Here it is the result of one morning work on Saturday June 8th at Castle Park.

From this day's work there are a lot of resulting script notes that must go to the production document along with more conclusions and resources that would be needed. More comments on future posts!

Today a warm sun in Bristol finally gathered a group of 6 people for a big test on the Oppa! video project. We managed to plan, prepare and shot a 20 minutes take including transitions and different props. The video is already edited and it is still rendering so I will post it tomorrow!

For today, while you wait, I am publishing this new little test. A new attempt of the coordinated couple step with a "hip hit" that I explored further and improved with my girlfriend. First we tried to learn and reproduce the original step at normal speed. Then when we were more aware of the details we started to look into a way to translate to a slow movement. We tried the jump that comes first in a different take and we managed to find some good ideas. We are quite happy with the result of the jump. The other two steps in the movement are a very different thing. While it is still correct in terms of timing, the look and feel is quite difficult to achieve. I guess that we will need help from professional dancers at some point!

It is a short video, enjoy it.

We keep exploring how to shot gangnam style music video in one take dancing in slow motion and then speeding it up. This new test was made last Wednesday before the drama&improv class at the Folk house.

The resulting segment is very short and we made 4 attempts. I think the fourth one is clearly the best but it is far from good. We haven't rehearsed the step prior recording this, so we were learning the movement on the fly.

Tomorrow we are meeting to shot longer tests. Hopefully we will get some interesting footage and learn new things about how to develop the project.

Some different things have been happening along the last two days that I haven't talk about.

First of all, today I was at the Best of Britain Indie Meetup at Bristol. It has been great people there and the presentations have been very specific, focused and interesting. Which is something refreshing for me to see at these kind of events. Yay!

Yesterday, before the drama class started, we got to shot some new tests which I haven't edited yet. Hopefully I will do it tomorrow and publish them right away. Specially because we are meeting on Saturday 11:00 at Castle Park for more gangnam fun.

Three days ago I started a new small experiment involving AdWords and a 2€ daily budget. Testing names and phrases that could explain quickly what I am doing here. The idea is to see what ads have the higher Click-through rate (CTR). It can also bring people interested in reading the blog and subscribing. Right now there are only two ads running whith one of them having clearly a better CTR, actually more than twice the other. There are getting like 40 clicks each day right now. I will be creating new ads doing split tests until I get something interesting or I reach 50€ (that would be ok for at least 5 rounds of tweaking).

Today at drama class we were doing and exercise in which, in groups, we had to select a random sentence from a book and trying to incorporate it to an improvisation. It could be as a dialogue line or as inspiration for a character or a setting. I draw the sentence "there is no place for dancing corantos or gallantry here". I asked what "corantos" was but nobody knew anything. Because of the context of the context of the sentence we figured out it would be some kind of dance (captain obvious to the rescue!). So in the end, when doing the improv we were dancing around in a circle grabbing our arm and shouting "coranto, coranto".

I couln't resist to look up what is actually the coranto dance. And this is what I found. Not so different from what we were doing.

The "sped up gangnam style in one take video project", or oppa! project for short, keeps going. After some days of bad weather and bad timing tomorrow is time for a new test before the drama class. And by the way I just saw that the weather forescast for the weekend is warm and sunny, so I will try to arrange a rehearsal at the park.

I will try to boost the work on the Oppa! project script and production document so we have the opportunity to try something new. If you feel like you want to contribute anything you are free to edit the document on your own. Come on, try it!

In other matters, today I have started a NLP course, so I may be including some comments about this topic from now on.

When I started to build the habit of publishing something everyday I could imagine myself going through different phases. Starting from being driven by the novelty, sometimes forcing myself, getting used, and eventually feeling that it is something you don't ever question anymore.

What I am actually seeing is that I am somewhere between "sometimes forcing myself" and "getting used to it", but somedays it is just I don't question it. So I guess I have to think about these phases again. But there is also another factor I didn't think of at the beginning. When you are living with another person, your significant other, and you can see how her reactions changes towards your new habit.

Because I usually write the posts at the end of the day (something that I would like to change) she sometimes feels that my challenge to build this habit is her enemy. At first she supported with the curiosity of the new challenge, then came a phase of "it looks like you don't want to do this", but now it is turning to a phase similar to "don't question it anymore", it simply is.

I don't know if there are more phases ahead for the two of us. But this made my thought about how the habit evolves in a different way when you have to make it happen and when your are adapting to it.

That was what Kieron Kirkland (Magician and Gentleman) stated last Tuesday at This Happened Bristol May 2013. Following that he explained that the answer to that would be extremely dissapointing as most tricks are plain lies and unnimpressive distractions. But magic on the other hand. Magic is something exciting and powerful, something that you want to believe is real. So actually is would be more useful and insteresting to ask:

How did you managed to turn a simple trick into a magical experience. The key when designing a magic trick is how to make the audience want to believe, because they already know you are just doing a trick.

As a game designer I felt like discovering a new cornerstone for the design of experiences. Thinking more about how to theatrically prepare the setting to deliver the experience the user wants or needs, and not so much about developing the "trick" itself. Now I have to find a way and time to make a prototype based specially on this concept.

36 miles (58 km) by bike from Bristol to Bath (and back) along a refurbished railway path. Incredible energizing and beatiful.

But even more incredible have been when I have looked at the path on google maps. Most part of the way we were thinking we were in the middle of nowhere, everything looked so green, covered by woods and grasslands, and we even crossed a big and dark tunnel.

I will start with the tunnel. It was big, long, old, dark and wet. Water dripping all over the place. "There might be a river or lake above", I said. At some point in the tunnel there was an opening in the ceiling from which the sunlight was entering. What a misterious and magical place!

Well, here it is the tunnel from above. No lake, we don't know where was all that water coming from and the odd opening turns out to be a strange structure built with old stone inside a residential area.

A few miles later we stop to have lunch. We found a grassland taking a small path next to the railway path. We lay down there taking every sun ray we can with our skin. We were almost covered by the tall grass. We heard some chiming bells. "There might be a town nearby. And even here we can hear the bells!" we said. We were also hearing kids playing, but because there was a lot of people in the path we assumed there would be something interesting just a little bit ahead. When we keep riding we saw a big sculpture which is also a drinking fountaing and some kids playing there with water ballons. "Wow, the kids here surely make a lot of exercise if they are coming here to play" I though.

Well, here it is the big grassland lost and our lunch and sunbathing retreat were we felt like in the middle of nature. We were eating and resting at the green mark. The fountain is marked in red. And the far away chiming bells are in the church marked with the red cross. Also note the "wast solutions site" at the left side of the picture which we didn't see at all, of course.

There are also other minor surprises that can be summarised in "I had no idea that we were doing such a detour" and "Most of the way we were surrounded by residential areas we couldn't see".

The fun and irony is that after our ride and before I looked on google maps we have been watching "The life of Pi". If you have seen the movie you may understand why now I have the feeling that both versions of my biking day are real, but there is cleary one that I prefer.