A busy day! Despite being sore with a cold, the Boxes event yesterday went well. I decided to use the light weight amplifiers, though, of course, it still took a couple of hours to set up and take down. Nick Ferenczy was particularly annoying, insisting on the projector being moved to his specification and not sending me the videos in advance, thus making the projections for the whole show generally a bit like a school slideshow or Alan Partridge presentation, not slick. I aim to be flexible and accommodating, but in future I will not yield on this. I wasn't happy with my performances, but they were not bad considering my illness and it was a nice, if not lovely, night with the opportunity to meet a few friends and fellows. There were some firsts: Andrew showed a video remotely, and many acts were filmed. More on this later. I've had no time at all today to file ArtSwarm.
After the pandemic years, many social gatherings and events have popped up as before, but most are poorly attended. Nine people came yesterday, which is perhaps only a little below the average anyway, but 14 are needed to break-even on the hall hire. I'm unsure whether to continue with the events or stop, but I expect that an event in the warmer and lighter parts of the year will be better attended.
Today has been manically busy as I catch up on many days of music admin. Today, editing some Lyric Reading videos for The Golden Age, the first of which is live now. These were filmed in about 90 minutes yesterday morning by Deborah - a joy! She saved me so much time woith her attentive camera work and sound monitoring. She is a good technician on every level. Editing and conversion is a lot faster than before, partly due to this new PC but also because I'm using the script-based ffmpeg for video conversion rather than the old (and buggy) Freemake. The only downside is that I can't encode to the reliable H264 format in a way that Media Player or the projector will play, but XVID will, so from today XVID is my main video codec.
I have lots more basic music admin to do tomorrow, the general filing and listing of work around the internet, rather than promotion. This will take all day. I'll also schedule the lyric images, then later in the week start work on the Spotify Canvases and lyric videos... and possibly music videos too. I have days of work to catch up with.
