Things I know how to do

Things I know how to do

Having never been particularly interested in watching sports on TV, I somehow ended up with an obviously excessive amount of free time to spend learning how to do other things.

I don't particularly enjoy dealing with things I don't understand, so I tend to take a frankly excessive interest in whatever crosses my path, at least until something else comes along and catches my curiosity.

This means I know enough Python to build my own tools, but also that I've read Sophocles' Antigone in Ancient Greek and investigated the chemistry behind Korean marinated eggs.

Keeping this work-related, in most cases I learned how to do things adjacent to whatever I was doing because I didn't like how somebody else was doing them, or at least because I wanted to be able to talk to them about it. This has had two consequences: the first is that I'm a fucking control freak; the second is that, since I can't do everything — or at least can't do everything well enough not to get pissed off at myself — at some point I realised my job was probably to coordinate lots of people who each do fewer things, but do them better than I do.

Most of the time, these days, I direct something.

Often it's a live show, which involves shouting cue numbers at departments and telling them when to fire them. Just as often, it's multicamera direction, which involves shouting camera numbers at operators and telling them what to shoot. Basically, I'm very good at shouting numbers.

When I'm not shouting numbers, I'm usually in the studio trying to find a way to bring writing and images together, somewhere between narrative, dramaturgy, aesthetics and technology. I have this idea that if, instead of blasting a hundred lasers into the air, a show manages to actually tell you something, the audience might be more moved by it. The numbers generally suggest this is bullshit, but it moves me more, which is often enough.

I also have this habit of building tools. I've somehow convinced myself that using the same tools tends to make everything look the same, so I like trying to break that pattern. Most of the time, the things that actually break are the tools I've built myself, although it's entirely possible that they do more interesting things when broken than they ever did when working as intended.

Oh, and I know a Windows XP product key by heart, as well as Canto XXVI of Dante's Divine Comedy.

Now you'd probably want to just go home.