In case anyone's curious about how this happened...
If it seems a bit over the top on production, that's because this has been as much of a video production project as a field recording project.
I've been field recording since 2010 or so, just as a hobby, my day job being in software. The effort to make this course started about the middle of 2018, when I started compiling notes on field recording techniques and technology for my own use. Sometime around September 2018 this grew to the point that it seemed like it could be useful to other people, and it started morphing into a series of textual articles that I would publish somewhere.
(If I'm vague about the dates, it's because I didn't keep any kind of records of the early development stages, because I had no idea what it was going to develop into. Of course I totally regret that now.)
Sometime after that I remembered that I'm interested in film and video, and realised that this should be a series of videos. So about March 2019 I started writing scripts, and a shot plan — well over 300 shots — and went out and started shooting.
There was a lot of dithering involved — because I knew how much work this would be — so by the time I was shooting, it was November 2019, and I was one-man-band-ing the whole thing in the north of Scotland in winter. So progress was slow. Plus I was learning how to do this as I went, which was also a big part of the point; a lot of shots have been re-shot multiple times. A big pain when the light might be gone by 2 pm!
The first 7 episodes, up to "Technique", were planned and shot together. Shooting of these episodes finished on 16 March. Editing ran in parallel with the shooting, so the first three videos were finally finished, and went live, on 23 March 2020 — lockdown day in the UK.
The lockdown scuppered my plans for researching and shooting the next couple of episodes, so in late March I planned out a couple of episodes which could be shot indoors — "Digital Obsolescence" and "Post-Production". These were shot on April 10-12, edited in the following week, and published on 27 April and 4 May.
Apart from the lockdown, major life issues interfered with progress for a long time. "Stereo" had always been a core part of the plan, but doing it right meant a lot of shooting in the field. It was deeply frustrating to be unable to get out and shoot it for so long. But I finally got the last shots done on 24 August, and published "Stereo" on 29 August 2020. "Mid-Side Demystified" was shot in parallel, and was published on 5 September.
"Wind" was a difficult episode — dealing with the horrible winter weather was bad enough, but getting just the right kind of horrible weather, and then having to go out and film in it, was worse! Filming started in October 2020 and finally finished in February 2021, with the episode published on 11 March. "Drop and Recover" was planned and scripted a while ago, but production went faster; filming was done in March, and it was published on 4 April. "Sound in Contact" was another one which had been planned for a long time, but actually making it was slowed down by a lot of bad weather in the spring — filming ran from early February to early June. But it was finally done and published on 11 June 2021.
