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This weeks Lowdown for The Production Office was Part I of a 2-part special focused on blogs and blogging.

PLATFORMS

There are 3 main blogging platforms out there, although you’ll be able to find many more if you search around.  The most well-known and easiest to use are Typepad, Blogger and WordPress.  Wordpress is, I believe, the most powerful, versatile and useful of all the blogging tools on the web and because of that, part two of this Lowdown next time will look at WordPress as a standalone platform.

There is a fourth platform, Tumblr, which is a micro-blogging site design for short, concise updates of anything from text to pictures to video.  It’s a great site and could be really useful for you if that’s the sort of set-up you want, but most bloggers prefer a little more space to ramble (more on that later).

THE LOOK

All of these sites allow you to customise your pages to differing degrees.  At the very minimum they allow you to change the background and colours of your blog, but can also let you delve deeper into the construction of the blog to rearrange the layout and other elements.

WIDGETS

These sites also all allow the addition of widgets.  A widget is a small application that runs in a sidebar or on the main part of your website and – most commonly – connects you to other place.  Twitter and Facebook are the two key widgets for most blogs, directing your site traffic over to your other online presences and encouraging them to get in touch.  Most bloggers receive far more blog feedback through social networking sites than they do through comments on the blogs themselves.

DOMAIN NAME

It’s really important to your brand as a filmmaker, producer, artist or whatever you may be that you purchase yourself a domain name.  There are various sites to do it at, I usually use 123-reg, and they’re usually fairly cheap.  You don’t necessarily need hoting for your blog (unless you’re using WordPress.org – of which more in part II), you can simply redirect the domain to go to your blog home page using something known as “masked web forwarding”. That means that all your visitors will type in yourname.com and see that in their browser window, but they’ll actually be (secretly) directed to yourname.wordpress.com or yourname.blogspot.com.

Why spend your money on something so seemingly insignificant?  Two reasons: 1) It’s really not that expensive and 2) It just makes you look more professional.  You’re not just some chump who’s thrown up a blog, you’re a serious blogger/filmmaker/whatever with something to say to the world.  Even if you’re not.

POSTS

The key thing about blog posts are that they are there to engage and entertain.  That doesn’t mean you’ve got to be hilariously funny on every page, just that you need to know what it is you want your blog to achieve.  Unless you know that, your blog will rapidly descend into random ramblings that no one is really interested in.

Invest your posts with a little bit of your personality – even if it’s a corporate blog.  Keep them light and, preferably, short – under 500 words if you can – so that people can pop in, have a read and shoot off again.

And lastly, but definitely not least, make your posts regular.  Yes, you’ll be pimping your new blog posts through all your social media outlets (won’t you…?), but you want people to come back because they want to read what you have to say next.  The more regular your posts, the more chance of a regular, returning readership – any blogger’s ultimate goal.

Next time, I’ll delve into a full break-down of WordPress and how you can get started with the internet’s most powerful blogging platform.

The last week or so I’ve been in a bit of a whirlwind and have therefore utterly failed to keep the blog up-to-date, including uploading my new Lowdown for Chris’s live show last week (which was the best so far, and can be seen again here).

The culprit is our new house. K and I have thrown our money into bricks and mortar and are now officially on the property ladder – and much higher up than we first thought.

It’s a great house, a lovely village and is perfect for our needs: a study for K to, well, study in and lay out all of her papers somewhere other than the living room floor and a separate study for me to work in, where I’ll have room to write, edit and store all of my various bits and pieces.

But it’s also got enough bedrooms to have people over to stay and enough room for great house parties.

It needs a lot of work to bring it into the 2010’s, being as it is slightly stuck in the 70’s, but that’s all worked into the budget and reflected in the brilliant price we got it for.

The only downside is that it’s starting to feel like we might be proper growed ups now.

Nah, that’s never gonna happen.

The Lowdown is a new segment on The Production Office, a weekly live show on LiveStream: LiveStream.com/guerillafilm. The show is broadcast live by Guerilla Film and Chris Jones on Thursday nights at 7.30pm GMT. You can also catch up with the show on VoD on the site.

