This year I coordinated three features: Watcha Want, Runaway, and The Skins Game, which is wrapping now. Production coordinating means keeping dozens of moving pieces landing where they need to be: crew, travel, hotels, cast contracts, accounting, equipment, schedules, and putting out all the small fires before they get big. I’m good at it, and it funds everything else I want to build.
Now I’m switching back to the work that’s mine.
BRINGING A STORY TO SCREEN
On my own time, I get to choose the stories and bring the creative vision to life for the ones that intrigue me.
I’ve chosen to produce origin-story videos set in the world of Her Immortal Gaze, a paranormal romance series by Arden James, on The House Fractal YouTube channel. These are the backstories behind some of the characters in that series.
You can read the short stories for free. Start with the first two: What Endures and Seeing is Believing
You can find the the books on KOBO and AMAZON
WHAT’S NEXT: RHYNIE
The next video is “Not One of Us,” and is set partly at the Craw Stane complex at Rhynie, in Aberdeenshire. It was part of a Pictish power centre active from the late 4th to the mid-6th century AD. I’m reconstructing the two buildings that were excavated, the palisade, the standing stones, and the hillfort on Tap o’ Noth rising behind them. The archaeology comes first, and the story takes its liberties within what the excavation supports.
The story behind the Rhynie video, “Not One of Us,” is free to read.
I’m learning as I go.
The video itself is AI-assisted. I build the world in 3D, then create the video.
[Image 1: bare timber frame] Frame first.
BUT WHY?
I’m tired of needing someone else’s approval to bring my ideas to life. AI is what finally lets me play: I can build the stories that fascinate me on my own terms, and I’m learning in public as the tools and the industry change. I understand why so many in our business are wary of it, and I don’t think that fear is foolish. But the genie isn’t going back in the bottle. I’d rather work out how to use these tools to get better at what I do, and to level the field for creatives who don’t have access to big money. I don’t know where this leads. And honestly, that’s part of the appeal.
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Sources
The reconstruction is built primarily on:
• Noble, G (ed) 2026 Rhynie, A Powerful Place of Pictland: The development of a landscape of Pictish royal power from the Roman to the early medieval period. Edinburgh: Society of Antiquaries of Scotland. https://doi.org/10.9750/9781908332394
• Noble, G, Gondek, M, Campbell, E, Evans, N, Hamilton, D, Ross, A & Taylor, S 2019 ‘A powerful place of Pictland: interdisciplinary perspectives on a power centre of the 4th to 6th centuries AD’, Medieval Archaeology 63(1): 59–94.
Comparative buildings, as cited by the excavators:
• Close-Brooks, J 1986 ‘Excavations at Clatchard Craig, Fife’, Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland 116: 117–84.
• Kirby, M 2011 ‘Lockerbie Academy: Neolithic and Early Historic timber halls, a Bronze Age cemetery, an undated enclosure and a post-medieval corn-drying kiln in south-west Scotland’, Scottish Archaeological Internet Reports 46.
• Perry, D R 2000 Castle Park Dunbar: Two Thousand Years on a Fortified Headland. Edinburgh: Society of Antiquaries of Scotland.
• Carver, M, Garner-Lahire, J & Spall, C 2016 Portmahomack on Tarbat Ness: Changing Ideologies in North-east Scotland, Sixth to Sixteenth Century AD. Edinburgh: Society of Antiquaries of Scotland.
• Strachan, D, Sneddon, D & Tipping, R 2019 Early Medieval Settlement in Upland Perthshire: Excavations at Lair, Glen Shee, 2012–17. Oxford: Archaeopress.
What’s excavated and what’s mine. The excavation found a rectangular setting of large post holes for Structure 1 (a building at least 9m × 5m, with traces of an interior division), charred oak and alder planks in Structure 3, and the Craw Stane standing on the line of the enclosure entrance. The rest is interpretation based on comparable sites: the turf walls, the doorway, the roof frame, the thatch, the lighting and the ritual scene. Roofs don’t survive in the ground, so no one can say for certain what this one looked like.
