Shoots and Reshoots

Revisiting Past Interviews, Deco Mesh with Wifi 6E, Alfred Update, Noise Reduction Plugins and Floating Screenshots

My month of March 2024 has gone like this:

• The first week I read THIS BOOK on Color Science, Color Harmony, and Perception. I highlighted it and created an outline for a class using its core concepts.

• The second week I wrote and revised the script for the entire class. I looked for personal work and some classical paintings or artworks that could help illustrate the content of all the lessons.

• The third week (the previous one) was shooting week. I filmed the seven lessons plus the closing video, and I worked on a rough cut of everything.

• This week that is just starting is for postproduction: editing, creating some screen recordings that will further illustrate the class content, reshooting any mistakes, and posting everything on Skillshare.

Needless to say, it's been a crazy month! I've had this class in mind for a couple of years already. It's the third time I've read this book, and I still remember how revolutionary it was for my own knowledge and experience. However, I always thought the subject of color science was too complex to tackle. Hopefully, I've been able to simplify it enough for others to learn. The class should be going live by the end of the week if everything goes well.

Ok, now let me share with you a few other things that stood out from my previous week:

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On Creatives in 2020

• I've been revisiting some old interviews I saved back in 2020. This past week I listened to an interview with Robert Crumb & Aleksandar Zograf and another one with Magnum photographers Rafal Milach & Newsha Tavakolian. It's very interesting to listen to these in 2024, as these artists were either locked down, or stressed out about the unknown future, or coming to their own conclusions about everything that was going on in the world at that time. Looking back, it's crazy how quickly those couple of years went by. As a wedding photographer/filmmaker, it still feels like my entire career took an unexpected turn, but it has also led me to new directions I never would have expected—teaching on Skillshare, for instance, or even starting this newsletter.

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On Wifi

• This past week I upgraded our wifi at home to THIS Deco Mesh. I recently heard about Wifi 7 coming out soon, which prompted me to check on our wifi modem. Well, we were still using Wifi 5, which is already two generations behind the current Wifi 6E. I don't know much about this, but even though our internet provider was sending 750 mbps, I could barely use a quarter of that. Plus, there were areas in our home where it was hard to get online. After some research, I decided on the Deco wifi network, and it's been amazing both for speed and coverage. I think I didn’t do it sooner because I didn't want to have to contact our internet provider. Dealing with services like that often means a lot of time on the phone and scheduling visits from technicians. But with the Deco, it was just a matter of plugging it in and setting it up in a few minutes using the app.

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On Alfred

• Alfred, one of my favorite automation & productivity apps on my system, got a big update and the team released an official Chat GPT/Dall-E workflow. Since I created an AI workflow myself a little over a month ago, I wanted to see how this new one compares. The new official workflow is not bad at all, but for my everyday use, I'm already so used to Kiki that this new option slows me down a bit, and I miss features like presets or triggering AI requests inline with snippets. However, the Dall-E integration in the new Alfred workflow is great for quick image generation. I hope to make more tutorials or walkthroughs of Kiki in the future since the biggest potential downside to using it could be the overwhelming amount of customization and options. In other words, if you want something simple, go with the official Chat GPT workflow, but if you're more of a power user, Kiki may be better suited for you.

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On Audio Plugins

• I've been doing a lot of video shooting  recently, and my office/studio is small but with a loud AC unit. Turning off the AC leads to the room getting very hot quickly, and I already got a few but I was looking for noise reduction audio plugins I could use in FCPX and I discovered Clarity VX from Waves. After watching some video reviews, I tried it out, and to my surprise, it's really good. Like… REALLY GOOD even compared to plugins like Izotope RX or DX Revive, which I already have. The price of $29.99 is also a surprise. I'm still holding back a bit from getting it, but I'll see if I need it during this week when I'm mixing and mastering the audio for the class I'm about to publish.

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On Floating Screenshots

• A while back I discovered that BettterTouchTool had a "pin on top" action that would place whatever window I wanted floating on top of everything else. Kind of like a PiP window but for anything. While the concept seemed useful, it just felt too buggy and incomplete. This past week I discovered that there's a new app that was created just for that, Float App. I've been testing it and—while better than BTT—it also seems very rough on the edges. Kind of unpolished, but it had an Early Adopters promo and I thoughts that supporting the development of this for 1 dollar was a no-brainer. I then discovered Screenfloat which seems to also do the same but in a better looking way. Man, but I just didn't want another screenshot tool. I already got the fantastic Cleanshot X for that. Ok, to make this short, I discovered that Cleanshot has this feature already built it. So you can take a screenshot and right away pin it on top. This is super useful in case you need to "freeze" a preview you get from Quick Look, or if you need to take a note from a document or website or something you got in a different workspace. Super handy and happy to have discovered this.

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On Cinema

• The Iron Claw (2023). A bit over a decade ago I watched Martha Marcy May Marlene, a film that was very influential to me in style and overall development of cinema language. Since then I’ve followed the works of director Sean Durkin, so I went to this one knowing absolutely nothing about it. Yes, his style has also changed a lot since that first film I watched of his, but still, this was pretty great! Even if you have cero interest in wrestling like me. Synopsis: The true story of the inseparable Von Erich brothers, who made history in the intensely competitive world of professional wrestling in the early 1980s. Through tragedy and triumph, under the shadow of their domineering father and coach, the brothers seek larger-than-life immortality on the biggest stage in sports.

• American Fiction (2023). If you're an artist or a creative person, and you frequently feel like you don't quite fit… then you may like this. Synopsis: A novelist fed up with the establishment profiting from "Black" entertainment uses a pen name to write a book that propels him into the heart of hypocrisy and the madness he claims to disdain.

• A Bay of Blood (1971). An American film that feels very Italian or very new-wave European cinema. I liked this one because of its style and camera work more than anything else. Synopsis: An elderly heiress is killed by her husband who wants control of her fortunes. What ensues is an all-out murder spree as relatives and friends attempt to reduce the inheritance playing field, complicated by some teenagers who decide to camp out in a dilapidated building on the estate.

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