Hi {{first_name|there}},
This fortnight has been about getting things off the desk rather than onto it. Filming briefs, a setup pack for a library editing day, and a lot of hours on the same problem I have been chewing on for thirty five years: how do you get somebody who hates being filmed to sound like themselves.
A course participant on the deck with her sheet of paper in her hand, talking to a phone, and there she is on the screen. Nobody performing. That is the method, and it is the first item below.
IN THIS ISSUE
VIDEO
The worst thing to say to somebody about to go on camera
Everybody reaches for it. It makes the nerves worse.
AI
The gym class that cost a stranger their booking
Nobody asked it to do that, and the hole was already there.
VIDEO
Why nobody finishes your training video
It is not the content. It is the length, and there is a number.
AI
Queensland just said no
The rules I told you to watch have hit a wall, and we are in it.
VIDEO
The worst thing to say to somebody about to go on camera
"Relax."
It is the first thing everybody reaches for. It is meant kindly. And it makes things worse every time, because you have just told a person that the way they feel is wrong and asked them to fix it with willpower, while a camera points at them.
Here is what I do instead. I give them something to hold.
Four points, in their own handwriting, on one piece of paper, big enough to read at arm's length. Not a script, because a script gets read out. Not cue cards, because they end up staring at them.
Typed notes get read out. Their own handwriting gets talked about.
Then I do not ask them to perform. I ask them about the second point, and let them answer me, standing off to the side of the camera, rather than talk to a lens.
The rest is patience. Get the first take out of the way knowing it will be the worst one, and say so out loud before you start so it is not a surprise when it is. Then keep recording through the "sorry, can I go again". That bit, right after somebody thinks they have failed, is very often the take I use.
Somebody you work with is going to have to do this in the next few months. When it is their turn, do not tell them to relax. It is not a confidence problem. It is a preparation problem, and preparation is something you can hand across a table.
AI
The gym class that cost a stranger their booking
A man in Melbourne asked an AI assistant to get him into a full gym class. He was fourth on the waitlist. A few minutes later it reported back that he was third, because it had cancelled the booking of the person sitting in first place. He had not asked it to do that. It could not undo it.
That was reported by the ABC on 10 August, and most of the coverage since has been about how frightening AI is. I think that buries the part you can actually do something about.
The gym's booking system had no check on who was allowed to cancel a booking. Anyone could cancel anyone. The assistant did not break in. It found a door that was already unlocked, in software somebody sold to a gym as a finished product. A determined human could have walked through it just as easily, and would have been much harder to notice.
So, two things worth doing this week. Ask whoever supplies your booking or membership system whether one user can cancel another user's booking. And do not hand a brand new assistant the keys to anything, which is the whole of how I teach this.
VIDEO
Why nobody finishes your training video
Because it is forty minutes long.
Attention drops off after about six minutes. That is the number I plan around, and it is why the induction video sits unwatched in the shared drive while everybody asks the person next to them instead.
The fix is not better production. It is scissors. One long file becomes six short ones, each answering a single question, each with a title somebody can find when they are stuck. Nobody sits down to watch a training video end to end. They go looking for the two minutes about the thing in front of them right now, and if that is buried at minute thirty one, you have made something nobody can use.
The rest of it, the objective, the script, the sound, the order I do things in, I wrote up properly a while back and have never once pointed you at.
AI
Queensland just said no
Last time I told you the new national AI rules had to get through National Cabinet in August, and that this was finally something worth watching because it had a date on it. Here is where it got to.
Queensland and the Northern Territory have both pushed back, publicly. Queensland's Energy Minister, David Janetzki, says the state will not force uneconomic investment into the system that ends up on household and business power bills. The Northern Territory's Environment Minister, Joshua Burgoyne, says the Commonwealth is overstepping and telling Territorians what they can and cannot do. The Territory has a forty billion dollar gas-powered data centre on the table that the federal renewable requirement would rule out.
National Cabinet met on Wednesday 26 August, and Queensland won.
Queensland and the Northern Territory were let out of the renewable requirement. They can power data centres with gas or coal. The Prime Minister's reason was that both own their own generation, so they sit in a different position to everyone else. Premier David Crisafulli called it a good win. Everywhere else the rule still stands: a new centre brings its own new power and pays the full cost of connecting, instead of leaning on the supply the rest of us are already on.
UPDATE, 31 August 2026. I got this wrong.
There's no carve-out for Queensland or the Northern Territory. Chris Bowen said so on 28 August: "there are no carve-outs for any state or territory." The standards will be Commonwealth legislation covering every state and territory the same, and the energy requirement hasn't moved. A new data centre brings its own new renewable energy, with gas allowed for firming and peaking rather than as baseload.
The states that own their own power companies got something much narrower. A state-owned energy company can put a case to the Commonwealth that it can run a data centre more cheaply than renewables would. The Australian Energy Regulator assesses that case, one application at a time, and the Commonwealth makes the call, not the state. The test is cost: prove it's genuinely cheaper than renewables, and prove it won't push bills up. Bowen calls that a high bar, and says he thinks it'd be very difficult for a state to clear.
So Queensland didn't win the argument, it won the right to make it, and somebody else marks it.
None of it is law yet. National Cabinet only agreed to keep working on the standards, and the bill is not due in Parliament until early next year. Worth knowing: Google and AirTrunk, who actually build these things, both said publicly they were happy with the renewable rule. The fight was between governments, not with the industry.
I am not going to pretend I know how this lands. What I will say is that the argument has moved. In June it was about whether these rules were a good idea at all. Now it is about who pays for them, which is a more honest fight and a harder one. Both sides have a real case: the states are not wrong that somebody carries the cost of new generation, and the Commonwealth is not wrong that a data centre boom without rules leaves that somebody being you.
This one has months left in it. I will keep watching, and I will tell you when something actually changes rather than every time somebody makes a statement about it.
Listen: the ABC on what Queensland and the NT actually said
Listen: the ABC on the National Cabinet meeting itself
One last thing
If there is somebody in your team who is going to have to be filmed, or who is going to have to do the filming, that is worth a conversation before it lands on them.
It is a conversation, not a pitch. Tell me what you are trying to make and I will tell you whether it needs me at all.
Cheers,
Suzie
eMotion Video Training & Production. Female-founded by Suzie Cray, Cairns, Queensland, since 2019. Video, digital skills and AI training for time-poor teams, on the devices you already have. 2,500+ Australians trained. ecoBiz Star Partner.