The Old Times

Established 1967

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Welcome to The Old Times. Nick is a Second Year Digital Media Production Student at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge. He is a retired HR Practitioner (DEI and Communication Specialist), Funeral Director and NHS Administrator. Coming late to university, Nick’s prefered proverb is: “Be not afraid of going slowly, be afraid of standing still.”

  • Immersive Storytelling: Week 5 (Part 2)

    Nick Gellatly

    Light on things that are not screens

    Thursday morning (22 October) was the practical follow-up to last week’s session on projection mapping. Last week we talked about it. This week we got our hands on a projector, a copy of Resolume Arena and a table of small white models, and found out how much harder it is than it looks on YouTube.

    We were joined by students from the Interior Design course, who made the models. They had built the surfaces, and we had the software to light them.

    Picking up from Week 4

    In Week 4 (Part 2) I wrote about projection mapping as one half of the “phygital”: joining a physical object to a digital layer so that the object itself becomes the screen. The academic name for it, from Bimber and Raskar (2005), is spatial augmented reality. Instead of handing people a headset or a phone, you put the digital content straight onto the real surfaces around them, so the room does the work and everyone sees the same thing at once.

    The example that stuck with me was Led by Donkeys projecting onto the White Cliffs of Dover. It works because the surface already means something before a single pixel lands on it. The cliffs bring the meaning; the projection only gives them a voice.

    The kit and the software

    The set-up was modest: two laptops on a table, a small projector, a white cyclorama wall and Resolume Arena 7. Resolume is ‘VJ’ software, built for nightclubs and festivals. But it has exactly the tools projection mapping needs, called Advanced Output.

    The work happens in two places:

    • Input Selection is where you choose which part of your image or video you want to use.
    • Output Transformation is where you decide where that part ends up in the real world.

    The building blocks are called slices. A slice starts life as a rectangle, but you can turn it into a polygon, drag its corners with Edit Points and rotate it until it matches the face of the object in front of you. Each face of a model gets its own slice. Then you press Save & Close and go and look at the actual object, because the laptop screen will lie to you.

    Cutting a triangle and mapping the stairs

    My target was a small white staircase model with a slanted top: a set of steps under a long diagonal. A rectangular image thrown at it just spills over the edges and onto the wall behind, which instantly gives the game away.

    So before going anywhere near Resolume, I edited the uploaded images into a triangle, so the picture itself already had the same shape as the side of the stairs. Then, in Advanced Output, I made a polygon slice, dragged its three points onto the corners of the stair diagonal and nudged them until the edge of the image ran along the edge of the model instead of past it.

    A few things I learned along the way:

    • Prepare the image first. Shaping the picture before it goes in saves a lot of fiddling with masks later. The software can crop, but it is easier to start with the right shape.
    • Small moves matter. A corner a few pixels out on the laptop is a centimetre out on the model, and the eye notices straight away.
    • Look at the object, not the screen. I spent the first part of the session staring at the laptop. The second part, the useful part, was spent looking at the stairs and adjusting until it looked right in the room.
    • Shadows are part of it. Anything that sticks out casts a shadow onto whatever is behind it, and you can either fight that or use it.

    What it means for my project

    In the Beginning Was the Word is an audio play: the voices are finished and the visitor walks the Sedgwick Museum with earbuds in. So I am not about to start projecting dinosaurs onto the display cases. But Thursday did make two things clearer.

    First, the Crystal Formation entrance I floated in Week 4 is more realistic than I thought. A single projector, a few polygon slices and a white faceted shape would be enough to make a crystal “grow” or shimmer at the door, in step with the shimmer in the audio. That is a small, achievable piece of phygital, not a full building job.

    Second, the Led by Donkeys lesson applies here too. The best surfaces already mean something. In the Sedgwick that might be a slab of rock, a fossil or the edge of a cabinet, lit just enough to point the listener’s eye at the thing the Catalogue is talking about. The light should serve the object, not compete with it.

    If I take this forward, the Interior Design students are exactly the people to ask about building the surface.

    A spooky little video of my photos and film of the session created with ChatGPT

    Choose your own adventure

    The afternoon session turned from where a story is told to who gets to steer it. Having spent the week building an audio play that walks people through the Sedgwick in a fixed order, it was useful to spend an afternoon on stories that hand the direction to the audience.

    Stories that make you work

    The theory came from a Prezi – written by course lecturer Tina Burton, on the ergodic, cybertext, aporia and epiphany. The terms come from Espen Aarseth’s Cybertext (1997), and once they are untangled they are surprisingly practical.

    • Ergodic literature is writing that needs “non-trivial effort” to get through. Turning pages does not count. Choosing a path, solving a puzzle or physically moving through a space does.
    • Cybertext is Aarseth’s word for texts that work like machines, producing different versions of themselves depending on what the reader does.
    • Aporia is the moment you are stuck: the locked door, the dead end, the choice you cannot see past.
    • Epiphany is the moment it clicks and the way forward opens.

    The rhythm between the last two, stuck then unstuck, is a big part of what makes interactive work feel rewarding rather than merely busy.

    Three examples

    Oat the Goat. A short animated story from New Zealand about kindness and bullying, in which the viewer chooses what Oat does at key moments. It is a good reminder that branching does not have to mean complicated: a handful of well-placed choices, each with a clear consequence, is enough to make a young audience feel responsible for how the story turns out.

    J. R. Carpenter. Emily introduced us to the work of this artist and writer, who makes pieces that move between print, performance and the web. The Gathering Cloud takes the idea of “the cloud” literally, setting the weather against the very physical, energy-hungry machinery behind the internet. What struck me was how the form makes the argument: you read it on the thing it is criticising.

    Karen, by Blast Theory. An app in which a life coach called Karen asks you questions, and gradually gets more personal than you expected. Behind the friendly chat she is building a profile of you, and at the end you can buy a report of what she found. It is unsettling in the best way: the interactivity is the point, because it makes you feel what handing over your data actually feels like.

    Branching, agency and a Twine workshop

    The core idea was the branching narrative: letting the audience make choices that change what happens, as in a video with several endings or scenes that only some viewers ever see. It came with a set of good, awkward questions:

    • How do I tell the story, and how much agency do I give the audience?
    • Does that make me a new kind of storyteller, more designer than narrator?
    • And how would I actually measure whether a story is truly immersive?

    Then we tried it. Twine is a free, open-source tool for writing interactive stories. It runs in a web browser, and you write in “passages”, little cards of text joined by links in double square brackets, which Twine draws as a map of arrows so you can see every path at once. The Twine Cookbook has ready-made recipes for the trickier things, such as keeping score or remembering a reader’s earlier choices.

    My first attempt is The Flat White, a nine-passage story which was based on TikTok star Rory Sutherland’s frustration at people choosing complicated coffees while he’s in the queue with a tight deadline.

    261022 The Flat White 1Download

    Even at nine passages, the map view made one thing obvious: every choice you offer doubles the writing you owe. Branching is generous to the reader and quite demanding of the writer.

    What it means for my project

    In the Beginning Was the Word is not a branching story. Everyone hears the same play in the same order. But the session made me realise it is more ‘ergodic’ than I had given it credit for.

    • The effort is physical. The listener has to walk the gallery, find each coloured star and stand in the right place. Aarseth’s “non-trivial effort” is, in my case, the whole length of the museum.
    • There is aporia and epiphany built in. Looking for the next star is a small moment of being lost, and finding it is a small reward. The bigger epiphany is designed: after a whole tour of the left ear (the label) and the right ear (the life) disagreeing, they finally say the same words at Jonathan Cutbill.
    • The agency is real, if quiet. Visitors can pause, skip the two content-noted sections, choose a queer dress code, or simply wander off. That is closer to Karen’s gentle, personal kind of interaction than to Oat the Goat’s forks in the road.

    It also gave me a way to answer the question of how to measure immersion: when my testers walk it, I want to know where they got lost, where they lingered and whether they looked up from their phones. Those three things will tell me more than a questionnaire.

    And I can already see a post prototype Twine version for the zine or the website: a short “choose your code” story that sends readers to the green carnation, the single earring or the carabiner, each with its own slice of queer history.

