Let’s kickstart the new year with a short & simple blog post, as a way to get me back on the blogging treadmill, and as a way to ensure my blog still works fine (I have just finished a very heavy-handed migration and database encoding surgery for my blog, which took months to solve… that’ll be a story for another blog post, if anyone is interested? 🤔 and yes, I’m totally using emojis and exotic languages in this post just to see if it still breaks Planet GNOME. わたしは にほんごがすこししかはなせません!)…
Sometime in the flurry of events that was 2020, my friend Hélène asked me a favor: to edit and publish some interview footage she had previously recorded—and that had been sitting on her hard drive since. The goal was to salvage this material and do a simple edit—not aim for perfection—and publish it so that the public can benefit from the shared knowledge and life experiences.
And so I did. The resulting video (17 mins) is here for your enjoyment:
What is this about?
The video is an informal speech given by Monica Nissén and Toke Paludan Møller, where they share their experience as business founders in the nineties, and what led them to create the Flow Game, a serious game that serves as a tool for creating “an interactive reflection, dialogue and action space for groups, teams and individuals.”
Indeed, while they were working on their entrepreneurial project (with at least one other collaborator, I believe), they felt the need to create a system to facilitate their brainstorming sessions and guide the evolution of their projects.
“What a strange edit! Were you drunk?”
A friend of mine who worked in Hollywood keeps telling me, “Editing is the pits!”, probably because you have to work with what you’re given, and have to cut and rearrange thousands of little pieces to build a coherent story.
In this case, the video was recorded with only one camera angle, so I did not have a lot of material to work with. I added some footage from other sessions to hide various handheld camera angle relocation moves; this is why you sometimes see visuals of other people (such as Toke) “silently talking” while Monica’s voice narration continues. There are scenes in Toke’s speech where I had only audio (it seems the video recording started late) so I had no choice but to fill the gaps with footage of other people talking (in that case I did find it amusing to have synched lips on some occasions), and I tried to not reuse the same footage too much to provide some variety.
Note: this video is a pro-bono production for educational and historical purposes, and is not a business endorsement of the Flow Game by idéemarque/atypica. I’m not selling anything, there is no Danish Conspiracy (unlike the GNOME Swedish Conspiracy), etc. I just hope someone finds this content insightful. Feel free to share it around (or retweet it) or to leave a comment if you liked it.