There was a deer straight ahead, and it looked at me the way you look at someone when you haven’t made a decision about them yet.
I looked back the same way. For a moment we were both reading each other, working out what each other meant, the way you do with a stranger before either of you has said a word.
I got my phone out, slowly, the way you’d reach for something in a room where someone’s sleeping. The deer decided I was harmless. It was right, mostly, and now there’s proof of it, an image, a few seconds of video, where nothing happens except two creatures deciding to trust each other.
The weather was not doing anything unusual. Warm, sunny, the ordinary kind of ‘good’ that a British summer manages a few times a year. Overhead, cumulonimbus building, tall, white and billowing.
Whitewash
I’ve been painting a room white. My son’s house, not mine. This room used to be his studio. He’s away just now, so I’ve taken it on as a good deed, because I’m handy with a paintbrush. The paint doesn’t ask for much except to be left alone to dry.
A paintbrush is like a small boat. You climb into it somewhere in the middle of the wall, you find yourself thinking about other things entirely, the way rivers think about the sea when the coast is many miles away.
There’s a particular kind of energy that comes from a week like this one. It’s the energy that comes after something’s been released rather than used up. I’ve noticed it in the painting, brush loaded, going wall to wall, and then somewhere in the middle I stopped thinking about the wall completely and started thinking about everything else that had been sitting quietly in the back of my mind. At the back of a very full week.
This energy isn’t restlessness. It’s closer to what a kettle feels, if a kettle could feel anything, once it’s finally allowed to whistle.
I thought about episode one of Houdini Window, which is actually a proof of concept, which is a polite way of saying it was a sketch of a fish before anyone had caught the fish. That was almost a year ago. The fish swam off and I let it go, because there was other work to do.
The Government contract ended last week, and this has been Week One of something with no name yet, with plenty of time to go fishing, metaphorically speaking.
Weather
You see, I used to fish the Trent at Newark as a kid, and the thing nobody tells you about fishing is that mostly, it’s just waiting. You sit there doing nothing and then all of a sudden, you get a bite.
Sound Design
I’ve been recording again. My recording setup has become the kind of thing that behaves, mostly. It used to fight me, tangle like a bad reel. But now, most of the time it just sits there, ready, float bobbing up and down in the mix.
I mixed the opening chapter to Houdini Window, and it’s nearly finished, the way a cake is nearly finished when it only needs the icing, which is either the smallest part or the largest part, depending on the type of cake.
I’ve started collecting my own voice, so that I can build an AI voice-clone. I said I would. I discovered I need three hours of it. Clean, like water you’d actually drink. Elevenlabs and Adobe Audition are the jars I’m keeping it in. I don’t think this voice belongs in Houdini Window, though. The characters there already have voices of their own, borrowed ones, and borrowed voices can get very possessive. This voice (my voice) just wants to do podcasts instead. And I promise not to sound too posh like my Houdini Window character, Laurie Lovelace.
Magic
There’s a character named Cordelia Kim who’s developing nicely in the later episodes. She doesn’t appear in episode one at all, and won’t, not even in passing. She belongs to episode two, when the story leaves the seaside and walks into a tech startup, where there’s a very different kind of magic going on.
But a character can be present in a story before she’s present in a scene, the way a person can be in a room before they’ve walked through the door, and that’s the kind of writing I’ve been doing all week.
This afternoon, I’m meeting Adrian face to face, for the first time in a year. In a Portuguese cafe, in Nottingham. The kind of place where you can talk for two hours over one coffee and nobody minds. We’ll have a few coffees and some cake. And we’ll talk about Houdini Window, obviously, because we always do, but about whatever else surfaces when we’re actually sat across a table instead of on our phones.
A year is a long time to wait for a face to face.
Whirlwind
Meanwhile, somewhere else entirely, a national care company took the training video, slide deck and checklist I made for them and put it all into their onboarding portal. This is a good result, it’s kind of like a stone that skips further than you expected it to.
A lot of former colleagues have been writing to me about ghosts on LinkedIn. Jobs that were posted and then quietly weren’t. Roles that existed for exactly as long as it took for some senior person to say ‘AI’ in a meeting.
In fact, engaging with LinkedIn has become a kind of seance. Everyone posting, everyone hoping someone real answers back. I don’t say much when I’m asked about it because everyone’s personal circumstances are different. And it would be a strange kind of rudeness to describe the weather to someone who’s still indoors.
So instead, I’ll just let you know I’m still here, I’m doing fine. I have a week that isn’t spoken for. Nobody’s diary has a claim on my Tuesday afternoon. It’s the first week like that in a long time, and I’m still getting used to it.
I think that’s what Week One has been all about, really. A lot came out of me these past few days. The way a held breath is released and leaves you feeling lighter rather than emptier.
The studio needed painting, so I painted it, the old recording needed finishing so I finished it. None of this was particularly urgent but all of it had been waiting. And there’s a particular kind of pleasure where the waiting things finally get their turn.
Connections
I don’t know what connects the deer to the studio, to Cordelia, to Adrian, to the onboarding collateral, to the ghosts on LinkedIn. Probably nothing? And that’s fine because Sherwood Forest doesn’t explain itself either. It just keeps on being a forest, evening after evening. And sometimes a deer walks through it. And sometimes I walk through it and I come out a little lighter than when I went in.
So, here I am, watching it all flow downstream, it’s calm and reflective, and when the rhythm of the float changes, I’ll know that it’s time to strike!
Anyway, ‘toodle-pip’ as we posh TV celebrities say. And remember…
You Make Magic Real
The Design intelligence Substack from Digital Producer Paul Fillingham.
Sound design by Studio-thinkamigo.
It’s here where we discuss the highs and lows of the creative process, from the very latest in AI-assisted design to digital storytelling in Houdini Window.