Well today, among other things, I have learned how to use Openshot video editor. I am quite pleased with myself. The inbuilt Windows editor was brilliant for a complete newbie and prepared me for the extra tools Openshot has.
You can see the results later in the week.
Openshot gives you more tools - good!
But fine tuning espc trimming clips is less intuitive - bad.
Working out how to raise and lower the background volume was the most complicated bit.
The clips I film are on the selfie camera on my Huawei P20, which is incredibly good.
As a bonus, Beijing gets to see everything I film. #evangelism
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Covid19: It's not a sprint, it's a marathon.
Wait, no, it's a triathlon.
If so, we are entering the second leg, which looks to be even trickier than the first.
A few thoughts:
1/
My best guess is 3 periods of about 6mths each.
1 (Mar to Sep) Lockdown into unlockdown
2 (now till Easter) rolling restrictions
3 (Easter till summer 2021) into postCovid normality
2/
But the second 'leg' (now till Easter) will be more complex. And we enter it with our emotional resources already drained from the first leg.
It was great to go back to the cinema last night!
Tenet, though, was... okay? I don't quite know what to think.
Conceptually, really interesting.
Stylistically, amazing.
But confusing! Though like Inception it will probably reward multiple watches.
It was Bond meets Doctor Who, which is a cool vibe.
For me, though, it felt more like a feature length pilot for a TV show. Characters were a bit flat, almost as if you were going to learn more about them in future episodes.
If you would like a movie metaphor for churches during lockdown, here goes:
Marvel/Disney had a plan that Covid19 disrupted. Instead of adapting, they hit pause. Waiting for things to go back to normal.
DC/Warner, remarkably, seem to have used the crisis to reflect on what they had been doing, reboot and relaunch.
All the pop culture energy is flowing towards DC.
I know I say this a lot, but you waste a crisis by waiting for it to be over. Adapt, respond, learn, review, try some stuff.
One of the things that keeps a local church 'stuck' - unable to innovate effectively, move forward and engage with younger generations - is an unspoken tendency to prioritise the voices of older, well-established insiders.
1/
People who do this never think that's what they're doing. They just disregard out of hand the voices and opinions of those who CAN'T know as well as they do because those people are, well, younger, newer or outsiders.
2/
This is not to say church leaders, councils, etc ignore the voices of older, well-established insiders. It is to recognise that those are the voices who ASSUME they should be heard and will therefore speak louder. So, the risk is that those voices drown out all others.
3/
This is such an interesting article. There is clearly still an appetite for 'high church', especially among the more intellectual class in cities like London, Cambridge etc.
But enough to keep the lights on?
As @DouglasKMurray observes, atheists and agnostics can find churches like this far more palatable (right word? not sure) than informal contemporary churches like the one I am Vicar of.
But outside the cities it's difficult to see that there is enough interest for churches like this to survive. And if a church like this is closing, it's going to be tough even in the cities too.
I thought this was relatively uncontroversial. Sharing public information from around the world in the context of a novel, global pandemic seems sensible to me.
Just to be clear though...
Charts like these are not telling you what to do. They are telling us about how the virus has spread so far. Like it or not, churches of all sizes have certain risks 'baked in' due to the way we ran our gatherings pre-Covid19. Anyone who denies that is wrong.
Now, if we mitigate those risks, then it's all good. Or at least, it's likely to be less bad.
But mitigating those risks will vary in different contexts.
A small congregation in a large building is very different to a large congregation in a small building.