[00:00:10.250] - Gordon
Hello.

[00:00:10.640] - Taylor
Hello.

[00:00:11.120] - Gordon
My name's Gordon from Drayson Design.

[00:00:12.980] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.

[00:00:15.250] - Gordon
And welcome to "This Week With Taylor and Gordon," a weekly podcast and vidcast where we talk about things that have affected our businesses in the last seven days. And welcome back.

[00:00:26.690] - Taylor
Welcome back. We say that every week, but yeah.

[00:00:28.190] - Gordon
We do.

[00:00:28.820] - Taylor
Welcome back.

[00:00:29.470] - Gordon
It's lovely to have you here. So this is episode 80.

[00:00:33.450] - Taylor
Yes.

[00:00:34.590] - Gordon
So it's quite a milestone, really. Number 80, isn't it?

[00:00:38.640] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:00:38.640] - Gordon
Who'd have thought would have got to that number?

[00:00:40.780] - Taylor
Yes.

[00:00:41.400] - Gordon
And we've got our new highlights showing on the website with the new season's colour. So if you haven't seen that, go and have a look at the website. Any news today, Taylor?

[00:00:54.630] - Taylor
Nothing from me.

[00:00:56.670] - Gordon
I'm not sure there's anything from me either. There's been a few things going on, but nothing really that's affected us. So we shall go straight into our topics of the week. Do you want to go first or shall I?

[00:01:08.920] - Taylor
I'll go first this week.

[00:01:09.880] - Gordon
Okay.

[00:01:10.640] - Taylor
So I have been looking at the "Pomodoro Technique." And this is a technique in which you do a focused block of work. Normally about 25 minutes. And then you spend five minutes doing whatever you want. And the idea behind it is when you're working, you sometimes just, you trudge along between just flicking between doing work and chatting with friends or checking social media, checking your phone. And the idea is that you don't have to sacrifice that, but by doing a block of 25 minutes and blocking apps from being able to use apps, so for me, that's like Discord and Twitch. I am able to then get 25 minutes worth of work done and get a solid amount of work. And then I get five minutes to kind of do what I want. And then after the five minutes, go back and do another 25 minutes. And the idea is that you would get more work done because you're doing them in blocks. So you're not doing four or five hours at a time and just being absolutely exhausted because you're still getting your social media addiction or whatever, and you know, you're not getting fatigued.

[00:02:31.470] - Gordon
So how does that work? Because we spoke a long time ago about being interrupted and it taking sort of ten, 15 minutes to get back into work again. So surely, if you're doing 25 minutes and then you're having a break for five minutes, it's going to take another 15 minutes or so to get back into the work. So you only actually get ten minutes work done.

[00:02:53.610] - Taylor
I think I would class the break as a terminology that I wouldn't cross with. So, for example, being interrupted and having to talk to someone, completely takes your focus away from the computer. If, for example, however, when you're doing the Pomodoro Technique, it's a five minutes, that is a short enough time that it goes by very quickly, but enough that it's a brief break and you know, you flick to your social media, you scroll down, not that far, and by the time you've finished, you're back and doing it. But it's not enough time to pull away and actually get into something else. So the idea is you're taking a very brief break, maybe looking into the, past your computer to help with your eyes, but you're not having to take away your focus. I think the big thing is I'm able to just scroll down and it's not, I'm not focusing on it. I'm still focused on my work, but I'm just taking a brief break to give me a bit of a breather, I guess.

[00:04:01.880] - Gordon
Okay. And you find you need this, do you? You can't sort of sit down and go, "right, this is the job that needs doing," and sort of keep going until that job is done?

[00:04:10.340] - Taylor
I think it's mainly to do with self-discipline. And obviously it's very difficult to say, "I'm not going to look at work." "I'm not going to look at the distractions." Even as much as getting a text message or getting an email is very distracting. And I find that because app, the Pomodoro app that I use blocks me from accessing it, I have no choice but to do work. And it kind of forces you. And then once you've done one or two, you actually find it works, you're in the zone, essentially. And the breaks are not breaks in regards to losing your focus. It's just a very quick just side flick just to take a deep breather. Like if you went to get coffee, for example, if you got up and just got coffee, but you didn't have anyone to talk to, essentially you just go and make a coffee and coming back and you just get straight back into it kind of thing. And I find it works quite well. I've been using it for a few days and yeah, I've been enjoying it. And yeah, it's nice because I get that little bit of I can take a break and enjoy checking if I've got any messages or whatever, but then I can just go straight back into it. And because the app blocks certain websites and certain apps from being accessible, I don't have those distractions. And it just helps kind of.

