isheyelens

Category: Weeknotes

  • Weeknotes 2 | Week 30, 2026

    I was feeling guilty about starting weeknotes and not continuing them. This week, I was reading indieweb blogs in the few minutes that I had internet access on our trip. That’s when I came across Ahn‘s weeknotes.

    It struck me that this is my website, and I can write my weeknotes whenever it strikes me.

    Seeing

    We’re on a tour through Ladakh. The land here is stunning, and it changes constantly.

    I’m grateful for our friends who organised and are managing this trip so I can focus on photography and writing.

    Reading

    Lots of indieweb posts about information diets and weeknotes.

    It started with a post on Hacker News1 – Andros Fenollosa’s Emacs is a Lispboard. That led me to Elfeed Optimised Blogging, on to Jeremy Friesen’s A Walk Through My Digital Neighbourhood, and a few other pages on his media diet, then I was off to Tracy Durnell’s Choosing my pace by shaping my thinking spaces.

    Shortly before the trip, I came across Alex Towell’s Long Echo series of posts. He’s been thinking along the lines I have regarding preserving work and work process. I haven’t had time to dig through his entire corpus, but it is impressive.

    Watching

    Videos on YouTube and Instagram about the landslides and flashfloods in Ladakh, the rain across the country, and the student protests in New Delhi.

    Listening

    Music:

    • Lots of Bollywood on the tour bus,
    • Ears, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, and
    • Patterns of Consciousness, Caterina Barbieri.

    Podcasts:

    • Comfort relistens of episodes from 5–4 and If Books Could Kill.
    1. This is a firehose for me that I haven’t managed to get my consumption under control. It’s a great source of insightful commentary, but I have to remind myself that I don’t need to read every. single. post. ↩︎
  • Weeknotes #001, Week 13, 2024

    Weeknotes #001, Week 13, 2024

    It’s been a short week, with Holi on Monday, and Good Friday on, well, Friday. I’ve been trying to write a weeknote for the last two weeks and haven’t made any progress.

    Other than typing out so this week was…

    But I really wanted to keep a record of how we made Project Paper Heist.

    Let’s wind the clock back a little to give some context. A friend of ours has been writing a script for a little over two years. When we first heard him tell the story, Vaidehi was immediately excited and wanted to be involved. We pushed him to start working on this script.

    He wrote it. We went back and forth on the language, eventually settling on Marathi instead of Hindi because we felt that it might stand a better chance of a theatrical run as a Marathi film.

    For two years, we’ve been talking about the script and pitching it to various actors and investors. This is hard to do especially when everyone – writer/director and producers – are green. Everyone wants to work with proven talent. Filmmaking is a risky business, especially after the pandemic. Theatres have a lot of competition from OTTs, live-streaming, and YouTube. The gap between a film releasing in a theatre and it showing on TV or streaming has become so small that if audiences are even slightly iffy about the film, they tend to stay home and watch it from the comfort of their sofas.

    Lockdown forced a massive change in the industry.

    So, we’re all trying to figure out how to get a film made and seen by audiences among the deluge of media that’s being made and released every day.

    I’m not a fan of calling all that work “content”.

    Anyway, two weeks ago, our friend called us with great news. A very well respected actor had agreed to be a part of our film.

    That put the project into motion.

    In the last three weeks, we’ve brought on various heads of department who have been interested in the film or working with us. Friends who are professional writers are helping to get the script in the best shape that it could be. The call for casting has gone out, and auditions will happen soon. A lot of this work can be done because of the goodwill of our friends and colleagues. There isn’t a budget for it to not be that way.

    That brings us to this week. There was a snafu with one of our departments. A miscommunication between the HOD and me lead to everyone thinking that we needed to find a new person. Many frantic calls and negotiations ensued. Luckily, the mixup was sorted out before we shook hands with anyone else. All that was left was for me to make several sheepish phone calls thanking people for their time.

    Project Paper Heist is the first film that Vaidehi and I are producing on our own. With our previous projects, I’ve either been completely green and followed directions, or wore many hats and burned myself out. This time, we have started with a small team. It lets me focus on the areas where I can make a difference and trust that other tasks are being handled by other members of the team. It also takes pressure off me because I’m the only person on the team right now who doesn’t know Marathi. Everyone has been kind enough to talk in English or Hindi when I’m around, but it would be a challenge to get artists and HODs signed up without speaking the language that the film is in.