On Making A Testimonial For A Friend

And what else I said (exclusive to Substack).

Today would have been Tazeen’s birthday.

I made this video as a kind of thank you to share on Instagram - where there’s a 90 second limit.

I’m posting it here too, not just because Tazeen was a journalist but to show something about the process of making the video - itself a kind of journalism.

The original audio was recorded at a public talk I gave about a year ago - a One Track Minds event at Wilton’s Music Hall. The talk lasted about 12 minutes, which means I had to cut the audio drastically to fit into this Instagram Reel.

The following short (and silent) video is made of screenshots taken inside iMovie on my desktop computer as I made the Reel.

I started with the original full-length audio, then painstakingly cut obviously unnecessary bits, then less obviously unnecessary bits, and finally moments of silence or other glitchy things just to reduce the length.

Next, I exported the much-sliced audio from iMovie as a new audio file of just under 1.5mins.

Then I imported lots of still images into iMovie - a mix of photos and drawings - and arranged them in approximately the right order to match the now-shortened audio.

You might wonder why I turned them on their side. Well, I did it so that when I came to export the video from iMovie, it would be upright (portrait, not landscape).

Here and there, I dropped a picture on top of others, as you can see in the thumbnails in the green timeline at the bottom.

I have never publicly shared the full recording of my talk at Wilton’s. I suppose I’m just a bit shy.

But today seems like a good day to share it.

I’m putting it behind the paywall because I feel safer with paying subscribers.