    Links from the session

  • What does it mean to be happy: Week 5

    Nick Gellatly

    Happiness, Education and Learning

    Learning to make room

    Dr Ian Normile began with a deceptively simple question: can happiness be learned?

    If happiness is entirely genetic or circumstantial, education has little to contribute. But if we can learn ways of living that help us flourish, education becomes central to happiness. Not because it hands us a formula for feeling good, but because it can give us the agency, imagination and relationships through which a life becomes possible.

    That distinction matters to me. I returned to education at fifty-eight, not primarily to improve my employability, but to become more fully myself. My experience at ARU has certainly involved acquiring knowledge and creative skills, but it has also involved identity, belonging and purpose. Biesta (2020) describes these different purposes as qualification, socialisation and subjectification. As a mature student, the third has often felt the most important: education has not simply changed what I can do. It is changing who I understand myself to be. Throughout my working life, I was never comfortable being described by my job(s)or profession(s) as I felt this did not properly represent me. I am, however, content to be known as a Digital Media Production Student and I am proud of this in a way I never was about previous subjecification.

    It has not always been comfortable. Ian reminded us that education should sometimes unsettle us. Learning exposes what we do not know, confronts us with difficult truths and makes us responsible for what we now understand. Bliss and happiness are not the same thing. Nozick’s experience machine offers a perfectly pleasant illusion, yet many people would refuse it because we want our lives to be real. Flourishing requires more than comfort.

    That feels particularly true of queer life. Education is never neutral about whose happiness matters. My generation grew up with emotional and social lessons about what boys should feel, how men should behave and which forms of love could be spoken aloud. Section 28 turned that silence into public policy. It did not merely exclude information; it taught queer young people that their lives were unsuitable for the classroom and perhaps for the world beyond it.

    I learned those lessons well. “Man up” did not remove fear, sadness or difference. It taught me to hide them.

    Returning to university has therefore involved a kind of unlearning. ARU has given me space to experiment, create, ask questions and form relationships across generations and disciplines. As a Welcome Buddy, I am supposed to help younger students find their place here. They are also teaching me something: experience does not give me ownership of what comes next. Arendt (2006) warns that hope rests upon the newness each generation brings, and that we destroy it when “we, the old” try to dictate its form.

    At fifty-nine, I am both old and new: an older student beginning again.

    This is the context in which the Queerly Beloved Café is becoming the artefact for this module. It is not simply an event decorated with positive messages. It is an attempt to make some of the lecture’s ideas tangible: a temporary space where queer joy, conversation, creativity and belonging can be practised rather than merely discussed.

    MacIntyre (2016) argues that flourishing may require us to live against the cultural grain. A café built around queer welcome is a modest version of that resistance. It asks what happens when people who have learned to make themselves smaller encounter a room that expects them to arrive whole. It offers no happiness machine and makes no promise that everybody will feel cheerful. Queer joy is not compulsory happiness. It can include grief, anger, awkwardness, bad poetry, difficult memories and the relief of not having to explain yourself.

    The arts matter here because, as D’Olimpio (2022) argues, education for flourishing must include emotional and aesthetic education. A poster, a song, a film sequence, a shared book or a conversation over tea can make ideas felt in ways a lecture cannot. The Café therefore becomes both creative artefact and educational experiment. It asks whether arranging a room differently might allow people to relate differently.

    It also changes my role. I cannot manufacture belonging for other people or decide in advance what will make them happy. The Café must be made by those who enter it. My task is to set the table, open the door and leave enough room for something unexpected to happen.

    That may be what education at its best has done for me. It has not given me a finished definition of happiness. It has helped me question the definitions I inherited, recognise whose happiness they excluded and imagine something more generous.

    The Queerly Beloved Café is my attempt to pass that gift on: not a lesson about how to be happy, but a place where people might learn that they are allowed to flourish.

    Taking the learning beyond the classroom

    At the end of the session an activity was set with a deadline of 4th November (one more day and it would have been easier to remember, remember!) It asks each of us on the course – a mix of people from across the faculties and locations of the university – to take our learning into two conversations. The first is to speak to a student from another discipline and another with somebody from our wider community. I expect to have the first conversation next Monday with a fellow student whose academic background differs from my own. I would like us to compare what we have each taken from the module so far, particularly the distinction between happiness and pleasure, the influence of social and economic circumstances, and whether education can help people flourish. I am interested in which ideas have travelled differently through our respective disciplines and whether we understand words such as wellbeing, agency and community in quite different ways.

    In my next post for this module, I will later summarise who I spoke with, the topics we chose, where our perspectives met or differed, and anything that surprised me. I also want to notice how the conversations feel, rather than treating them simply as information-gathering exercises. This matters to the Queerly Beloved Café because the artefact depends upon people from different backgrounds making meaning together. These conversations offer a small rehearsal for that: listening without deciding the outcome in advance, allowing another person’s experience to disturb my assumptions, and asking whether happiness becomes richer when it is discussed across the boundaries of discipline, age and community.

    References

    Arendt, H. (2006) Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought. London: Penguin Books.

    Biesta, G. (2020) ‘Risking ourselves in education: qualification, socialization, and subjectification revisited’, Educational Theory, 70(1).

    D’Olimpio, L. (2022) ‘Aesthetica and eudaimonia: Education for flourishing must include the arts’, Journal of Philosophy of Education, 56(2), pp. 238–250.

    MacIntyre, A. (2016) Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity: An Essay on Desire, Practical Reasoning, and Narrative. New York: Cambridge University Press.

    Noddings, N. (2003) Happiness and Education. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  • Immersive Storytelling: Week 5 (Script to Audio)

    Nick Gellatly

    From a walk to a play

    Earlier this week I visited the Sedgwick Museum to check the route and now, I have made it talk, as you will see from previous posts on this blog, I had trialled this a week or two ago using ElevenLabs.

    The recce on 19th October changed more than I expected. The Whewell Gallery turned out to be a fair walk from the front door, and studying the museum’s own labels gave me some interesting facts I hadn’t known before and the trail ended not at Jonathan Cutbill but in the gift shop, where a Pride T. rex and a Trans Pride T. rex were sitting on the shelf as if they had been waiting for me. So, the first job was a new script, Version 3: nine stops, a long walk through the twentieth century, and a finale among the rainbow badges.

    The second job was the big one. Version 3 In the Beginning Was the Word existed only on paper. I wanted it to be something a visitor could scan, press play on and walk with. This post is the story of how it got there, including the bits that went wrong.

    Finding the voices

    I made the voices with ElevenLabs, using its newest model, Eleven v4. The appeal of v4 for drama is that you can direct it inside the text itself. Square-bracket tags such as [sassy], [whispering] or [long pause] work like stage directions, and the model performs them rather than reading them out.

    Before recording anything I rewrote the whole script as a clip list: one row per line, with the character’s name and every direction stripped out, the tags added, and a note of which ear each line belongs in. Version 3 became 167 clips.

    Then came casting. I had already designed a voice for each character, but a test recording of Stop 2 showed two problems. Norman Flint, the porter, was fine but a touch too quick for a man who “walks at the speed of continental drift”, so his lines got more pauses and a [very slowly] tag. Crystal Formation was the bigger worry. She is a drag queen made of minerals who bursts out of the amethyst case, and the first voice sounded like a polite tour guide. I designed three new options and chose the third, which has the exuberance and timing the part needs. The difference between “You’re boring them to sediment” said nicely and said properly is the difference between a guide and a character.

    Recording 167 clips

    I recorded Stops 1 and 2 first and listened before going further, so any problems would show up early and cheaply. They sounded right, so the rest followed: one take per line, spread across four ElevenLabs Flows so each section was easy to find. The whole play used about 29,000 credits.