[00:05:35.740] - Gordon
Okay. It's interesting you said about emails there, because I sometimes find if I'm... The way I work is very different. I will create myself a To Do list, and I'll do that the night before so that it's ready to go, so that I'm not going to spend the first sort of ten, 15 minutes writing a To Do list and forgetting what I was doing. So that gets done the night before. So I've then got a set number of things that I would like to do in that day, and I've prioritised them to make sure that the important ones are done first. But if I stop and have a break and look at my email, I might find that there's something in there that needs my attention, something that maybe needs to be renewed, or there's a customer query that I need to deal with urgently. And I'll then find that I'm being pulled in that direction and I'm going to be ending up spending time that I hadn't already scheduled for, doing things that I hadn't realised I was needing to do that day.

[00:06:39.570] - Taylor
So this is where I guess my break is slightly different in regards to, I don't look at my emails during that five minute slot. I wait until I have a bigger break that I can then go, "okay, let me just make sure I can re-evaluate and make sure that I am focusing on the highest priority." I set what I want to do, I do it in the morning normally, but I just, I set what I want to do. But these breaks are not "let me look at my email and get distracted," it is let me just scroll down my Facebook feed, for example, and just read what there is to do. Maybe reply to a couple of comments or posts that people have got which don't normally take much brain power because there's normally stuff that I'm just repeating to newer people that just don't have the experience or knowledge because of the kind of software they're using. But it's not something I can then get distracted by because these are just one time posts that I'm commenting on, scrolling down again. And I'm quite good in that regard in terms of not getting too distracted with social media. The main thing I struggle with is chatting to friends and stuff. So Discord is the biggest time sink for me, and the biggest distraction. And so I found that when I had the Pomodoro app that blocks the app from me using it, whenever I kind of flick to it, it quits the app essentially, and stops me accessing it. I get the work done that I need. So for me, the social media, I can turn it off and doesn't really bother me. I'm not one of those people that keeps scrolling, keeps scrolling because they've got FOMO or whatever. I just do it because I'm interested and just check it every now and again when I want to.

[00:08:16.100] - Gordon
And funnily enough, Discord is also the place where you get quite a bit of work.

[00:08:22.580] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:08:23.120] - Gordon
And work done, and communications with people who are working on projects with you. So it's sort of a curse and a blessing really.

[00:08:32.870] - Taylor
That's the tricky thing is, it's not being able to just quit it because I do need to have access to it because I do talk to people that I work with. But at the same time, a lot of the time I'm just there answering messages and stuff and that actually takes more time away than just going and answering comments on Facebook instead. So the word "break" I use quite loosely and probably in the wrong context. It's not a break as in relax and stuff, it's just a quick breather essentially, and just doing something that doesn't require my brain, essentially.

[00:09:10.160] - Gordon
So you're clearing your brain a little bit to then look at the work you're doing afresh.

[00:09:15.000] - Taylor
Yeah. And it also can be good for, I had this the other day was I was having a, I was just stuck on a problem. I was doing some custom development, and the break just allowed me to stop and just have a think, actually. And that was the other thing I quite enjoyed is that instead of trying to bang my head against the wall the entire time trying to fix it, the break came up and I was like, "okay, let me just stand here and just have a think," rather than just keep doing. I guess the word I used was wrong, but it's just a quick breather, essentially.

[00:09:48.960] - Gordon
Very good.

[00:09:49.790] - Taylor
So, yeah, that's all for me this week.

[00:09:52.260] - Gordon
Okay. So as you may be aware, if you've watched this podcast or listen to this podcast or watched this vidcast in the last couple of weeks or so, you'll know that I've been heavily involved in my Pantomime "Goldilocks and The Three Bears."

[00:10:07.860] - Taylor
How'd it go?

[00:10:08.960] - Gordon
Well. It went very well. I'll be honest. I was expecting at some point during the week to be stopped, based on somebody going ill or testing positive, and the whole show having to grind to a halt. It's happened so many times with other productions and other events, and West End shows have been shut down because of it. And so for us to do ten performances, Saturday through to Saturday, without having any incidents, I just didn't think that was going to happen.

[00:10:46.580] - Taylor
Consecutively I think is the biggest thing.

[00:10:49.360] - Gordon
Yeah. It's one week. And what's really surprising is the only problem we had was that one of our stage crew tested positive right near the beginning of the run, about the third, fourth show in that sort of time. And we had a small cast member, not as in size, but as in the size of the part. Our Daddy bear. It's not a big, big part. He had asthma and he had a coughing fit after our Friday show and managed to cough so hard that he managed to hit his head and knocked himself out, which prevented him from doing the last two shows. Luckily, we have a member who has been in many, many, many productions as the Dame and as many other characters. And he was able to step in at the last minute, and he managed to fit the costume; he put the makeup on. He took a script on with him for the lines that he had.