Twitter is one of the most useful marketing and networking tools for filmmakers out there. Here’s a quick guide to how to make the most of Twitter:

It’s all about you
Twitter is the perfect place to build your brand as a person and a filmmaker. You can use whatever screen name you like: I use my own name – @olilewington – but Chris uses his company name – @livingspiritpix – and Judy uses @applestax, which is neither her name nor her company, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that all three of us have our full names and links to our sites on our Twitter profile pages.

People want to connect with YOU as a person, not an abstract notion at the end of a computer, so make sure you include your full name somewhere on the profile and a link to your sites. Using a good headshot of yourself as your Avatar is another great way to establish a quick connection with people.

It’s not all about you
Your page is all about you, yes, but what you do on Twitter isn’t.

Twitter is a community and that’s how you need to treat it. If you keep plugging your own stuff constantly you become the social networking equivalent of a guy walking into a party and just handing out fliers; no one wants to be that bloke and, more importantly, no one wants to follow that bloke.

Get involved: take part in conversations, discussions and post links to interesting things you find on the ‘net. They don’t even have to be film-related – on Twitter right now there’s a lot of people sharing stuff they’ve found on the elections happening in a few weeks in the UK. If it’s interesting and worth sharing, share it.

RTs
The letters RT are something you’ll see a lot on Twitter. It means Re-Tweet and is usually done by a click of a button next to a Tweet from someone you follow.

If someone says something interesting, funny or just something you want to pass on, hit the RT button and let all of your followers know about it. It’s a really easy way to support other people in their campaigns, whatever they may be.

Gary King, a filmmakers based in New York has just rasied nearly $3000 in two days largely down to the fact that the community around him RT’d his updates as he drew frantically close to his fundraising deadline. Never underestimate the power of RTs, because when your Tweets are RT’d you know about it, so people can see that you’re supporting them.

Hashtags
Twitter also uses a great little resource called hashtags. This is where you put a hash mark (#) with a specific word after it, like #prodoffice for The Production Office. That then enables any Twitter user to search for that hashtag and it’ll come up with a constantly updated stream of tweets from anyone who puts that hashtag into their messages.

It’s a great way to hold a conversation over Twitter and connect to people you wouldn’t normally see Tweets from.

For screenwriters, there’s a great example of this every Sunday night where #scriptchat takes place, for people to discuss issue with their current projection and seek support and advice – I’ve connected with loads of writers who’ve helped me out through the #scriptchat hashtag.

#ff
Once you start using Twitter you’ll also see the hashtag #FF come up every Friday.

The FF in question stands for Follow Friday and is a way of Twitterers recommending people they follow to others. So this Friday I may decide that Chris and Judy have some interesting stuff going on, so I’ll add #FF to a Tweet and include @livingspiritpix and @applestax, which is a shorthand way of telling everyone who follows me that they should also follow them.

It’s like a personalized Amazon system where you can say to people: if you like me, you might like to try this person, too.

Making the most of Twitter
Twitter is undoubtedly one of the best ways to find and support filmmakers around the world. Watching other people pushing their projects forward and pushing themselves to be the best they can be is utterly inspiring.

Filmmakers of all kinds, from the top directors and celebrities to people scratching out no-budget shorts all come together to help, support and drive each other.

Be part of the conversation – get involved, offer advice, offer opinions, get into the debate and get your ideas across. Like a lot of things in life, the more you put in, the more you get out.

Twitter is what you make of it – it can be all about your breakfast or it can be all about what you have to offer. Just don’t make it all about you.

The Lowdown
That’s this week’s lowdown – if you have any ideas for topics you’d like to see covered here then leave me a comment and we’ll see what we can do. You can also find me on Twitter @olilewington.

I’m on record in many places as saying that I’m a big fan of the Guerilla Film Makers Handbook series and I’ve got the complete set sitting on my shelves as I type. I was, I supposed, pre-destined to be a fan of the all new Guerilla Film Makers Pocketbook, but at the same time I had my reservations.