    A few things needed care:

    • Names. Text-to-speech guesses at unusual words, and guesses badly. I wrote the hard ones phonetically into the script: Whewell (“Hew-ell”), Nopcsa, Onllwyn and the Dulais Valley, and Jonathan Cutbill’s Latin collection name, Haud Nominandum.
    • Lines spoken together. The two rival novelists’ “And then…” and the moment where the left and right ears finally agree on “Jonathan Cutbill. Geologist. Bookseller. Out gay man.” were recorded as separate clips and laid over each other later.
    • One fix. Listening back, I changed Darwin’s “pounding the NW mountains” to “pounding the North Wales mountains”, so a listener hears it clearly, and re-recorded that one clip.

    In total the play runs to about 32 minutes of speech before any sound effects or music.

    The label and the life

    The central idea of the play is that museum labels and real lives often disagree. The Catalogue reads the official version (“Resided with her cousin by marriage”) and Crystal tells you what it leaves out. I wanted listeners to feel that, not just hear it, so the play is built for stereo earbuds:

    • Left ear: the Catalogue, the voice of the label.
    • Right ear: the voices of the lives themselves, such as Anna Gurney, Darwin’s notebook and Nopcsa.
    • Centre: Crystal, Norman and the Clerk, who guide you through.

    The payoff comes at Jonathan Cutbill, the last stop. After a whole tour of the two ears disagreeing, both say the same words at the same moment, and for once the label and the life match.

    To make editing manageable, I assembled the clips into eleven voice tracks, one per stop, already in order and already panned. Each came with a label file for Audacity, which marks every line by its clip number and every gap with the sound that belongs there, so opening a stop shows a ready-made map of what goes where.

    Sound effects and a song from 1917

    The script needs 44 sound effects, from keys jangling at the front door to a glitterball spinning in the Darwin gallery and a till drawer in the gift shop. I worked from a checklist, one row per cue, with search words and a column for the file name and credit, and sourced about 50 sounds from three places:

    • Freesound.org, for most of the everyday sounds. Many need the creator named, so I kept a credit for every one.
    • BBC Sound Effects, for period sounds such as the courtroom and the typewriter, used under the BBC’s licence for educational use.
    • Pixabay, for the comic ones, such as the squelch and the gasp, which need no credit.

    The music was the real headache. The play ends on Ivor Novello, whose last musical, Gay’s the Word, gave Jonathan Cutbill’s bookshop its name, and I wanted its big number, “Vitality”, running underneath. I could not find a royalty-free recording anywhere. A 1951 West End show that was barely recorded is not much use to an audio play in 2026.

    In the script,  Crystal mentions that Novello wrote “Keep the Home Fires Burning” at twenty-one and the whole country sang it. I found John McCormack’s 1917 recording, which is old enough to be out of copyright, as is Novello’s tune. It now plays like a distant gramophone through the long walk, growing a little louder each decade, comes up when Crystal introduces Novello, and returns for the finale. A song about keeping a light on until people come home turned out to fit a play about queer history better than the one I had planned.

    Mixing, and getting it to visitors

    The first full mix placed each sound at its marked gap, faded it in and out, and set it well below the voices, with ambient beds such as the seagulls at Anna Gurney’s stop and the swamp at William Smith’s map sitting very low under the speech. Every stop was then brought to the same loudness, a standard level for listening on phones, so nobody has to reach for the volume between stops.

    Not everything arrived. Seven of my sound files were too large to transfer, including the footsteps, the ice cracking and a 139 MB recording of a music-hall piano, so the first mix used substitutes or left those gaps quiet. I listened to every stop twice with headphones and decided it worked as it was. Those sounds would have made a difference but I had to bear in mind that this version is a prototype.

    For hosting I chose SoundCloud, first because the museum already uses this platform for its commentaries and second because it plays straight from a phone browser with no app and no sign-in. The play is now a public album, In the Beginning Was the Word, with eleven tracks in walking order and content notes in the titles of Stops 5 and 6. The play can be accessed using this QR code or the link below it.

    https://soundcloud.com/nick-gellatly?utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing

    The last link in the chain is to add the QR code. It will be on page 2 of the A6 zine, but will not be in the printed version as I have already made these arrangements – a bit of cut and paste will be required. It is also on the draft invitation web page beside a new “Listen to the play” button (I have not yet made this page live). A visitor can scan at the door, put their earbuds in and press play.

    Reflection

    What worked. Testing small before committing big. Recording two stops first, and a single scene before that, meant the voice problems surfaced when they cost a few hundred credits to fix rather than thousands. The clip numbering also earned its keep: one number tied together the script, the ElevenLabs clips, the Audacity labels, the sound checklist and the credits, so a note like “5-01” meant the same thing everywhere.

    What surprised me. How much of audio production is file management. Some of my hardest moments this week were not creative at all: a zip file Windows would not open, a cloud folder that could not be shared, upload pages that hid their buttons. Next time I will keep sound files small (MP3 rather than huge WAVs) from the start and keep everything in one place.

    On using AI. This project used AI at two levels. The character voices are synthetic, made with ElevenLabs, and I am open about that in the credits. I also worked with Claude, an AI assistant, as a production partner, for rewriting the script into a clip list, assembling and panning the voice tracks, laying in the sound effects and troubleshooting along the way. The decisions stayed mine: the story, the casting choices, which voice Crystal should have, which sounds to use and when the mix was right. I found it most useful for the repetitive, technical work, which left me more time for the parts that needed a human ear. The open question I want to keep thinking about is how synthetic voices sit alongside a project about real, often silenced, people. My answer for now is that the voices are characters, clearly made, while the history they tell is real and sourced.

    Next steps. A test walk at the museum with my phone and earbuds, to check that each stop lasts about as long as the walk to the next star, especially the long walk to Cutbill. Finally, I need to work on how best to present the ‘pitch’ on 12th November as there are a few elements to demonstrate.

  • Immersive Storytelling: Week 5 (Recce)

    Nick Gellatly

    Why go back?

    In the Beginning Was the Word asks visitors to walk through the Sedgwick Museum with their phones and earbuds, guided by Norman Flint, a dusty museum porter, and Crystal Formation, a drag queen made of minerals. That only works if the directions are right. If Crystal says “turn left at the elephant” and there’s no elephant, the spell breaks.

    So on Monday 19 October I went back with a one-page checklist, a phone, a microphone and a green carnation, strictly for research purposes. I had four aims:

    • walk the route in order and time it
    • check every object the script relies on is actually on display
    • photograph labels, textures and details for a printed guide
    • record the visit as evidence of the research process

    What happened

    The first surprise came early. The Whewell Mineral Gallery, where Crystal makes her entrance, is further from the front door than I’d assumed. Rather than a problem, it became a gift: Norman now gets a proper walk to fill with dull facts. He passes a plaque recording that Sir David Attenborough reopened a gallery in 2002, and he polishes it on Tuesdays.

    The labels turned out to be better than my research. The Bridging Binaries trail card for Jonathan Cutbill says he helped build the museum’s first computer catalogue in the late 1960s, “one of the first museum computer catalogues in the world”. Baron Nopcsa’s trail object is a Megalosaurus bone from a brick pit at Fletton, near Peterborough. Its handwritten label credits Nopcsa with naming it in 1901, question mark included. A panel shows Mary Anning’s letter to Professor Sedgwick of 4 May 1843, with her own sketch of the ichthyosaur she was selling. And William Smith’s great 1815 map, which shows St Neots, was found folded in a box in 2013 before being restored. Folded away, brought out, restored and put on display: I couldn’t have scripted that metaphor better.

    The final discovery was in the gift shop: Pride badges, a Pride T. rex and a Trans Pride T. rex. So the play now ends there.

    The video

    I made a short video of the recce, in chapters that follow the research process: the mission, a reality check, the walk round, the findings and the next steps. The camerawork is rough, but it does its job as evidence. I’d planned to shoot 360-degree photos but decided against it. Ordinary photos and video told the story more clearly, and with less faff.

    What changed

    The route is now nine stops, ending in the gift shop:

    1. The entrance
    2. The Whewell Mineral Gallery
    3. SUE the T. rex
    4. Anna Gurney
    5. Darwin
    6. Franz Nopcsa
    7. Mary Anning
    8. William Smith’s map
    9. Jonathan Cutbill

    I’m now working on Version 3 of the script. The ‘Nopcsa’ scene is rebuilt around the real bone, Anning’s letter becomes her “love letter to rocks”, and the coal story grows into a full stop at the Smith map. Norman’s big reveal moves to the shop, where he buys a rainbow badge before declaring “I’m free!”

