Our fierce rate of consuming movies has abated somewhat, as we face a hectic start to 2012. It’s all good but it does mean we haven’t been keeping up with Film Watch as much as we had been towards the end of last year. The slower pace has given me pause for thought, however, and it occurred to me recently how much the process of completing a Film Watch post has changed.

When I started, the concept was new, and I didn’t really consider how many movies we might be watching in the future. I grabbed a notebook, and started watching. Because I was viewing an iTunes rental, the timings were available just by hovering the mouse over the screen. I noted down the time and what I wanted to say as I watched. Later, I would type up the notes and publish the post.

Mr C and I began watching films together, and that meant viewing via a big screen rather than iTunes, so I had to switch timings. When we would watch a film, I’d start the timer on my iPod and use that instead.

At some point along the way, it became obvious that I had a handy iPad that would save an awful lot of pen and paper, and would save a little bit of time as well. I started typing the notes up and then syncing with iTunes to get the text file. A bit of copy and paste magic later and the Film Watch post would be complete.

When iOS 5 arrived, it brought with it the innovation of the iCloud, and that stripped out the rather clunky syncing process. Now it’s a matter of setting the timer going, typing my notes, getting the file from iCloud, copy and pasting, getting some extra notes from IMDB, and hitting publish.

I still feel like there could be some improvements to the system, but for now, it’s working really well. Compared to the lengthy process that involved many, many notebooks, it’s a breeze. The only downside is that I have no excuse to buy notebooks anymore.