[00:11:57.690] - Taylor
Only one scene, though. So he...

[00:11:59.970] - Gordon
Only one scene did he have the script, yes.

[00:12:01.840] - Taylor
I think if he had one more show, he would have been able to do it scriptless.

[00:12:06.030] - Gordon
Yeah. So we are really grateful to him for stepping in, but it was a really good solution to allow us to do the last two shows, which I just didn't expect us to get to.

[00:12:21.030] - Taylor
It was great.

[00:12:21.970] - Gordon
I was very surprised but very happy that we managed to do all ten shows. Since then we've had one child that has tested positive, that's been in the chorus; the Baron tested positive; I think someone else has tested positive as well. It's all to do with timing. If this had happened last week, we'd have been closed down really early in the week. We'd have got maybe four performances done and that would have been it. And so, you know, I just am very grateful and thankful that we managed to get through them all.

[00:12:58.110] - Taylor
It did happen last week. Do you mean if you started it last week?

[00:13:01.660] - Gordon
If what happened this week with all the people going down with the...

[00:13:06.250] - Taylor
Right.

[00:13:06.250] - Gordon
With Covid happened last week, we'd have been shut down very quickly.

[00:13:13.610] - Taylor
Got it.

[00:13:13.610] - Gordon
Yeah. So the thing I wanted to actually talk about this week is that we've now come to the end of the run, and for me it's a two year journey from the time I started writing it to the time that it actually was performed. And now it's all finished. And the way that it works for us is that we hire this hall which has our stage in it and we put all of our equipment into it. And so at the end of our Saturday performance, our last performance, we then have to clear the hall. So that means taking all the scenery down; taking all the lighting down; taking all the sound down; any decorations we put up; all the costumes have to be packed away; every technical prop. Everything that we've added needs to be taken away and the hall needs to be put back in the same condition it was when we found it. And for us there is a playgroup that use the hall and they store all their play equipment on the stage. So it means all the equipment we've moved into a different hall has to come back and gets put back on the stage again. And it's a lot of work. Especially after you've done two shows that day, whether that be cast or crew, we've all been doing the same amount of work. And it's a hard job, but we're done; and I think we managed to leave just after 10 o'clock, which is not too bad, although we did finish the performance about quarter past 8. So it was everyone getting mucked in and getting the work done as quickly as possible, as well as cleaning the whole place, and taking all of your own personal property and putting that in your car so you don't forget anything. There's a lot involved, and it's a really tiring day, really, because you've got two shows and then the clear up and I've been not able to do my magic shows because of the pantomime. So I obviously had a show booked for the following day, which meant that I had to get everything ready for that and go down and do that, which meant that the whole of my weekend was very, very tiring. But my job doesn't finish at that point because I had a friend of mine, and my dad, who came up and took photos during the dress rehearsals, and we've been editing those photos and putting them up for the cast so that they could use them, and put them on social media, and have them as keepsakes. But on the Wednesday night and the Thursday night, my dad and myself were up there, and my dad was filming the show with two cameras. So then once that's been filmed with two cameras, it then needs editing. And so that's what I've been doing this week. I've been editing the video. It's a just under two hour video. Once you've taken out the music for the second half at the beginning, the overture, which is not needed because you're on a video, you're just going straight into the next scene. So once you've taken that out and you've tightened up some of the transitions between scenes, it brings it down to about 2 hours, just under 2 hours. Which is perfect because that's how long you can get onto a DVD. So the editing takes time as well. First of all, I have to edit between the two angles, which means syncing the two angles together, first of all. You then have to edit between them, as you go through the show, finding the best angle for that moment. You then have to make sure you're getting the best sound from the best camera angle. So you've got two mics. You've got to decide if you want to combine them because you want to hear the audience, or if you're just going to go for what's on the stage and therefore have the microphone that's nearest to the stage. You then have to add your credits at the end with all your titles. You've got titles at the beginning, you've got any overlays and captions you want to add. You've then got to create the DVDs themselves. And I had a few issues with that because DVD writing on a Mac is not as easy as it used to be. Macs used to have a DVD burner built into them, and they haven't for many, many years now, so you have to have a third party DVD writer. And the software is not being updated as often as it was because there's not as much demand for it. So I'm finding that a lot of my workflow that I used to have, which allowed me to create a DVD rather quickly, and just burn them off once I've done a master, is getting much more difficult to do because the software is not keeping up with the operating systems, and you get it crashes, and all sorts of things. And then when you do manage to burn a master one as a disc image, first of all, as a test, you find that your chapter markers aren't right, and they're not at the beginning of each scene they're every five minutes. And when you go back in to try and do it again you find that it's causing you problems and it crashes. It's just getting really difficult. But it's the only way that I have to give a copy of it to someone in a secure way. It's not that secure, because people can rip DVDs, but it does require someone to have a bit of effort to do that. The alternative is I give them a sort of a memory stick with the movie on it, but that can be shared amongst everybody and it's not going to allow me to compensate myself in any way for the time and effort and equipment that I'm using, because it's about a week's work.