Mostly it’s to do with size: the thing I always loved about the Handbooks was that they’re SO comprehensive, covering all areas of production, post-production and beyond in such minute detail even the most confused newbie to the film world could come out of it with a really solid background of knowledge.

I kind of felt, then, that Chris Jones, Andrew Zinnes and Genevieve Jolliffe were doing themselves a disservice in boiling it all down to something that slides neatly into your pocket – which it does. Very neatly.

As I’ve discovered in the last few days, being wrong can be great. And boy, was I wrong to worry about this book.

The Guerilla Film Makers Pocketbook is everything that the other GFHs are and more besides. Remarkably (and I want to know what kind of witchcraft the authors used) they seem to have distilled all the information down into prime nuggets of need-to-know info, combined with great interviews with people who are at the cutting – nay, bleeding – edge of the New Indie Filmmaking Order.

People like DP Philip Bloom who’s been instrumental in showing just what DSLR filmmaking can achieve, having impressed the likes of Lucasfilm and others enough that they’ve converted to using Canon 5DMkII cameras for some recent shoots. People like Sheri Candler and John Reiss who are working to help revolutionise the way indie filmmakers approach the marketing and distribution of their films at a time when it’s getting harder and harder to get huge sums for your finished flicks.

This book covers all the basic elements and nitty-gritty of producing quality short or feature films, but so much more besides. The great strength of the Guerilla books across the board is to give you all the information you want, all the information you need and then a whole load of truly vital information you had no idea you needed, wanted or could even ask about.

Congratulations to Jones, Zinnes and Jolliffe on another outstanding addition to their library. If you’re a filmmaker and you’re serious about learning, expanding and exploiting your craft, art and talent, you simply cannot afford not to buy this book.

The Pocketbook is available here via the authors themselves and will be available on Amazon shortly here. Buy it. Now.

As I mentioned in my previous post, last night (Thursday) saw the launch of The Production Office from Chris Jones and his Guerilla team.  And as it happens, shortly after I wrote my previous post, I had a perfect example of excellent feedback.  Not positive feedback, but constructive criticism.

A short while ago, when Chris was first putting the new show together – in fact, when they were first batting the idea around – he approached me with a view to providing extra content for the show by way of short VTs he could slip in between the studio stuff.

Excited to be involved in the new venture, I started working on some ideas.  This week, one of those ideas came to fruition and I created the folllowing video.  Watch it now and then read on:

In the end, Chris didn’t use it in the show.  Today, he called me to explain why it had been dropped.  In essence, it wasn’t good enough.  But that’s not how Chris couched his feedback.   Instead, he carefully explained WHY it wasn’t good enough and what I can do to improve my work. He offered pitch-perfect feedback which communicated his point in a way that didn’t make me feel a) like a total failure and loser or b) like he was the bigger boy who knew how to do it better.

Firstly, it was too long.  At 5.07 it’s still a short (still a relatively short short), but it’s too long for the show Chris is making – the audience’s attention would have wandered and that’s fatal for a show like The Production Office when people can quickly and easily click off.

Secondly, it was about a fairly boring subject.  In Chris’s own words: “talking about procrastination is the very worst kind of procrastination.”  In other words, people should be out writing, not watching 5 minutes of me telling them how to.

Thirdly, it was the wrong form for the show. Chris explained very succinctly that internet TV is something that many people can watch, but will often be doing other things, too – as we all experienced in the chatrrom on the LiveStream channel last night.  That means the show is essentially radio with pictures, not a TV show where people are following the visuals 100% of the time.  Making a short with no audio other than keystrokes and kettle noises doesn’t hold up to this.

Lastly, it’s not the right feel for the show.  Both the Guerilla Film Makers’ Handbooks (and the new Pocketbook) and The Production Office are about PEOPLE, by PEOPLE.  And my short…wasn’t.

Once he’d taken me through all of these points, he then explained more carefully exactly what he was looking for in terms of videos for the show and I gained a much greater understanding of what he wants me to deliver – and also grew in confidence that I can deliver what he’s asking for. In truth, this is a conversation I should have had with Chris a long time ago to avoid the stab in the dark that was the above film.

