Last summer I did a stint making short videos for THE PRODUCTION OFFICE LIVE. The show is presented and produced by my friend, author, filmmaker and blogger, Chris Jones. Its mix of interviews with genuinely valuable insight and lively studio chatter, saw it quickly become a favourite among indie filmmakers across the world1.

Chris and his producing partners have recently launched a crowdfunding campaign for the second season of the show to give them enough capital to run the show professionally. Take a look at their IndieGoGo page to find out more (and back them if you can).

The campaign itself has one key element that too many filmmakers2 miss: “perks” or “rewards” that backers genuinely want3 at minimal cost to the production.

Too often crowdfunders come up with lists of brilliant bonuses, but if you’re giving away a $40 T-shirt to people who back you to the tune of $50 it doesn’t take a genius to tell you’re not going to raise the amount you need to make your show. Some would argue even a $10 T-shirt on a $50 pledge is too much of a chunk to give away.

What Chris & Co have done is to come up with a crowdfunding model whereby they offer great value to contributors at little cost to themselves. That is the ultimate lesson in crowdfunding best practice not only because it gives the show the best fundraising model, but also because as a backer you know you’re money is going to help your favourite show get made, not to produce the rewards you’ll receive for putting your hard-earned in.

Well done to Chris, Judy, David and Gemma for creating a great campaign for a great show. I can’t wait for the new season4.

1. literally, with viewers in the US, Germany and Australia among other places [↩]
2. and crowdfunders of other art forms [↩]
3. such as a credit on the show, a visit to the studio, a VIP pass to the always-awesome wrap party [↩]
4. which will also, incidentally, be featuring the return of the LOWDOWN from yours truly [↩]

My body decides that 6.30am is a good wake up time this morning and, as the room is freezing and the wind is rattling the door, any chance I have of convincing myself to go back to sleep is thrown out of the window, so I get up, close the window over lest the same fate should befall the lovely K1 and head downstairs.

I make myself a cup of tea with the penultimate tea-bag in the house2 and sit down to catch up on emails, news and blogs from the last two days since I’ve been out of the office for most of them. I promptly let my tea go cold and debate whether to walk to the shops but a) it looks freezing outside and b) I’m digging too far into the news blogs to leave my laptop.

By late-morning I’m all caught up on everything I’ve missed and have worked my way through two scripts that were in my To Read pile. I fire off an email of feedback to the writer/director of one of them, but promise myself a second read of the other, since it’s being pitched to me as a possible new producing project and I think it needs a more careful evaluation.3.

K eventually rouses herself and announces (shock of all shocks) that she actually had a good night’s sleep and feels rested and happy – not a common thing for K of a morning. She also informs me that we’re popping next door at 2 to give Wee C4 his delayed Christmas present that various events colluded to prevent us handing over pre-Christmas (or even pre-New Year).

Back from that we take a stroll down the road and pick up some tea and milk, then K hits the sofa to dig into some statistics homework while I clean up the kitchen, including mopping the floor from Thursday’s jumping cider incident (it’s been a bit sticky since).

That done, I head upstairs and have a chill out in the bath, followed by some relaxation, then make a few phone calls that I needed to catch up on, including chasing up a commission that came my way yesterday.

Phone calls finished, I try (and fail) to wrap my head around K’s statistics stuff to see if I can be of any help, but drawing a blank on that I instead fall back on my dinner-cooking talents and rustle up some griddled pork and accompaniments.

After dinner, K hits the sofa again and I head up to the office to check messages and update the blog. When K’s brain has exhausted itself and her mind is a whirl of statistical mess we play a quick game of Bananagrams before heading to the movie room and throwing in the original BBC STATE OF PLAY series, which K’s never seen. I realise I’ve forgotten just how much I love this show as we get through two hour-long eps back-to-back and could quite easily have stayed up and got through all 6 in one straight marathon, but I’m keen for K to rest up before Uni starts on Monday, so I drag us both to bed for sleep.

