Award Sounds

The Award Sounds website had its first birthday yesterday. One year old. Wow. I posted the first articles on 15th July 2007. They were mainly placeholders stating what I was going to place on the site.

Musical Creativity

And a year on, we're up to 43 articles on the Musical Creativity series, for ideas for overcoming composer's block/writer's block. That's a little less than the one a week that I'd intended, but not far off. I'm happy with that amount, especially as some of the articles have been more in-depth than just a blog article.

Fundamentals of Process Mapping

I also started the Fundamentals of Process Mapping ebook series to help me mentor analysts and users on consultancy projects. That series still needs a couple more articles to make it worthwhile. I've already got a few mostly-written. They're in the pipeline. I can see that growing although each article takes longer to write than any of the other articles on this site.

Photography

It's the articles on photography that have gathered the most interested. Thanks to those that have commented. This is an area that I don't get much time for, but when I do it's enjoyable. It's even better to hear from others about their experiences.

Side-Project

The Space Opera side project has captured my own imagination more than my past side-projects have. I'm not that sure what to do with it now. While I'm on consultancy assignment, it will remain a side-project. I'll continue to write music that I think is suitable and clean up previous ideas, getting them into a fit state for publication. Some of that music may remain ear-marked for the side-project, some I may release out through other channels.

Memory and Venn

Spinneyhead Presents released Memory in 2007. It was the first release from the team, I was involved as composer, but also offered advice on how to plan the production; some advice was taken, some not. Most importantly, what wasn't heeded was the advice on location audio (not something I've that much experience in, and I don't claim to, but I do follow basic audio engineering principles). The result was that the location audio was horrific and I spent more time editing in post than composing. I wrote up the lessons learned so others can learn from the team's experiences.

That may sound harsh, but it was a first release for a new team and there are two real positives came out of Memory.

The team delivered. It finished what it set out to do. Despite the quality of the footage and hard work involved, the team completed the project. There are enough teams that fail, lose their way or find the work is too difficult.
The team learned from the experience and the following (and unrelated) series Venn is so much better, it's hard to believe the same team is behind it.