This is a new departure for me. I am making a video.
The video is of one of my short stories, The Curse of the Ferryman. The plan is to release it on social media to promote myself as a writer. (Cunning, eh?) But also it’s an experiment with live storytelling and an unfamiliar medium.
I am very much a latecomer to all this. The internet is – aha aha – reeling with videos on every subject imaginable, including how to make a video (useful, these). I’m sure that among them there are lots of very professional videos of writers telling thrilling and atmospheric short stories to the camera. I haven’t dared look. And with the right AI tools you can illustrate and animate your story like you were Disney or Pixar, they say.
I do not have the right AI tools. Actually, I don’t particularly feel I want them. What I have is:
- a handful of illustrations which the artist Paul Duffield did for the original story, and which he is happy for me to use. These are lovely and creepy but all different shapes and sizes and not at all intended for 16:9 aspect video;
- the story text, which reads reasonably well aloud;
- some online audio resources, (blessings be on all artists who are willing to put copyright-free material on the web for this and other purposes;)
- some free downloadable studio and editing software, which I am driving with L plates on;
- self, who proves to be hopeless when talking to a camera. I must have had eight attempts at my little introduction before I gave up and accepted the last one. Maybe it was ten. Never act with children, animals or plummy middle-aged white males who have to read off a script if they are to manage three sentences without stumbling.
But, but, but…
There’s no point in trying to be slicker than the slickest. Even if I could produce a glossy, animated thing, it would only be one more glossy animated thing among thousands. This needs to be personal, from me: human, hand-made, and in that sense, real.
And constraint drives invention. It makes you look for ways to solve problems. Some of the greatest literature has been written under conditions of censorship, as the writers wove their way around the checks and obstacles and still said what they had to say. In my humdrum little case, well, how do you make a video with only a handful of static illustrations, all of which are the wrong aspect ratio? I came up with an answer to that one, and I think it’s pretty good.
We’re not done yet. Not by a long way. But the first draft of the first part is here. See what you think.
Last Updated on March 30, 2026 by John