    The pocket guide

    The photos became a zine: A Pocket Guide to the Rocks of the Sedgwick. It’s eight A6 pages. The cover is deliberately dull, grey and typewritten, so anyone glancing over sees a geology enthusiast. Inside it’s a burst of colour: the queer codes, a page for each pair of stops with photos from the visit, and a strip of coloured rock layers along the foot of every page that works as a timeline. Unfold it fully and the back is a poster, We were always here: twenty-five layers of rock and history, from the first minerals 4.5 billion years ago to “Now: You”. It is with the printer now so that I can hand out actual copies when we do the pitching next month.

    261019 Pocket Guide to the Rocks zineDownload

    Between now and 12 November

    • Re-record the audio in ElevenLabs to match Version 3.
    • Host the audio and add the real QR code to the zine (though as the pitch will be a prototype I may not do this).
    • Print the zine and the green carnation stickers.
    • Prepare the pitch for the sharing event on 12 November, and finish the dev log.

    Three weeks, nine stops, one drag queen. What could possibly go wrong?

  • Motion Graphics: Week 5

    Nick Gellatly

    Putting the Words In

    Fourteen frames of painting, ninety seconds of timeline, and a title sequence with no title on it. This was the week the words went in, which turned out to be much less about choosing a typeface and much more about whether anyone could read the thing at all.

    The ‘homework’ from last week was to create a styleboard:

    And to create a visual poster at 16×9 landscape (1080) format that can be used as a ‘benchmark’ visual style for you project:

    The objective for this week was to move to the ‘Production’ phase including each of the following:

    • Asset creation
    • Text
    • Layouts
    • Artwork ready

    With this in mind I created the assets using Canva (with support from Claude AI as my virtual assistant and online instruction manual). This phase was completed and can be seen in the previous post for this module on this blog: https://theoldtimes.co.uk/2026/10/16/motion-graphics-week-4-part-3/

    Credit where it’s due

    I had been carrying a rough credit list in my head since the storyboard, and I was wrong about two things in it. The first is billing order. Because he is my favourite, I had Gordon Warnecke as the opening cast card, on the reasonable grounds that Omar is the lead. In the actual film Daniel Day-Lewis is billed first and Gordon seventh, which is how 1985 saw it, and since I am re-imagining the titles rather than rewriting the contracts, that is how my version has to run. Day-Lewis moved to frame four and Warnecke to five.

    The second is the production card. I had it as Working Title alone. It is Working Title and SAF Productions, made for Channel 4, so the opening is now three cards rather than two: Channel Four Television, then a Working Title production, then in association with SAF Productions.

    There are thirteen cards in total. I had drafted seventeen and cut four, because at ninety seconds anything beyond thirteen flashes past too quickly to read. Derrick Branche, Souad Faress and Richard Graham all came out. They would be on an end roller if this film had one.

    In total, I went through seven versions in an attempt to get it right (in so far as I have) and the first iteration with titles can be seen here:

    James had asked for ‘dynamic typography’ and I was pleased with the result – frankly, I wasn’t certain a few weeks ago that I’d get this far with this project.

    Dynamic typography means the type carries meaning through how it moves, not only through what it says. A credit that fades up is static type that happens to be sitting on a timeline. A credit that assembles the way the pictures assemble is doing some work.

    The temptation here is obvious, and it is to show off. Kinetic type is the easiest place in a title sequence to do something clever that nobody asked for, and my artwork is already calm and flat and deliberately unhurried. So I gave myself a narrow brief. The type moves the way the machine moves, and it never moves for its own sake.

    Three behaviours, each borrowed from something the washing machine already does.

    1. Tracking close. The letters start spread wide and gather as the card settles. This is the drum: things fly apart, then come back together. It also solves a practical problem, in that widely spaced type is hard to read in motion and tight type is hard to read against a busy picture, so moving between the two gives you a moment of each.
    2. Per character offset. The letters do not all arrive at once. A range selector walks along the line so each one fades and lifts a few frames after the one before it. This is the tumble, because objects passing the porthole go by in sequence and never all at the same time. It is about eight frames across a whole line, so it reads as a ripple rather than a wave.
    3. The settle. The ripple shortens as the sequence goes on. Eight frames on the first card, two by the time we reach the folded laundry and the door. By then nothing in the picture is moving either, and the type has stopped fidgeting along with it.

    If, like me, you have watched the version above on YouTube, you will notice that not all of the titles were legible – while I liked the colours and general design the main title itself wasn’t sufficiently bold or, indeed, ‘beautiful’. The shots that worked best were the ones sitting on a navy background. Everywhere else I had put flat type straight onto a painted, faceted, mid tone picture with nothing between the two, and it only survived where the painting happened to be empty and dark. Moving the cards around would not have fixed it either, because frames five, six and eight have no empty quarter to move into.

    For the next version, I moved to include a piece of ink navy, slightly tilted, with uneven edges, drawn to fit that card’s own text and sliding in six frames ahead of it. You won’t notice but I also changed the typeface, or at least I tried to. Poppins has perfectly circular bowls and even strokes, which reads soft and contemporary against artwork built entirely from straight edges. A condensed face would sit better and carry far more ink at the same height, which matters on a busy frame. I picked Oswald, spent a cheerful half hour failing to install it, and discovered via a diagnostic script that every title I had looked at for two days had quietly been Arial Bold. Having now seen it against the shards, Arial Bold is doing a perfectly respectable job, so Arial Bold is staying. Not every decision has to be the one you planned and i think this works well and I don’t think sits as an admition of defeat. Though maybe it is but I didn’t want to sweat the small stuff!

    The neon sign

    In an early version of this project, I made a neon logo – with ‘Beautiful’ in pink script, MY in cyan, LAUNDRETTE in yellow block capitals, all on black. It had been sitting in a folder ever since, but I knew it would make the difference here.

    It is now the main title. Screened over the painted shopfront so the black drops out and only the glow lands, it stops being a caption laid over the picture and becomes the shop’s own sign, lighting up in the window I have just wiped clean. It switches on the way neon does, two stutters across six frames and then steady, with a faint hum on the opacity afterwards.

    This is better than what I had planned, and I would not have got there by designing forwards. I got there by going back through my own discarded work and finding that the thing I had made for a version of the project I abandoned fitted the version I ended up with.

    There is also now an end card, after the ninety seconds rather than inside them, with the neon logo glowing behind it. My name on my own work, which feels like the right place to put it: outside the film’s credits, not pretending to be part of them.

    The bit where it all fell over

    I have always been open about my use of AI and since I was introduced to it during the ‘Fundamentals’ module last year, it has been a revelation and I am noy ashamed of using it despite the anti-AI sentiment in the media (at least the MSM!) perhaps years in the frame during my professional life as the object of hatred of supermarket development has hardened me. I am not ashamed.

    Everything in these fourteen frames is built by script. I am not keyframing a hundred and fifty layers by hand. I describe what I want, Claude writes an ExtendScript file, I run it in After Effects, I look at what comes out, and I say what is wrong. Each pass takes minutes rather than hours, and the whole project is reproducible: if I lose the file, I rerun the scripts and get it back.

    Which I did have to do. After Effects crashed yesterday afternoon and took several hours of changes with it. Auto save was set to twenty minutes and five versions, which is not enough, and it is now ten and twenty. Recovery took one run of each script, because the work lives in the scripts rather than only in the project file. That is a real argument for working this way.

    The more instructive failure was smaller. For three rounds the names kept vanishing off cards. Each time there was a plausible explanation, each time it got redesigned, and each time something else broke. The actual cause was one undeclared variable: the script used the composition width in a dozen places and never said what it was. Every symptom followed from that single missing line, and three rounds of redesigning the alignment had been three rounds of fixing something that was never broken.

