Behind the Scenes – Page 2

Next Up: Scotland.

This week Nick’s on holiday, next week I’ll be away from my desk for a few days. Once we’re both back, our next trip for the film is coming up. In the middle of November, it’s back to England and Scotland.

It’s always a bit of a haul to get there because, as we’ve described here, we do most of our travelling around Europe with an electric car. So it’s a two-day trip to go one way.

Our first stop will be London, where we have an interview scheduled with a political activist, then we’ll drive on to Northampton, where we’ll do another interview, that one’s with a young academic. Then on up to Glasgow — we’re meeting up with Katherine Trebeck again, to get her latest news, and we’ll also hopefully be able to speak with a couple of people from the Scottish Government, whom we’ve met before already, and with whom we want to catch up quickly before everyone goes to South Korea, for the OECD World Forum on Statistics, Knowledge and Policy. Also, Nick’s folks live in Edinburgh, so we’ll see them and get to stay at their place and enjoy their hospitality.

Then it’s back to London, where we’ll meet with someone who will be involved in contributing music and potentially something more to our film … we cannot share details yet, but stay tuned, we’ll hopefully be able to share some specifics later in the month. We’ll also do some video reporting from our trip, of course, that’s what this video blog is for!

Video Interviews Without Travelling.

A quick snapshot from last week — one of the people we are speaking with for our film is Alvaro Cedeño Molinari, the current Costa Rican Ambassador to the World Trade Organisation. Alvaro is a fierce fighter for sustainable trade and for a sustainable development of our world, and it’s such a pleasure to talk to him. (Also, he is a much better-looking man than you might think after seeing this slightly distorted snapshot. 😉 )

Here I am speaking with him on Zoom (it’s like Skype, but much better video and sound quality), and we’re actually recording the conversation through the Zoom app.

We met Alvaro first at a “task force meeting” for the Wellbeing Eonomy Governments project in Edinburgh a few months ago, and then again in Costa Rica when we went there in the summer. And then we met his family and did a longer interview in Geneva, where he lives, in early September.

A lot is going on in Costa Rica these days, and some of it has an impact on the story of our film. So we need to stay in touch with Alvaro. And even though it’s the absolute best thing to go and see and meet people, we cannot travel all the time, and speak to someone like Alvaro in person as often as we want. (Not only, but in part also for reasons of sustainability.)

So I’ve started interviewing our protagonists online, from time to time. And we’ll most likely use some of this footage in our film.

Note: We are not getting endorsed by Zoom, or getting paid, we just like the service.