When you mention Charlie Brooker most people think of epoch-defining Black Mirror or perhaps his Weekly Wipe. His other show Nathan Barley is one of my all-time favourite British comedies.
The show is about wokesters before Woke became a thing, in media and related industries within the surrounds of London’s Shoreditch. I well remember laughing at the eponymous character describing himself as “self-actualising media node” like a total wanker.
Only to become precisely that myself twenty years after watching the show.
When I started producing video content a couple of years ago it was just me and my Insta-360 camera filming stuff while out and about, then editing it together -poorly- for publication. One vocational hazard for people in my profession (I’m a technology architect) is that we have a tendency towards tightly categorised methodical thinking, and one such category is capabilities. An organisation has X capability, but to achieve Y business objective it needs to develop an ancillary Z capability.
Editing is a great example from when I first started out. I had the capability to film with my 360 camera, the objective was to publish material so others could consume it, I needed to develop the ancillary capability of video editing.
As often occurs with such an approach, it snowballed from there. And I’ve documented (another vocation hazard) my steps along the path to becoming a self-actualising media node.
Capability 1 - Filming in the field and editing (documented here)
Capability 2 - Building the SimonTV LIVE podcasting set and distributing content (documented here and here)
Capability 3 - Building the Sample Simon music performance set (documented here)
Capability 4 - Building an in-person set for multiple participants [WIP] (this document)
The video above is the proof of concept for the fourth capability. In-person interviews and conversations are a natural progression from the remote interviews I host on SimonTV LIVE but is very different, with its own set of requirements and constraints. The biggest difference is it’s pre-recorded (as opposed to live) and consists of multiple cameras and audio sources, which need to be edited together in post-production. Essentially the set looks like this:
…with the addition of separate audio recording for each individual.
The challenges are the cost (equipment), most of which I already possess or can cobble together and the time, particularly the amount devoted to post-production. The design is a trial-and-error learning curve as I figure out how best to arrange lighting and camera angles for the best picture, and adjust audio to obtain the best sound.
Design is the aspect I enjoy most and I am very pleased to have delivered a successful proof of concept to the client (me) here in this video. From this position I’ll proceed to production implementation, with the only risk I’ve identified so far redundancy and resilience, and that perhaps no-one will want to come and speak with me in person.
-SRA. Auckland, 17/vii 2025.
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