    What fixed it was not more thinking. It was a diagnostic that tried each step separately and printed what threw, and a mock version of After Effects that runs the scripts and catches that class of mistake in a second. Both should have existed three versions earlier. The lesson is not that AI makes mistakes, which is unremarkable, but that the way you catch them is the same as it has always been: stop theorising, get the error message, and build the thing that tells you the truth.

    Nine iterations

    In total – to date – I have downloaded and edited nine versions of the titles and the next video shows where I have got to:

    Next step: sound

    The pictures are done and the words are on them. What is missing is the thing that will decide whether any of it works, which is what you hear.

    There are three jobs. The music bed is already cut to ninety seconds at 96 BPM, which is why every edit lands on a downbeat, but it was chosen for the animatic and needs judging again now the pictures are finished. The sound effects from Week 4 are scratch, dropped in roughly to mark the beats, and need re-timing properly to what is actually on screen: the coin, the drawer, the drum filling, the spin, the door. And then the balance between the two, which is where a title sequence is usually won or lost. I need to test these and establish whether these are the sounds I want, whether it feels – to me at least – that the music works. This is my test for the ‘reading week’ break.

    The interesting question is what the sound is for. The brief says the piece should inform, educate and entertain about a time and a place. The pictures are doing the place. Ninety seconds of a laundrette in 1985 South London, is a lot of information to carry in sound alone, and the obvious temptation is period pop. I am not sure that is right. A launderette has its own music, which is a drum turning and water moving and a coin dropping into a slot, and I suspect the piece is better served by leaning into that than by putting a familiar record over the top of it.

    Credits and tools

    My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), directed by Stephen Frears, written by Hanif Kureishi, produced by Sarah Radclyffe and Tim Bevan for Working Title and SAF Productions, made for Channel 4. The credits in my sequence are the film’s own. The pictures are not. This is a student re-imagining made for Motion Graphics MOD009754 at Anglia Ruskin University, and nothing in it is endorsed by or connected to the original production.

    Made with. Adobe After Effects 2026, with every frame assembled by ExtendScript rather than by hand. Still artwork generated in Canva and art directed against a style board of my own. Claude for the scripting, the credit research, the diagnostics and a good deal of arguing about where the title should go.

    Typeface. Arial Bold, by accident and then on purpose. I didn’t like Poppins, Oswald was the second plan.

    The prompt, roughly. Every piece of artwork in the sequence was generated against one unchanging house style: a bold modern gouache and acrylic painting, faceted and cubist influenced, flat painterly illustration with visible directional brush strokes and matte paint texture, every surface shattered into angular geometric facets, hard edged deep indigo outlines, flattened and tilted perspective. Explicitly not photographic, no film grain, no 3D render, no gritty realism. A fixed palette of nine colours, sampled from the benchmark frame rather than invented: ink navy, laundry cream, powders orange, vermilion, drum turquoise, deep teal, ochre sand, brick brown and pale sage. Each element was generated in isolation on a plain grey ground so it could be cut out and animated separately.

    Previous weeks: Week 3, the storyboard and Week 4, the animatic.

  • Motion Graphics: Week 4 (Part 3)

    Nick Gellatly

    My Beautiful Laundrette titles — where we are

    I worked on the After Effects piece this afternoon and created a number of ‘assets’ ready to animate them for the titles sequence.

    I’m working towards a 90 second opening title sequence for My Beautiful Laundrette (1985, dir. Stephen Frears, written by Hanif Kureishi), re-imagined for 2026. Fourteen frames, one wash cycle from coin to open door. Frames 13 and 14 are an optional coda beyond the 90 seconds. I am starting to wonder if 90 seconds is long enough but I will work towards that at this stage.

    The style

    Bold modern gouache and acrylic painting, faceted and cubist-influenced. Flat painterly illustration, visible brush strokes, every surface broken into angular facets, hard deep-indigo outlines, flattened tilted perspective. Explicitly not photographic, no grain, no 3D, no social realism.

    Palette: ink navy #121D27, laundry cream #F0CC96, powders orange #DE802D, vermilion #C0421A, drum turquoise #3F7D75, deep teal #2A5350, ochre sand #D5AF75, brick brown #663E26, pale sage #89A99B. Held back for later frames: turmeric #CB8D28, coral #C28E6D.

    Typography is Route A from the style board: Poppins Bold, all caps, tracked out. No lettering inside the artwork. All type is added in After Effects.

    The grid

    96 BPM against 24 frames per second. One bar is 2.5 seconds, exactly 60 frames, so every cut lands on a downbeat. 90 seconds is 36 bars, 2160 frames. The animatic and the music are both already cut to this grid. Do not move to 25 fps, it breaks the arithmetic.

    Slots in the master: F01 0:00, F02 0:05, F03 0:10, F04 0:15, F05 0:25, F06 0:35, F07 0:45, F08 0:52.5, F09 1:00, F10 1:07.5, F11 1:15, F12 1:22.5.

    State as of this post

    All fourteen frames built in After Effects, assembled into a 90 second master, with all credits set. Built by script rather than by hand.

    Assets were generated in Canva and downloaded as PNGs into three folders. After Effects keys the grey backgrounds out itself using Color Key, so there are no separate transparent versions to manage.

    The scripts

    ScriptWhat it does
    MBL_Build_Frame04.jsxbuilds frame 4 from its 16 PNGs
    MBL_Tune_Frame04.jsxlight, foam and object size on frame 4
    MBL_Build_Frames_09_10_12.jsxframes 9, 10 and 12 from 12 PNGs
    MBL_Tune_Frame10.jsxshrinks the cloth so the figures read
    MBL_Tune_Frame12.jsxenlarges the machine, tames the light
    MBL_Build_Remaining_Frames.jsxthe other ten frames from 17 PNGs
    MBL_Build_Master.jsxcuts all twelve together on the grid
    MBL_Add_Titles.jsxall the credit cards, re-runnable
    MBL_Open_My_Frames.jsxopens all fourteen frames as tabs

    Every build script has a block marked TUNE at the top. Changing a number there, undoing in After Effects and running again is the way to adjust anything.

    Earlier output

    Animatic rendered and posted at https://youtu.be/LYVw-TeCt8I (see previous post in this series: https://theoldtimes.co.uk/2026/10/14/motion-graphics-week-4-part-2/ )

  • Immersive Storytelling: Week 4 (Part 2)

    Nick Gellatly

    Week 4, Part 2: Projection, play and the phygital

    Immersive Storytelling workshop, 15 October 2026

    What happened

    Part 1 covered Bare Conductive and SUE’s foot. The earlier session – as well as apart of the afternoon – looked at two overlapping ideas: projection mapping and the “phygital”.

    Projection mapping, also called spatial augmented reality (Bimber and Raskar, 2005), turns real objects into screens. Software maps digital content onto an irregular surface, so a building, a car or a dinner plate seems to move, change or dissolve.

    I am familiar with the use of Projection Mapping through the work of the pressure group, ‘Led by Donkeys’ which has used this medium effectively – notably using the white cliffs of Dover as a backdrop:

    As you can see in this video, with Projection Mapping, unlike VR, no headset is needed, and a whole crowd can share the illusion at once.

    “Phygital” joins physical and digital. It describes experiences where tangible things and digital interaction work as one journey: a QR code on a clothes rail, a stadium app that brings food to your seat. Projection mapping is one of its most powerful tools.

    We then looked at alternative controllers. These are game inputs that aren’t a joypad, from arcade dance mats to the Wii remote, and I’d argue the wiggly-wire game at a village fete belongs here too. Shake That Button showed what this looks like as installation art, with Trees of Life and Hi-5 Heroes. Makey Makey, developed at the MIT Media Lab (Silver and Rosenbaum, 2012), and SPOKE boards from Media Services let us turn everyday objects into triggers using crocodile clips and the body’s own conductivity. The theremin made a guest appearance as the original touchless instrument. The session’s motto was “thinkering”, thinking through making, and Emily’s instruction was clear: don’t expect polished outcomes. See Part 1 of this week’s post for my attempt at an alternative controller: https://theoldtimes.co.uk/2026/10/15/immersive-storytelling-week-4-part-1/

    The afternoon brought ARU’s placements team. They talked about internships, enterprise placements through the Anglia Ruskin Enterprise Academy, and job platforms including Handshake, Higherin and Bright Network.