1. although that’s hardly likely as she sleeps like the dead once she’s nodded off [↩]
2. naturally leaving the other for K the tea monster [↩]
3. the first of the scripts is another project i’ve been producing that’s been slowly working through numerous drafts over the last few months [↩]
4. the neighbour’s 3-year-old [↩]

The alarm wakes me at 8am, which is the latest I’ve been up all week (I figure I deserve it). I get out of bed, shower and rouse K so we can make our 9.35 train to London.

We get in to Town and K heads off to Angel to Uni, where she’s meeting her study group to polish up their joint project while I head down to Waterloo to meet up with HC, a filmmaker friend of mine. It’s good to finally see her as we live a life of constant “we must meet up” messages and rarely manage to find time that both of us are free to actually do it.

We pick each other’s brains about various work-related thing, as well as chatting about new projects we have on and our hopes and plans for 2011. The hour-and-change we spend in a lovely little South Bank café1 passes way too quickly before I’m back on a tube and headed North to Angel.

I meet K to accompany her to a meeting with her Uni that she’s organised to try to sort out arrangements for her placement this term, which goes very positively and we’re in and out inside half-an-hour.

K smuggles me in to the uni library using one of her study-mates passes and I stick my head into their room to say hello to the group and thank Sc for her card. They carry on working and I sit in the main library study area and battle (unsuccessfully) with the WiFi before giving up and settle into preparing a business plan for the new project I’m working on with CR that doesn’t require ‘net accesses.

While I’m working I get an email from a Twitter contact who was involved in Danny Lacey’s LOVE LIKE HERS offering me a Line/Co-Producer role on her new short. As it’s on my Blackberry, I can’t read the script, but I file it away to come back to later once I’ve got chance to access the ‘net and read it.

I also get an email from THE PRODUCTION OFFICE commissioning me for 12 new eps of THE LOWDOWN for them this year, which is a really nice boost. I’ve had great feedback in the past on the videos I’ve done for the show and it’s always flattering to be asked to come back and do it again. I accept without hesitation.

When K wraps up her study group, I pack up my things and we stroll back up to Angel and grab the tube to St Pancras, where we’ve just missed a train home. There’s one every half-hour, though, so it’s not the end of the world and we hit Foyles bookshop to kill some time, with me wading through the business section as a bit of market research.

We hop the train and ride some, K zoning out with tiredness while I read an eBook on her iPad for the first time. I’m impressed at how nice it is to read on it, as I’ve only used it for games and “useful” apps before. The workflow for reading PDFs is a little fiddly, but once they’re on there, it’s great.

We get home and swing by KFC for K and I whip myself up some chicken mayo sandwiches from the leftovers in the fridge2. We watch some SIMPSONS while we eat, then head up to the movie room and the PS3 to stream the first ep of FAMOUS AND FEARLESS that we missed on Monday, which we jump through the key moments of before coming back down to tonight’s Sky+’d final. It’s such an odd show – potential to be very, very good, but the live studio format necessitates quite a lot of padding. That said, if it weren’t live it wouldn’t have the same edge to it, so it’s a bit of a conundrum for the producers. It’s great to see Chris Evans doing good TV again, though – I miss TFI FRIDAY.

It’s late once F&F is over (well done Charley Boorman) and we take ourselves off to bed where I read for all of 10 minutes before conking out.

1. Earl Grey for her, green tea for me, both served in little bowls [↩]
2. K’s not a sandwiches kinda girl [↩]

I get up and drag myself out of bed and into the shower when the alarm rouses me at 6.45am. I gather my bits and pieces, kiss K goodbye and head out. The roads are very slow, so I opt to avoid the M1 and take the slightly slower, but moving faster, back roads to the hospital.

I arrive and it’s chaos, as should be expected on the first clinic back after the Christmas/New Year break. I sit and chit-chat with JL, another transplantee who’s doing amazing thing with her gift. We talk fundraising, sponsorship, goals and targets for 2011 and how we can help each other out before she’s called in for her tests and I sit and wait a while longer.

