I thought it might be interesting to journal a day in the life of a writer-director (me!) during the last days of a TV edit. It turns out it wasn’t interesting at all but I’ve written it now, so you can damn well read it…
07.00 – What? What time is it? Who am I?
07.15 – Coffee. Toast. E-mail. Twitter. RSS feeds. Plenty of time…
08.01 – Crap, now I’m running late!
08.03 – Jana and Edie wake up. I change Edie’s nappy.
08.15 – Bath. Try not to fall asleep again.
09.00 – Into car, hoping there won’t be any traffic as I have to be at Pinewood for ten for a music-spotting session on two episodes of “New Tricks”.
09.15 – A406 is a car park. Crap. Listening to Amanda Palmer album and smoking.
09.55 – Don’t know how this happened, but I’m actually at Pinewood on time!
10.00 – Composer not here yet. Bloody musicians.
10.15ish – Music spotting session starts. This is where we show our composer, Warren Bennett, the two edited episodes and discuss where music should go and what kind of music it should be.
13.15 – Spotting finished. Warren had already seen one of the episodes so, mercifully, we didn’t have to watch both in their entirety. I think they’re both good eps, but I have an appallingly short attention span and there’s only so many times I can watch the same episode before my eyes start bleeding.
13.30 – In the car, heading home. Nothing more to be done in the edit until we know what the executive producers thought of the latest cut and what changes we need to make or argue against.
14.00 – Arrive home. Jana and Edie are out, so I fire up the desktop and start making notes for an outline of another New Tricks episode for the next season.
15.00 – E-mail flurry from exec producers. They love the episode. No changes. We’re “locked”. I call Ben, the editor and tell him the good news. I’m not out of contract until the end of the week so I’m now being paid to sit at home for a few days. That would be great but I suspect the production will try to squeeze in a few post-production meetings to save having to pay me extra to go to them when I’m out of contract.
17.00 – Still making notes for new New Tricks episode.
17.45 – Read “Each Peach Pear Plum” to Edie TWICE! (She insisted on an encore)
Now – Taking a break from writing (I won’t officially down tools until about 8pm). Sitting on the sofa in front of the news, with laptop. Will post this now so I can get back to work.
Go away.