More importantly, the feedback has helped me to see the short in a new light.  I still like it – I think it’s quite clever, pretty well cut (although could be better) and has some cute moments as well as good, solid advice that I stand by.  But I know it’s not the best I can do and I also recognise that it’s not fit for purpose, which in a way makes it a total failure.

And sure, I’m not going to pretend I didn’t have a moment of gutted disappointment there.  But as the online buzz has been lauding recently, failure is a vital step to achieving greatness.  If I’d not made this, I’d not have submitted it to Chris, who wouldn’t have taken the time to give me the feedback he did and I wouldn’t have learned.  I’ve taken all he’s said on board and my next piece will be better.  Much better.

And the key to all this: feedback makes your end-product better. Full stop.

The internet has been abuzz in the last couple of weeks with all sorts of new and exciting projects.  We’ve seen the launch of the Lone Gun Manifesto, the Multi-Hyphenate “Don’t Make Sh*t” creative statement, some great new short films and the debut of The Production Office, the weekly live show from indie filmmaking guru Chris Jones (of Gone Fishing and The Guerilla Film Maker’s Handbook(s) fame).

The one thing that all these projects and ideas have in common is their creators’ willingness to take on board the views and opinions of other people.

That’s not to say that any of them are bowing to pressure from readers, viewers or supporters to change their visions, but they are seeking a broad range of ideas on what’s right and what’s amiss with their creations in order to better themselves and what they are trying to achieve.

It’s a lesson many writers and filmmakers would do well to learn.  Feedback isn’t about people blindly praising or harshly judging you or your script, film or show – it’s about learning what works and what doesn’t from someone else’s point of view.

You’re not always going to agree with what other people think of your work, the important thing is to acknowledge comments and take the time to really consider them.

Case in point: my new screenplay.  I’ve just finished a fourth draft of a screenplay that’s very close to my heart and sent it out to my loyal band of 3 readers who I send all my stuff to for feedback.  I’ve had another great set of notes from one of them that highlights some issues that I was aware of, some that I hadn’t noticed and some that I disagree with.

The significant point is that even those we disagree with are hugely valuable, because it forces us as writers or filmmakers to justify to ourselves why we don’t agree.  It’s no use just saying “No” and ignoring someone – you have to take the time to work out why you disagree and why you want it to stay the way it is.

Feedback can be hard to accept when it’s not the gushing praise you were expecting, but it’s vital to hep create the very best piece of work.  Don’t be afraid to offer your darling up and ask people what they think.  In the end, it’ll make your baby better.

Catch up with the rest of the story in Part I, Part II and Part III first.

Easter weekend, then, was a bit rubbish if we’re all honest about it.  Getting home on a stonking great 70mg dose of oral pred meant two things: MASSIVE appetite and MASSIVE lack of sleep.

In the first 72 hours of getting home (that’s all of Easter weekend, essentially) I slept around a total of 8 hours.  In the first 5 days at home I had two nights where I actually didn’t sleep at all.  Not a wink.

The great thing about insomnia is that it often makes me hugely creative.  Some of my best writing has been done in the middle of the night when my brain is whirring over-time and I’ve got up and hammered out some great stuff.

The problem with steroid-induced insomnia is that the longer you can’t sleep for, the more useless you get.  By Easter Monday I’d been without decent sleep for nearly 4 days and my brain had turned to utter mush.  I couldn’t do anything other than sit in a heap on the sofa and – after spending the last month in hard-core training in the gym – that really didn’t float my boat.

Worse than that, though – and please turn away if you’re of a nervous disposition – was that I wasn’t allowed ANY chocolate over Easter AT ALL.  Utter, utter rubbish.  The prednisolone had spiked my blood sugars higher than the flagpole at the summit of Everest and I was reduced to a low-GI diet of wholly unsatisfactory wholemeal products to keep my sugars as in-balance as I can.

Because I’m not a “real” diabetic, the dietary control was vital as I didn’t have any insulin to use if things go too bad, necessitating late-night A&E trips if I lost control.