Eventually I’m called in to get my bloods done, then sent off for RFTs and X-Ray before heading back to get my obs done (the clinic is in utter disarray with too many people and not enough staff, so the whole blood-and-obs procedure take much longer than normal). I’m free to go by 11am and told to be back for 3ish, so I take myself over to Watford to settle into Starbucks and rock their WiFi with a bucket of caffeine.

I sit in Starbucks from 11.30 until just after 2pm and get through loads of email and other work bits & pieces, which I’m really chuffed with as Starbucks work days can sometimes be disappointingly unproductive. At 2.00 I get up and take a wander around the centre, grabbing a magazine to read during the afternoon wait and then jumping in the car, fuelling up on the way back and eventually landing back in clinic just after 3pm.

I wait a little under an hour before seeing the No.2 doctor dude, with whom I run through a few issues I’m aware of at the moment. None of them seems to overly bother him, so I’m sent away with the promise of a scan appointment to come through and a follow-up at Harefield in March.

The drive home is hellish as the anti-clockwise side of the M25 is completely closed due to an accident and everyone on the clockwise side (my side) wants to stop and see what’s happening. I take a detour off the motorway by take a wrong turn and end up clogged up in rush-hour traffic. By the time I get home a journey that should take 1-1.5hrs has taken me closer to 2 and I’m shattered after my early start and close to 5 hours in a car today.

K is waiting for me and I’m a little short with her for not emptying the dishwasher while I’ve been out, but we soon kiss and make up and settle onto the sofa for a cuddle. We opt to head out to get some takeaway as neither of us has the energy or compunction to cook tonight, so we ride the sofa and watch some Sky+ while we eat, then stay where we are for the rest of the night going through the programmes that have stacked up on our planner and chatting.

We eventually call it a night around 11ish, conscious that we have to be up for the London trip in the morning. I pass out almost immediately we get to bed.

The story goes that wherever he performed, Elvis insisted that his dressing room was placed 1000 yards from the stage.  As he walked those 1000 steps to get to his arena, he would slowly focus his mind and get into the head space he needed to perform to his best abilities.

Do you have your own 1000 steps? A routine or system that helps you get your head into gear?

For me, it’s making a hot drink1 and walking up the stairs to my home office. As soon as I close the office door and place the hot drink on the mat on my desk, my brain is in work mode and I’m focused on my To Do list for the day or the week.

Routines and systems are brilliant productivity aids, especially for freelancers working from home. They keep you focused on the task(s) in hand and keeping you from becoming distracted.

If you want to do more, achieve more and make the most of your day, find your own 1000 steps to performing your best.

1. green tea at the moment as I’m desperately trying to cut down on my caffeine intake [↩]

A friend of mine Tweeted this yesterday afternoon, managing to precisely pinpoint the best way of getting what you want from 2011:

“Ink your goals rather than just thinking them”

Tamsyn O’Connor1

Rather than making resolutions that we won’t stick to, it’s much better at this time of year to set yourself goals and targets for the 12-24 months ahead and review your old ones.

The best way to ensure that you finish up 2011 and head into 2012 the way you want to is to take ten minutes today to sit and write down exactly what you want to get done this year.

You can scribble it on a piece of paper and stick it to the fridge; pop it on a post-it on the side of your computer screen; even make it public by posting it on your blog or Facebook profile.

Whatever way you do, the simple fact of having your goals and dreams for the year written down in a concrete form will force you to focus on what you want to achieve, keeping you eye on the proverbial prize.

The more we focus on what we want–rather than what we don’t want–the more success and happiness will come our way.

1. script writer, associate producer and Love Like Hers‘ spectacular 1st AD [↩]

Sadly, despite being up ’til past 2am two nights in a row, my body1 just isn’t in the mood for sleeping.

I’m an impatient slumberer and if I’m not asleep within about 30 minutes of turning the light out, it just makes me more restless. So, around 3am I get myself up again and head downstairs.

