China Stories

Busy again.

22th June 2008, Gerald

Busy day today.

First up we met with Xiao. She is going to check our films in the edit to make sure that we edit what people are saying correctly. As you know Maria and I don't speak Mandarin and so we would have great difficulty knowing if we were cutting the wrong bit out of an interview. We have had all our interviews translated already and have these to hand at all times but Mandarin is a really complex language and to us, doesn't always read how it sounds. So even if the translation is written down in PinYin (Mandarin written with English characters) it is still really tough to follow. So Xiao is going to act as our translator in the edit. She seems pretty excited about our project and will join us every second day to keep us on the straight and narrow.

Next I had a catch up meeting with Nick, the head of Learning (who I believe you have already met via this site). It was my appraisal. Ai-ee! This is a bit like parents evening but instead of your teacher talking to your parents about you, your boss talks to you directly about how you are doing. We chatted about my work over the last year and talked about this project a fair amount as it has taken up a large part of the year (since my last appraisal). It was good to reflect upon the past wee while and to talk about how I feel things are going and the kind of things that I would like to be involved in over the next year or so.

After lunch Maria and I met with Trudy who is going to be producing the graphics for our programmes. She had been working on something which was based on an idea that I had before we went to China. It looks cool and we are really happy with it. We talked about how the single idea could be continued across all the films and so now it's up to Trudy to get to work on those. She is hopefully going to have a final version for one of the films finished on Friday. She seemed to be quite excited about our work together which was nice. If people are genuinely interested then it makes work a lot more fun.

I had another meeting about our project and how we can do a bit of promotion for it. It's all top secret just now - I'll let you know more when I can. Shhhhh!

Finally, it was back to my desk to get on with logging. Maria and I were last in, sitting in silence with our headphones on listening to Mandarin and typing furiously. Just another day at the office then.

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