To be honest, though, after the stresses and strains of the past week, it didn’t seem like a hugely big deal to miss out on a few chocolate eggs and the last of the Cadbury’s Cream Egg McFlurries.

Thursday was D-Day of last week, heading back in to see the docs and find out what the score was.  As far as we can tell, we finished up at Oli 1-0 Rejection.  Which is, conclusively, A Good Thing.

There’s still a bit more of a waiting game to play as there may be other problems that the rejection was masking, including whether or not it’s hammered my pancreas so much I may become a fully committed member of the diabetes squad, but these issues are – frankly – little niggles compared to the threat of the last week.

The docs are happy, I’m happy and I can finally re-focus myself on the next few months which, all being well, contain some very, very exciting times indeed.

Watch this space: the show’s not over ’til the bloke with the fat, steroid-rounded face sings.  And I haven’t even warmed up my vocal chords yet…

Read Part I and Part II first.

I hadn’t even had time to cut the medical wristbands off my arms, nor the nurses any time to clean my room out, by the time I’d got back to the hospital.  The plus-side being a lot less paperwork than my admission the previous morning.

The docs arrived and inserted a new cannula into my hand to start me on a course of methal-prednisolone, a high-dose steroid treatment that would blitz my immune system into the equivalent of a small koala with a chesty cough and hay fever.

There are two things that should be noted about methal-pred (look away anyone who may be introduced to this wonder drug at any stage) – 1) It hurts like hell going into the back of your hand.  It’s only a one-hour infusion once a day, but boy is that hour the most uncomfortable you’re going to be all day. 2) Steroids stop you sleeping.  Especially when they first dose is administered at 6pm at night.

The next three days were something of a blur, not through a drugged-up haze of weird psychotropic experiences, but rather because I was just really quite bored.  The high doses, which can really wrangle with your blood sugars, meant I had to be monitored quite closely, the pain in my hand and the bandage to protect it meant typing was almost impossible and being moved to a downstairs room midway through Thursday meant my dongle couldn’t get decent signal and the internet was out.  I did, however, managed to watch all of Season Four of House on DVD, which was nice.

By Friday I was itching to get home.  And just plain itching at the back of my hand, too.  My blood sugars had been all over the place, hitting high points unheard of for me and even managing to creep higher even after a rapid injection of fast-working insulin, which I though was quite impressive myself.  All of which had me convinced they weren’t about to kick me out, Good Friday or no Good Friday.

To my surprise, then, the docs did indeed come around and discharge me.  To be sure I wasn’t being royally stitched up again, I actually made the Sister on the ward watch me cut off my wristbands and told her straight out that if they brought me back I was making her to ALL the paperwork again.   Every single sheet.  Which, I like to think, is why they didn’t call me back.

Instead, my three days of methal-pred over with, they sent me packing with new, much higher doses of oral prednisolone, a steroid I take as part of my regular regime, only increased by a monstrous 700%.  Nice.

Only once I got home did I discover that oral pred is worse than methal-pred in one key aspect: it’s even worse at letting your sleep.

To be concluded…

Read Part 1 here first.

Although not entirely rectified, the issues with my throat had at least dampened down enough overnight to allow me to talk. I still had the odd issue with my gag reflex, though.

Having rested and dressed in the morning, I was surprised to find the docs still willing to go along with their pronouncement that I could go home.  By now Wednesday, I hadn’t planned on having this much time away from my desk, so it was nice to think I could go home, sleep a little in my own bed and rest up properly.

K arrived to shuttle me back and we made our break for it.  Unfortunately, too soon.

Halfway through the hour-and-a-bit drive home, my phone rang with a call from the HeadDoc again.  Apparently, they hadn’t waited for my biopsy results from the previous day before kicking me out.  Which is when I heard the five words you definitely, definitely don’t want to hear as a post-transplant patient:

“You’ve got some acute rejection.”