I move the laptop through to the dining room (I feel like working at a desk/table), brew myself a cup of green tea and get down to doing some work on a website I’m prepping at the moment for a new project that’s hopefully launching in the next few weeks. I realise there’s a lot more to be done than I thought and I hit up some WordPress forums for a bit of help with some coding.

After an hour-and-a-bit of that, my brain is a little too numb to focus on any one tsk any more, so I set about backing up all of the various blogs and websites I run2, whilst reading some wisdom of Seth Godin, my new guru of choice, and catching up on some news websites I like to stay abreast of, like Mashable and Hollywood Wiretap, the latter of which is a little devoid of news due to the NY break, being trade-based.

I sort out a calendar-syncing issue K and my computers are having and eventually, around 6am, I’m finally too tired to think and I take myself to bed. I get upstairs to discover that K is also still awake, although she has a higher tolerance for just lying in bed when failing to sleep.

We both turn out lights out and try for some sleep, which eventually comes our way.

I wake around 11.30 and drag myself out of bed to eat something and knock back my a.m. dose of meds that are now a little late. I wolf down a bowl of cereal and the tabs, shoot-up a good dose of insulin3 and take myself back to bed for more rest.

I snooze lightly but happily for a couple of hours and eventually drag myself out of bed around 2pm, brewing myself a cuppa and hitting the sofa to chill out with some TV in the background while I surf the ‘net and investigate Squidoo, a rather neat-looking idea that is currently intriguing me.

K gets up and I make more tea and we sit and chat with the Strictly edition of Question of Sport on in the background. Tea down, I decide to get off my butt and go for a walk around the village, the old parental mantra of “a little fresh air does you good” ringing in my ears.

On my way round I stop at the Co-op and pick up some grub for dinner and some bits and pieces for lunch tomorrow when K’s girly mates (plus manly men, plus bambinas) are coming over for a post-Christmas catch-up.

I get home and K is busy cleaning, tidying and taking the decorations off the long-dead Christmas tree. I take the tree out, along with a few bags of rubbish and recycling for he outdoor bins, then sort dinner out with our revived George Foreman.

We eat, clear up the hit the sofa to watch ERIC AND ERNIE on Sky+. BBC drama is usually good quality, but even by their standards, this was a doozy of a drama, both of us really liking it.

After the film I go for a bath to chill myself out before sleep4 then come back downstairs to grab my evening meds and update the blog while K switches places with me in the tub before we both sack out for sleep.

1. or brain, not sure which [↩]
2. mostly through the infinitely adaptable WordPress platform, which makes it incredibly easy to backup [↩]
3. it was a slightly naughty cereal [↩]
4. in the vain hope it might help tonight [↩]

New Year started, as most do, at midnight. K & I were down at the Black Bottom Club in Northampton for the second year running. This year was a little different, with a rocking indie band as opposed to the more chilled jazz band of last year. Different, but not worse.

After seeing in 2011 we eventually rolled back home after a detour to drop S&G off at theirs around 2.30am. I drove, which meant sobriety for me, but K was not so hampered by the restrictions of driving laws and just about managed the stairs to bed before crashing out.

Being in bed after 3am, I was pretty disappointed that my body decided to wake me at 10am. Granted, 10am is a pretty good lie in for me, but I felt like I could do with at least a couple more hours.

I get up, grab some brekkie and make some tea and sack out on the movie room sofa to explore the 007 game K picked up for me this week to go with the free PS3 she got on her new phone contract just before Christmas. I get one stage in (the pre-credit sequence) before her ladyship awakes and comes to join me.

I shut the PS3 off and come downstairs, making us both tea. We opt for a movie and flick through the Sky planner, eventually settling on SAVE THE TIGER, a Jack Lemmon flick from the 70’s that neither of us have seen or heard of. Turns out to be pretty good, but halfway through K’s not liking it and heads off to catch some more Zzz’s. I finish the flick while updating the blog and being sure to pimp it on Twitter before shutting down to head up for some kip myself.