[00:19:03.660] - Taylor
Do they have solutions out there that you can send your file and they'll burn it for you and then send you...

[00:19:12.320] - Gordon
Not that I know of. Again, you've got a large file. Sort of, the movie file ended up being about 4.8gb and you can get 4.3gb on a DVD, so it needed compressing ever so slightly anyway, and writing in a DVD format because otherwise it's just a movie format. So, yeah, I don't... There used to be a company I used where I just sent them a master and I said, "duplicate this X number of times for me," and they would do it, but I don't have that ability anymore, so I have to do them all myself. Which is fine, but it just takes a lot longer.

[00:19:53.010] - Taylor
Doesn't sound fine by the amount of stuff you've got to do.

[00:19:54.760] - Gordon
Yeah. It's just that every time, because I don't do it very often, it's maybe a couple of times a year, three times a year that sort of amount of time that I do it. Every time I come to it software has changed, and the way that you do things has changed. If I was doing it on a weekly basis, maybe I would have a machine that never got updated and I'd only use that machine for this one task, but that's not really a good option for me. However, we have our Pantomime party, which is happening on Saturday, that's tomorrow night. And my plan is to try and get the DVDs done and ready so that I can hand them out to people so that they've got them a week after the show, which is not too long, but close enough where it's still in everyone's memory and they'd like, you know, they're happy to sit down and watch the show all over again.

[00:20:51.150] - Taylor
You've got about a day and a half left to do it.

[00:20:53.130] - Gordon
Yeah. So we should be okay. We shall see. I'm getting close, so. I thought it would be worth talking to you about that, though, because it's something that is a lot of work, but it's the closure for me for the end of this journey. Onto the next show, onto the next show, which I've already been cast in. I'm doing a play in May, so rehearsals for that start in February, although I won't be here, so it will be early March. We haven't told you why I won't be here yet, but we'll talk about that, probably next week.

[00:21:34.330] - Taylor
You won't be here? Where will I be?

[00:21:35.280] - Gordon
Oh, I don't know, you might be with me.

[00:21:36.980] - Taylor
Okay.

[00:21:36.980] - Gordon
But we'll talk about that next week, because it's very exciting and we'll spend a bit of time talking about that.

[00:21:43.880] - Taylor
Did we say that last week?

[00:21:43.880] - Gordon
We said we would talk about it in a future episode. I'm not sure we mentioned that it would be this week.

[00:21:48.120] - Taylor
Right okay, we don't keep saying it will be next week and then just...

[00:21:49.690] - Gordon
It definitely will, it will definitely be next week that we'll explain what's going on and why we're being...

[00:21:55.160] - Taylor
I'm excited to know what it is.

[00:21:56.420] - Gordon
Yeah, me too. What could it be? So anyway, that's everything from me today.

[00:22:02.510] - Taylor
And me as well.

[00:22:02.510] - Gordon
Thank you for joining us. As always you can find us on YouTube and on Facebook. Please like, share and subscribe with anyone you think might be interested in our content.

[00:22:13.310] - Taylor
And you can also go to our website, thisweekwith.co.uk to find all of our past episodes. And if you're interested, go and check out the new design, or the new style of the site. It has had a bit of a new fresh paint with a new accent primary colour that we've got, which is our season and that is green.

[00:22:31.630] - Gordon
And the transcript of all of our episodes are available on the website as well. The latest episode takes about four days or so for it to get up, just because of the process that we use. It's a sort of semi-automated, semi-manual process.

[00:22:52.670] - Taylor
It's an automated process with manual checking.

[00:22:56.670] - Gordon
With human error checking, yes. So it takes a while for that to happen. That's something for a future episode as well; I'll explain the workflow as to what happens once the video has gone live, to getting all the subtitles on and in different languages. So thank you very much. We'll see you next week at 1pm on Friday. Until then, my name's Gordon, and I'm from Drayson Design.

[00:23:21.490] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.

[00:23:24.070] - Gordon
Goodbye.

[00:23:24.670] - Taylor
Bye.

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