominate possesion, with a very neat passing game, almost like a mini Spain. Even on Sunday, apart from the first 10 minutes, they looked much better when they had the ball than did Bolton.
Secondly, the emphasis in the commentariat has been their lack of goals, particularly from the strikers. I think that a much more serious problem is they concede too many goals. Much has been made of Leighton Baines' ability on the wing but I think that their over-reliance on him (and to an exent Seamus Coleman on the right) to supply balls into the box has left the excellent Sylain Distin with too much to do. We have conceded far too many goals through the channel between a retreating Baines and Distin trying to cover both the attacking winger and the striker. Indeed, this was exactly how the second Bolton goal was conceded on Sunday, with Sturridge exploiting acres of space between Distin and Baines. I think that the solution to this is to change formation to three central defenders, with Baines and Coleman operating as wing-backs and Distin, Jagielka and Neville patrolling the centre. This system was used very effectively by Liverpool in their defeat of Chelsea earlier this month (shows that King Kenny hasn't wasted his ten years out of management). In front of them I'd play a mid-field diamond with Heitinga or Fellaini in the holding role, Arteta, Fellaini or Bilyaletdinov in the centre and Cahill behind the striker. Up front Saha is obviously first choice when fit, with Anichebe filling in otherwise. This setup has the great advantage of providing a lot of cover in defence, whilst playing to the strengths of the team. Even with injuries there are a lot of options, as Heitinga can play in central defence, Fellaini or Neville can play the holding role and Fellaini or Rodwell can play at the head of the diamond.
The next thing that needs to be sorted out is what the team does when they regain possession. Currently they have two modes of attack: The first is to pump the ball up to the striker (route one), and the second is to play the ball out of defence. Now, I can't remember the last time Everton scored from a route one attack and Saha is no-one's idea of a target man so in terms of scoring goals it's not a very effective tactic. However, it does force the defenders to track back to cover the striker so as a tactic to stretch the defending side we need to keep it in our armoury.
The second mode of attack, playing the ball out of defence looks very effective and leads to long periods of possession. The problem is that, by the time we get into the opponents half, they have dropped deep and the team ends up having to play through all eleven men to get a sight of goal. With the departure of Peinaar, there's only really Coleman who can run past players and he's not yet the finished article in terms of delivery so this is not a strategy that is going to produce many goals.
The other thing I've noticed is that they tend to be very predictable in how they use the two tactics. Rather than mixing them up, they tend to use one strategy for 10 minutes then switch to the other. This makes them easy to defend against as the opposition knows that, when they're in long ball mode, they can stay up and let the central defenders deal with the lone striker, and when they're in passing mode they just drop deep and take up their defensive positions.
What needs to be added is a third mode of attack, the quick breakaway. In order to do this, they need to drop deeper when the opposition has the ball, with the furthest man forward (typically Saha) no more than mid way between the top of the penalty area and the half way line. This would give Everton's quick men (Saha and Coleman, plus Anichebe when on) a lot more space to run into and would make it a lot harder for the opposition to score. If I were Moyes, I would be spending all my time drilling the team in this mode of defence and attack, firstly making everyone run back into their defensive positions as soon as we lose possession and then as soon as we regain it, getting Saha and Coleman into the channels and getting the ball to them. They also need to work on mixing up their attack, to keep the opposition guessing so that they have to cover the whole field, rather than just a few predictable areas. If the team could add this mode to their offensive capabilities they would be a team to be feared and would climb up the table.
Nil desperandum Moysey.

You can outsource responsibility but you can't outsource accountability

A couple of times in the last decade, the (medium-sized) organisations I worked for have outsourced IT software development projects to large consultancies. In both cases the results have been disappointing, to say the least, and I would like to use this post to explain why.
The problem with a small organisation (in this context, anything under £100m turnover is small) outsourcing to a large consultancy is the asymmetry of risk. Put simply, the consequences of failure for the customer are much greater than the consequences of failure for the supplier. The last company I worked for outsourced a development project with a contract value of £2.3m. This represented approximately 25% of the total IT budget to us but was no more than a rounding error for the supplier which typically dealt in contracts worth several hundred million. The project was absolutely critical for the customer, whereas the supplier literally didn't care whether it succeeded or not.
To understand why this is the case, we need to understand how large consultancies work: In any large consultancy, at any one time there will be a number of people who are not employed on any paying project. These people are 'on the bench' in consultancy parlance. Indeed, one of the selling points of big consultancies is their supposed ability to scale up quickly. Human nature being what it is, the majority of the people who are on bench will not be the best staff in the business, as these will get snapped up to work on the important (i.e. high-value) projects.
So if you have, say £5m to spend, you will end up with a team that is mostly inexperienced with below average skills, leavened with a few good people who were unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Of course, you will still be paying £800-£1200 per day (£1500 if they see you coming) for staff who are little better than graduates, and untalented ones at that. Worse still you may be actually paying them to learn skills (programming in new languages, project management) that they should already have.
The end result is a late delivery of a sub-standard product with all the tricky stuff left out. The in-house team will have to work like trojans to turn it into something that the business can actually use, all the while seething at the proliferation of Audis and BMWs that turn up in the car-park, driven by the consultants.
The solution?
There are two parts to this: 1: Outsource to a company that has as much to lose as you do. So, if you have £3m to spend, try to spend it with a company that has a turnover in the region £30-100m. That way, if they fail it will hurt, but it won't kill them. 2: Make sure that the person who is responsible on your side really understands how to manage outsourced contracts.
If you can't honsetly say you can do both of these (this is known as capability to perform in process improvement circles), then don't outsource; build up your skills in-house, or buy off the shelf and make it work for you.

The Beauty of RAW mode

I've got into using RAW mode on my new Canon 550D and it's fantastic! The thing I particularly like about it is that reduces the number of settings you have to worry about. The way RAW works is it stores the actual values that are read off the sensor in the file. Things that change the appearance of the picture (White balance, Exposure compensation, Colour profile) are stored as settings which can be modified later in the comfort of your own home. This means that you only have to worry about the settings that actually change the light that falls on the sensor - Focus, Aperture, ISO, Shutter speed, and most importantly, where you point your camera.