For those unversed in all things transplant, here’s the skinny:

When organs (or tissue) are transplanted into your body you discover just how clever your body really is.  It’s doesn’t realise that you’re doing it a favour, but rather notices that a large piece of itself has gone missing and been replaced by, well, a large piece of someone else.  Not knowing what that large piece is (nor that it’s actually very good for you), any body will start to attack that foreign invader.

Hence the most important part of any post-transplant medical routine: immuno-suppressant drugs specifically designed to dampen your immune system to a point where your body can still fight off the everyday coughs and colds we all come into contact with, but where it won’t recognise the new additions to your system.

Sooner or later, though, the body won’t be fooled any more.  At some point in the future – and it can be days, weeks, months or many, many years – the body will recognise the foreign objects and it will start to attack them.  This is called rejection.

The Big R is something every transplant patient knows will happen to them sooner or later, but we all try to hide from.  We all know we’ll face it, but none of us is actually willing to, you know, face it.

There are two types of rejection and, in that regard, I’ve got the good one.  Acute rejection can be equated to a sudden flare up of an old injury, like when a pulled back gets “put out” on over exertion.  It doesn’t mean the beginning of the end, but it does need to be treated swiftly and decisively to make sure it doesn’t escalate and your backbone doesn’t fall out entirely.  OK, maybe that’s analogy’s a little stretched.

So, halfway home to a nice cup of tea and some chill time in front of the TV, I’m ordering K to turn around and racing back to Harefield with one single word bouncing around my head.  I’ve had more enjoyable journeys, I have to admit.

To be continued…Part III tomorrow.

Monday 29th March started like any normal transplant clinic visit.  About 10.30am I heard the words you never really want to hear from a techie doing your lung function:

“It’s gone down a bit.”

Sure, ‘a bit’ isn’t the most worrisome of phrases, but after over two years of steadily increasing function, hugely increased physical capability and a life coming together and wandering off into new & exciting worlds, it’s not what you want to hear.  Then again, neither is that horribly mixed and mangled metaphor in the previous sentence…

Regardless, I hung around to chat to my docs in the afternoon, as is their wont.  The system at Harefield works by running you through a battery of tests in the mornings, then shipping all the results to the docs for the afternoon session where they can get them instantly and take action.

The action my doctor took was to go and talk to another doctor.  Never an encouraging sign.  When he returned, HeadDoc MC had decreed (he doesn’t decide, he decrees, he’s that kind of fella) that I should come in the following morning for a bronchoscopy – otherwise known outside the medical world as shoving a camera down your throat to have a look at what’s in your lungs.

It seems that over the last few months, although my lung function hadn’t been dropping alarmingly my mid-expiratory flow (the amount of air I’m pushing out in the middle of my breathing test) has been slowly decreasing and was now starting to fall to a point that raises alarm bells.

The following morning, after a rather rude 5.55am alarm call, I rocked up onto the ward for my bronch and got myself all gowned up.  About 10.30 I was whisked (well, leisurely wheeled) to theatre and knocked out.  Thankfully with a nice little cocktail of drugs and not something hard and blunt.

When I woke up my throat hurt and I couldn’t see straight.  I remembered hurriedly that that was OK and not the repercussions of a heavy Monday night out.  Throughout the rest of the day I laid in bed and felt awful. And tired.  Then awful again for a bit.  Then threw up.  Twice.

In the middle of all of this as I became more conscious, I noticed that I was having trouble swallowing, talking and breathing (the latter only a little, thankfully), due to an inflamed uvula at the back of my throat. It’s that dangly bit you can see when you look into someone’s mouth that people always think is the tonsils.  It was inflamed and enlarged and causing all kinds of problems, bouncing against my gag reflex and trying to pull the roof of my mouth off every time I swallowed.  Not pleasant.

The docs shot me up with a barrage o drugs – hydrocortisone being the most exciting – to try to bring the swelling down, but they eventually gave up after nothing made it better and it wasn’t getting worse.  Most popular diagnosis on the ward was “trauma” which is doctor-speak for “we must have battered it with the ‘scope when we were fishing in your lungs”.

Encouragingly, though, they told me I could go home on Wednesday.  Which I did.

To be continued…