    So what?

    I’m not a gamer, and I’ll admit the alternative controllers felt foreign at first. But “thinkering” is close to how I already work. Ingold (2013) describes making as a correspondence between maker and material rather than a plan imposed on it, and Resnick and Rosenbaum (2013) argue that tinkerable materials invite people to explore rather than follow instructions. For an analogue creator that’s reassuring: the crocodile clip is the gateway drug.

    The real value was seeing how these tools could serve In the Beginning Was the Word rather than distract from it. Three ideas stood out:

    • A touch-to-play rock. A Makey Makey wired to a replica fossil or handling specimen (never a real one) could trigger Crystal Formation’s entrance. Visitors would literally make contact with the past, and the act of touching becomes the story’s first beat.
    • Hi-5 for the in crowd. Hi-5 Heroes suggests a conductive high five between two people. Two visitors wearing green carnations could complete a circuit together and unlock hidden content. It’s the queer dress code turned into a game mechanic, and it’s consensual and deniable, which matters for people who don’t want to be outed.
    • A glimpse of projection. Even a small projection onto a mineral or a label could show the “left ear, right ear” idea visually, with the official label dissolving into the private life behind it. That may be beyond this prototype, but it’s worth sketching for the pitch.

    One small moment made me smile. The placements adviser wore a rainbow badge, an everyday example of exactly the kind of quiet signal my project is built on. Codes are all around us once you look.

    Experiment: Mary, Queen of Scots at Peterborough Cathedral

    In the spirit of “don’t expect polished outcomes”, this week I also made a short film of Mary, Queen of Scots: The Exhibition at Peterborough Cathedral, where Mary was first buried in 1587. The videography is rough, but as an experiment in storytelling it taught me a lot.

    I provided the footage, the visit, the editorial direction and the narration. ChatGPT helped with footage selection, sequencing, script development, stabilisation, sound mixing and subtitles.

    The key decision came when I reviewed the first draft. It followed my route through the door, so it recorded my visit rather than Mary’s life. I asked for a chronological structure instead, which turned a travelogue into a historical narrative. That taught me to judge an edit against its purpose rather than accept what the AI handed back.

    My queer and progressive Christian perspective shaped the script. I wanted to acknowledge the misogyny and religious prejudice Mary faced while recognising her agency and how contested the evidence about her is. Documentary is full of ethical choices about language, emphasis and representation, and those choices are the same ones I’m making about the queer lives in the Sedgwick.

    Recording my own voice gave the film a personal warmth. Removing my countdown, reducing camera shake and adding subtitles showed how technical choices shape accessibility. The AI-generated, Renaissance-style music gives atmosphere, not historical evidence, and I’ve labelled it that way. The collaboration let me make something beyond my current editing skills, but the responsibility stayed with me: choosing the perspective, questioning drafts and judging whether the finished film said what I meant.

    Now what?

    • Ask the Sedgwick on Monday whether there’s a handling specimen or replica I could wire up.
    • Keep ‘thinkering’. Polish can come later; the ideas come from making.

    References

    Bimber, O. and Raskar, R. (2005) Spatial Augmented Reality: Merging Real and Virtual Worlds. Wellesley, MA: A K Peters.

    Ingold, T. (2013) Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. London: Routledge.

    Resnick, M. and Rosenbaum, E. (2013) ‘Designing for tinkerability’, in Honey, M. and Kanter, D. (eds) Design, Make, Play: Growing the Next Generation of STEM Innovators. New York: Routledge, pp. 163–181.

    Silver, J. and Rosenbaum, E. (2012) ‘Makey Makey: improvising tangible and nature-based user interfaces’, Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction (TEI ’12). New York: ACM, pp. 367–370.

  • Immersive Storytelling: Week 4 (Part 1)

    Nick Gellatly

    SUE’s Foot, an Alt Controller

    This morning I made a dinosaur foot out of cardboard, wired it to a circuit board, and taught it to burp. In a single class session it went from flat brown card to a working touch controller with three toes and three sounds. I’m not a very technical person and I did take plenty of advice but I am excited that it worked.

    The task was to make an alternative controller: a way of triggering something digital that isn’t a keyboard, a mouse or a touchscreen. It was purely experimental, which made for a fun Thursday morning and builds on both my knowledge and understanding of what I am capable of doing with the right direction.

    I don’t think it will have a place in the project for the Sedgwick Museum – at least not the prototype – but it has encouraged me to look again at my project and to think about how I can make the project more creative and more immersive. As the audio play is , In the Beginning Was the Word, includes SUE the T. rex, SUE got the job of being my first controller.

    Making the foot

    There was plenty of cardboard and a cardboard cutter, so the controller became a footprint. Three toes, a broad heel, about the size of an A4 sheet. Everyone knows what to do with a fossilised footprint. You put your hand on it.

    On the front I painted a claw on each toe in red, and drew a line of little three-toed tracks walking away up the middle. Those are bird prints. Birds are living dinosaurs, so the tracks are SUE’s descendants heading off into the world. It is a small “we were always here” joke, which is more or less the thesis of the whole audio play.

    The back was the engineering drawing. I marked a patch on each toe and a square on the heel with “FOIL”, which is about as technical as my plans get.

    Wiring it up

    The plan changed halfway through, I started out planning a Makey Makey. That works by completing a circuit through your body: one hand on an earth strip (the foil heel), a finger on a toe, and the board sends a keypress to a laptop running Scratch. Then the Bare Conductive Touch Board appeared to make the plan simpler. The Touch Board senses touch, so there is no earth to hold and no laptop needed. It plays MP3s straight off its own microSD card. Each of its electrodes is matched to a track by file name, so touching electrode E0 plays TRACK000.MP3, E1 plays TRACK001.MP3, and so on.
    The build ended up as:

    1. Kitchen foil wrapped round the tip of each toe, front and back, so a fingertip lands on it.
    2. A crocodile clip lead from each toe to its own electrode: green, yellow and red, one per toe.
    3. A small speaker into the board’s headphone socket.
    4. USB in for power, switch on, touch a toe.
    5. The heel foil turned out to be unnecessary. I am keeping it as a monument to the Makey Makey plan.

    By the second test the board and speaker were sitting on the foot itself, and the claws had gone green. It makes the whole thing one object you could hand to someone, rather than a foot with a tangle of wires trailing off the edge of the desk.

    Three toes, three noises

    I downloaded three soundeffects onto the card:

    • a burp – in lieu of a roar (3 seconds)
    • a whoop – a kind of alarm sound (about 20 seconds, the long one)
    • a woodpecker laugh – because it made me laugh too (4 seconds)

    The test demonstrated that touching a toe makes something happen, and a burp proves that very clearly. There is also something disarming about an object that answers back, and rudely at that!

    I filmed a short test, about 20 seconds. In this video you can see the moment that matters: a hand hovers, a finger lands on a claw, and the foot makes a noise. Each toe plays its own sound.

    What the foot taught me

    The biggest lesson is that touch can change how you listen. Pressing a claw to hear a voice could be a means to ask SUE a question.

    A few smaller ones:

    • The object tells you what to do. Nobody needs instructions for a footprint. A good controller explains itself through its shape.
    • Capacitive beats circuit, for this. The Touch Board needed no earth strip and no laptop, which means fewer things for a museum visitor to get wrong.
    • Length matters. The 20-second whoop felt long next to the 3-second burp. Spoken lines will need to be short, or the visitor’s finger will wander off before the story ends.
    • Plan B is still a plan. The Makey Makey route would have worked too. The heel foil can stay as proof.

  • Motion Graphics: Week 4 (Part 2)

    Nick Gellatly

    Building the Animatic

    Since the very beginning of first year, I have been admiring Adobe tools very nervously from a safe distance and, as you will see in Part 1 of my Week 4 blog, I was no less frightened of After Effects. The workshop in Week 3 was very useful but I will not pretend to be proficient and it has taken me quite a while and a lot of step-by-step guidance from ClaudeAI – acting as a digital users guide – but finally, and rather proudly, I can show you 90 seconds of a film:

    Before you ask, it is not supposed to be animated – this is simply a stepping stone along the way to creating a new title sequence for ‘My Beautiful Laundrette 2026’.