I realise as I’m getting upstairs that I’m not actually tired enough to sleep, so I wonder what to do with myself. I to-and-fro up and down the stairs, make some coffee and a cuppa for the not-sleeping-either K and leave her to try out her new Mario 25th Anniversary edition game on the Wii.  I head upstairs to the movie room and throw on WAR OF THE WORLDS as background while I do some stuff online.

No sooner is it on, however, than I change my mind and decide it’s about time I sort the DVD collection out. It’s been randomly thrown on shelves since we moved in August and it drives me nuts having to hunt out the film I want to watch when I used to be able to grab it from my stack without a bother in the flat.

I empty the shelves and discover I’ve got enough DVDs to entirely cover the floor and I set about constructing a heavily-geeked up system of storage, based on genre, director and other random categories.

Around 4,30 I finish up the sort, although still with minor adjustments to be made, and jump into the shower before we head over to my ‘rents for a New Year’s dinner of roast lamb with all the trimmings. Awesome meal down, we chill with the ‘rents and play some Bananagrams1 before heading back to ours and getting in just after 9.

K retreats to bed, nursing a delayed hangover and over-eating-itis2, while I jump on the corner sofa downstairs, legs up, old episodes of ED from Sky+ playing the background while I download the NYE pics and write this, the very first ‘new’ post on the combined archive blog.

I note my paunch staring at me as a look down on the laptop screen and realise just how important my fitness goals for this year are. The belly will be banished.

Despite aiming for a 2 ep max, I end up on the sofa until nearly 1.30am at which point, 5 eps in to a mini-ED-a-thon, I close up shop and head upstairs.

1. an awesome game that both Mum and I bought for presents this Christmas, based on our deep love of playing a friend’s version [↩]
2. a sad curse of my Mum’s extraordinary cooking [↩]

Some of you may know1 that before olilewington.co.uk came SmileThroughIt.com, a blog that charted the progress of my life in the uncertain times leading up to my life-saving double-lung transplant in 2007.

The old blog was hosted over at WordPress.com (http://smilethroughit.wordpress.com) and served as a way for me to keep a little perspective on the things going on in my life.

Long story short, I’ve migrated all of the old SmileThroughIt archives onto the olilewington.co.uk servers so I have an easy-access archive of my entire blogging life. You can check out the old blog’s archives2 right here.

I’ve just re-read my very first post on the blog and it makes for insightful–if scary–reading. Baring in mind the fact that we all know it ended happily, it’s odd to look back and see just what kind of head space I was in at the time.

Browse and enjoy at your leisure3. The updates on my professional and creative life will continue on this site, business as usual, so you can readily ignore everything on the other page if you so wish.

Happy New Year, one and all – here’s to a happy, healthy and prosperous 2011.

1. and some of you may not [↩]
2. and the latest daily updates, starting this week [↩]
3. or don’t – it’s more an archive for me anyway! [↩]

Today marks the first day of my return to day-to-day life blogging. Back when I was ill and immediately after my transplant, I spent about 2 years documenting almost every day of my life1 . Back then the intention was to give me something to focus on beyond the long wait for transplant, or for what would happen if I didn’t get one in time.

I’ve lapsed off the personal blogging over the last 12 months, but have decided to return to it as I’ve slowly felt myself losing that little bit of perspective that the blog gave me on my life and how things were going.

I also hope by writing a daily journal on my activities, it may spur me to be even more dedicated to getting work done and achieving my goals, rather than losing myself in Facebook and Twitter when I’m supposed to be being productive.

Here’s a new year, a new chapter and a hugely successful 2011.

PS – I don’t actually expect anyone to find this site either interesting or of use, but I felt I needed to write a little intro post on here to explain why this blog’s so dull. The real action is over at olilewington.co.uk

1. The archive for this blog, as you will see, has been migrated onto this one, so the entirety of my blogging life is collected in one place [↩]