    Starting with an animatic

    Having finished fourteen storyboard frames, the obvious next step felt like opening the first one and animating it. I am glad I did not. I had no real idea yet which frames needed movement and which could sit quietly, and I would have spent a week making something beautiful in the wrong place.

    An animatic is the cheapest possible version of the finished piece. All the stills in order, at the right lengths, with rough sound underneath, so that you can watch the shape of the thing before committing to any of it. If it does not hold as a slideshow it will not hold once animated either.

    Two things I learned before I started

    The first was disappointing. My frames are flat paintings, and to animate them I need their elements on separate layers: the water turning independently of the objects, the flag moving separately from the newspaper. Canva has a layer separation tool, so I tried it on my benchmark image. It gave me six rectangular blocks, which is to say the left wall, the floor, the bench, the machine, the right edge and the porthole, and not one clean cut-out of anything I needed.

    That has changed how I will make the rest of my assets. Rather than generating a finished picture and taking it apart, I will generate each element on its own against a plain background. More images, but far less unpicking, and I will own the layers from the start.

    The second thing was more cheerful, and it was arithmetic.

    I had already chosen 96 beats per minute for the soundtrack, because ninety seconds at that tempo is exactly thirty-six bars. What I had not noticed was what happens at 24 frames per second. One bar becomes exactly sixty frames, and one beat exactly fifteen. Set the composition to 24fps, place a marker every sixty frames, and every cut in the sequence falls on a downbeat without any further thought. Had I used 25fps, which would have been my instinct as a British default, a bar would have been 62.5 frames and nothing would ever have lined up.

    It is a small decision, made for a musical reason, and it quietly organised the entire edit.

    Learning to write scripts

    This is the part of the week I had not anticipated.

    After Effects will run scripts. You write a file, choose File, Scripts, Run Script File, and it carries out whatever you have described. I had never written one, and I was not expecting to start now.

    I began with the markers, because there were twelve of them and each one needed the playhead moved to an exact frame with no layer selected. Entirely possible by hand, and entirely possible to get wrong without noticing. Once that worked I wrote one to import the twelve stills, stack them so that each frame covers the one before it, and set all their start times. Then one for the audio, and finally one for the render.

    What surprised me was not the time saved, although there was plenty of that. It was that writing the scripts made me say precisely what a correct result looked like. The marker script checks that the composition really is 24fps and 2160 frames before it does anything. The build script tells me when a file is missing rather than leaving a silent gap. The render script insists the audio output is switched on, which is the usual way people produce a perfectly good silent video and only discover it after uploading.

    I have spent a long career writing processes down for other people to follow. It had not occurred to me that doing the same thing for a computer would make me think more clearly about my own work.

    The render script did not work the first time, incidentally. The solution was to write a second version that reported what it was doing at each stage rather than stopping quietly, and the fault became obvious within a minute.

    A small technique worth remembering

    I will note this down because I will certainly forget it.

    Place all twelve stills in the timeline with frame one at the bottom of the stack and frame twelve at the top, then set each layer to begin at its own cut point. Because the later frames sit above the earlier ones, each new frame simply covers the last. There are no out points to trim and no gaps to chase.

    I had expected to spend the evening dragging the ends of layers about. Stacked this way round, there is nothing to drag.

    Sound

    Everything here is scratch audio, which is to say rough and temporary.

    There is a click track at 96 beats per minute to keep the edit honest, and a washing machine, a coin drop and a low bass note from Freesound, filtered to Creative Commons Zero so that there are no licensing questions when it goes online.

    For music I used a track called India from Bensound. It runs at 99.5 beats per minute, which sounds close enough until you work out that it drifts around three and a half seconds away from the picture over ninety seconds, putting every cut in the second half slightly out. Slowing it by three and a half per cent corrects it entirely and cannot be heard.

    There was a piece of luck as well. The track opens quietly, builds through its middle and reaches its peak between sixty and ninety seconds. My sequence is muted and fractured at the start, with the full spin arriving at sixty seconds. The music becomes loud exactly where the pictures do, with no editing at all.

    I should be honest that this is placeholder music, and probably not the right answer. I noted earlier that a stock track called India risks labelling the South Asian part of this story rather than building it in, and that is still true. What I actually want is the collision between the Southall bhangra scene and the synth pop of the same year, both of which were genuinely the sound of London in 1985. That is work for later, but it is a better idea than anything I will find in a library.

    What the animatic has told me

    Watching it through is the first time this has felt like a piece of film rather than a folder of pictures, and three things became clear that were not clear on paper.

    The quiet frames in the middle hold for longer than I had feared, which means less animation than I had budgeted for. The spin at sixty seconds carries most of the weight, so that is where the effort should go. And the ending arrives a little too quickly, which I had suspected but could not be sure of until I could watch it.

    That is what an animatic is for. It turns opinions into observations.

    Next comes separating the assets properly, one element at a time, and discovering whether a painted washing machine can be persuaded to turn.

    References, Credits and Prompts

    Film
    My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), directed by Stephen Frears, written by Hanif Kureishi. This is a student re-imagining of its opening titles and has no connection to the original production.

    Music
    “India” by Bensound. Music by Bensound.com. Free licence with attribution. Slowed by 3.5 per cent for this project to match the sequence tempo of 96 BPM.

    Sound effects
    All from Freesound, filtered to Creative Commons Zero.

    Click track
    Generated for this project at 96 BPM. Not a library file.

    Images
    All fourteen storyboard frames generated with AI image tools, directed to a written style specification of my own. See the prompt section below.

    Typeface
    Poppins, by the Indian Type Foundry. Designed by Jonny Pinhorn with Ninad Kale, Shiva Nallaperumal, Michelle Parmar, Rahul Gajjar and Liang Hai. Released under the SIL Open Font Licence. Chosen for the titles, which are not yet in this version.

    Tools
    Adobe After Effects, Canva, Gemini, ChatGPT and Claude.

    Prompts

    As with my other posts, I am recording the prompts behind the images. Every one of the fourteen frames was generated from the same style instruction, with only the contents of the drum changed between them. Keeping the style text identical is what holds the sequence together.

    The house style, used unaltered on all fourteen frames:

    A bold modern gouache and acrylic painting on canvas, 16:9 landscape, faceted cubist-influenced style. Flat painterly illustration, visible directional brush strokes, matte paint texture. Every surface shattered into angular geometric facets and triangular planes of contrasting colour. Hard-edged deep-indigo outlines. Flattened, tilted perspective. NOT photographic, no film grain, no 3D render, no vector clip art, no gritty realism.

    PALETTE exactly: ink navy #121D27, laundry cream #F0CC96, warm orange #DE802D, vermilion #C0421A, turquoise #3F7D75, deep teal #2A5350, ochre sand #D5AF75, brick brown #663E26, pale sage #89A99B.

    No people, no faces, no hands. No readable words, no lettering, no logos.

    One frame instruction, as an example. This is frame four, the benchmark image, which sets the standard the other thirteen are judged against:

    SUBJECT: the interior of a 1980s South London laundrette. A washing machine dominates the centre and its large circular porthole is a window onto a churning world painted inside the circle.

    INSIDE THE PORTHOLE, a strong anticlockwise spiral of turquoise and white painted water. The objects caught in that spiral stay whole, large, solid and instantly recognisable, clearly separated from one another against the water, tilted and rotated by the spin but never dissolved or abstracted into it. Use only these six objects, generously sized and well spaced: a torn fragment of a red, white and blue flag broken into a few large angular shards; a folded newspaper with blocks of solid black standing in for a headline; a short row of brick terraced houses tipped on its side; a whisky bottle and tumbler; two or three loose banknotes; a panel of bright South Asian block-print pattern in turmeric yellow and coral. Leave clear turquoise water between the objects so that each reads cleanly.

    COMPOSITION: the porthole sits slightly right of centre and is large. The left quarter is a calm flat plane of cream and indigo wall with nothing in it, deliberately empty for titles.

    On the saturation. The palette stays the same across all fourteen frames, but the first three hold it at low saturation with navy and ochre dominant, the middle frames let the colour arrive, and the last four run at full strength. Held at arm’s length you can see the temperature rise across the sequence.

    A note on how this was made. The images are AI generated. The concept, the metaphor, the storyboard, the decision to abandon my first visual style, the palette and every art direction choice inside those prompts are mine, as is the build in After Effects. Where I have used AI to research, to draft or to generate, I have said so, and the full record sits in my module development log.

  • Motion Graphics: Week 4 (Part 1)

    Nick Gellatly

    Finding a Visual Style

    This week had one job: decide what this thing actually looks like. I went in thinking that was a research problem. It turned out to be a taste problem, and the two are not the same.

    Starting with research

    I began by asking both ChatGPT and Gemini for visual directions for a 2026 re-imagining of My Beautiful Laundrette, with three clichés ruled out from the start: VHS-glitch eighties nostalgia, generic neon synthwave, and the literal Union Jack.

    They came back with six directions each. Twelve ideas, and far too many to work with.

    So I reduced them to a single page of A4. It turned out the two sets largely overlapped, which was reassuring. Twelve became five real choices: glass and reflection, degraded photocopied print, bureaucratic paperwork, cloth and dye, and a hallucinatory two-worlds-at-once option that both models rated hardest and Gemini told me outright to avoid.

    The one-page reduction was useful and it showed twelve directions is impossible – it was easier to look at fewer options. The two models disagreed in an interesting way. ChatGPT argued from art history and was strong on why an image means something. Gemini argued from chemistry and kit and was strong on how to build it. Neither was wrong. They disagreed because the brief was genuinely open, which is the point of Week 4.

    261012_Visual_Style_Decision_SheetDownload

    The style I built and then binned

    I committed to a hybrid: glass and reflection for the structure, degraded print for the contents, with a cyanotype blue bleeding into magenta. The governing rule was the one I had written in Week 3, begin in social realism, let the inner world leak out.

    It was a sound argument. The research supported it. I generated a benchmark image to that specification.

    And I disliked looking at it.

    The first attempt came back as a glossy black sci-fi portal. The second overcorrected into a clean modern appliance. The third was actually good: flat fluorescent light, grimy enamel, a blotted newspaper, rust and limescale, one thin bleed of magenta at the edge. Technically it did everything I had asked for.

    It was also bleak, grey and not mine.

    I had reasoned my way into somebody else’s taste. The grit came from two AI briefs and a rule I had written down because it sounded rigorous. Nowhere in that chain did anyone ask whether I actually enjoy looking at grey.

    What I actually wanted

    A few days earlier I had made some paintings in Gemini while thinking about something else entirely. Flat gouache and acrylic, every surface shattered into angular facets, saturated colour, bold indigo outlines, flattened perspective, checkerboard floors.

    Looking at them next to the grey benchmark, the answer was obvious. And annoyingly, the faceted style sits much closer to the Political Pop and modern Indian art I had already identified back in Week 1 than anything the AI research produced. The material was in my own notes from day one. I just talked myself out of it.

    The transformation survives the change. It now runs from fractured to whole rather than from grey to neon. Early frames are muted and broken into shards. Later frames resolve into saturated, harmonious colour. Same journey, better paint.

    The benchmark and the style board

    I rebuilt the benchmark in the new style, focusing on storyboard frame 4, Britain going into the wash.

    It took three attempts again, for a more interesting reason this time. The first was legible but static, a tidy pop-art poster. The second had proper brushwork and a real anticlockwise vortex, but the contents of the drum had dissolved into soup. Beautiful, and telling no story at all.

    The third put the first version’s contents inside the second version’s spin. Flag shard, newspaper, terraced houses tipped on their side, whisky bottle, banknotes and a block-print panel, all whole and readable, all turning. The left quarter kept flat and empty, because that is where the credits go.

    From that one image I built a style board with everything on it: palette, typography, environments, characters, recurring motifs and the rules.

    Every colour on the board was sampled from the benchmark rather than invented. Ink navy #121D27, laundry cream #F0CC96, Powders orange #DE802D, vermilion #C0421A, drum turquoise #3F7D75, deep teal #2A5350, ochre sand #D5AF75, brick brown #663E26 and pale sage #89A99B, with turmeric and coral held back for the later frames. Every motif tile will be cropped from the benchmark too, which answers my own Week 3 note that a style board should not become a scrapbook of things I like.

    Typography

    Poppins, by the Indian Type Foundry, released under an open licence so there is no rights problem.

    It is geometric, so its O is a true circle and its lowercase a is single storey. On a sequence built around a porthole and a rotating drum, the letters are made of the same shape as the subject. Bold at 118px with wide tracking for the title, Regular and SemiBold for credits, and all type added in After Effects rather than painted into the artwork.

    There is a pleasing coincidence in the foundry, though I am wary of overclaiming it. Poppins ships with a Devanagari companion, while Urdu, which a British Pakistani family in 1985 would more likely read, uses Nastaliq. So the connection is nice rather than meaningful, and I would rather say that than pretend otherwise.

    Fourteen frames, remade

    With the style fixed, I rebuilt all fourteen storyboard frames using the same style string, changing only what is in the drum and letting the saturation climb across the sequence. You can see the frames below in this video sequence:

    Held at arm’s length, you can see the temperature rise across the page. That is the clearest evidence I have that changing direction was the right call.

    Frame 10 was the real test: Omar and Johnny forming out of the swirling cloth as two silhouettes, foreheads almost touching. No faces, no literalism. It carries more feeling than any of the grey versions managed. The faceting can do tenderness as well as politics, which is what I needed to know.

    Sound, and a useful discovery

    I also started thinking about the soundtrack, and realised my Week 3 audio plan had the same problem as the visuals: it was written for the grey version.

    The structural idea survives. The laundrette generates the rhythm rather than music being laid underneath. What changes is the temperature.

    I found two things worth having. The first is that 96 BPM makes everything line up: one bar is 2.5 seconds, ninety seconds is exactly 36 bars, and at 24 frames per second one bar is exactly 60 frames. Put a marker every 60 frames and every cut lands on a downbeat. (Thank you Google).

    The second is the Pet Shop Boys. Their re-recorded “West End Girls” came out in October 1985 and hit number one within eight weeks, so it was genuinely the sound of the street this film is set on. They also wrote music for the 2019 stage adaptation of My Beautiful Laundrette. I am not sure whether I will use this but it provides a production brief: melancholy and danceable at the same time, which is the tone problem I have.

    That sits alongside the Southall bhangra scene of the same moment, and the two together give me the collision the whole piece is about. Two kinds of British music from the same city in the same year, meeting inside a washing machine.

    What I take from Week 4

    Pre-production is still the creative work. But this week added something sharper. I am not 100% certain that I will be able to make each of the ‘assets’ this project requires and I have hedged on this for 48 hours before starting.

    Research can tell you what is possible but it cannot tell you what you want. I built a careful, well-evidenced argument for a style and then found I did not want to look at the thing it produced, and no amount of further research would have told me that. Only making the image did.

    “Second year is supposed to be about taking risks”. I had assumed that meant choosing something difficult. It turns out it also means being willing to bin a week’s reasoning when the evidence in front of your eyes disagrees with it.

    Coming soon – the animatic! But in the meantime there are a lot of assets to make:

    Back to front, as the worked example. Every other frame follows the same logic.

    1. Laundrette back wall, faceted planes
    2. Checkerboard floor
    3. Bench
    4. Machine body, orange casing
    5. Light wedge, the only “lighting” element, a flat painted shape whose opacity you animate
    6. Drum interior, dark
    7. Water spiral, square, larger than the porthole
    8. Flag shard
    9. Newspaper
    10. Terraced houses
    11. Whisky bottle and tumbler
    12. Banknotes
    13. Block-print panel
    14. Foam flecks
    15. Porthole bezel, chrome ring, sits in front of everything inside
    16. Glass highlight
    17. Type