“Take 2″ and “Single Dad”
October 28th 2002 -
Donnie Darko
I saw Donnie Darko on Friday night, after a particularly draining guitar-lesson, and was quite spooked out by it.
Recommended. It’s a semi-independant film (produced by Drew Barrymore) with a hugely uncommercial feel, lots of bizarre humour, some parody that misses wildly and some wonderfully imaginative stuff that somehow stayed past the first-draft despite all common-sense but *still works*. What kind of film is it? Let’s see. Cross “American Beauty” with “Twelve Monkeys” and add a bit of “Heathers”, “Harvey”, and “Mulholland Drive”.
Donnie Darko quickly achieved cult-status in the US (it’s been out there for about two years, during which I have been impatiently awaiting its release) and you can really see why. Good stuff! Recommended!
Take 2
I helped out with the lighting again on “Take 2″ on Saturday. Once again, a pleasant learning experience. I tried out more shining-lights-against-walls-and-ceiling and it worked well, made the room look like it was normally lit, and avoided harsh unpleasant shadows. Nice! Also nice was Lachlan’s TiBook, on which he did the editing for last weekend’s work. (Lachlan = Hugh Jackman from my previous weblog entry) The results thus-far looked really very nice. It’s an incredibly good experience to work with real actors. There was one scene where the Seth Green guy, who’s name I still can’t remember, goes through about three different expressions, and you can *see* what the character is thinking. Brilliant.
Unfortunately, we ran a bit slow and I had to leave for roleplaying before they had managed all the shots for the day, so I left them the lights and they returned them yesterday. Nice peoples.
Roleplaying
We’re into the second of the “Bright & De’Ath” games, titled “Amusement-Park Sugar”. These games only form a small part of our roleplaying evenings, but I’m really enthused about them – they’re quite different from most roleplaying I’ve done before, and are very much in a direction that interests me, somewhere between traditional roleplaying and theatre sports and Once Upon A Time, but without any real pressure. It’s great. The first story came out wonderfully in the end, and I gave high audience appreciation figures for it. It’s a pity (but very necessary, as it’s draining) that the game can only go about half-an-hour.
Ted
Ted came over and delivered the new Spit album cover and “The Usual Suspects” soundtrack – thanks Ted! Thanks Simon! Thanks Jimbo! Er, yeah, then we sat around and chatted a bunch and recorded some lines for the slow-fated “Bullet Hole”, now entering its third year since I started writing it. Anyhoo, it was most pleasing, because not only is Ted good company, but he is also Mr. Fixit. I’ve been having problems for quite a while with my sound-recording equipment. One of my microphone/pre-amp setups is dodgy, producing lots of ground-noise (ie. a low hum) whenever I try and record onto minidisc. I moved the microphone downstairs in the hope that getting it away from all the other electrical equipment might help, and then Ted pointed out that the power-cord for the minidisc player was directly above the microphone input for the pre-amp. Once he’d fiddled around with the cables for a bit, we had perfectly crisp and hum-free sound. Woo-hoo! More thanks to Ted!
Wrap-party for “Single Dad”
Anna and I went to the wrap-party for the short film I helped make about three weeks ago. It came out pretty well, actually, they hired a professional editor to put the footage together, and he did a decent job. On the technical side, the sound quality was excellent, which was particularly nice because we were rather worried about it, given the poor results on “Hensnightmare”.
The Bourne Identity
Finally, last night Anna and I went to see big-dumb-action-movie to find out that while it wasn’t astonishingly clever, it wasn’t by any means dumb. Events and motivations pretty much made sense throughout. And the action bits were good and actiony, and Famke Potente was great again, and Matt Damon, eh, but he didn’t drag the whole film into a morass of eh with him. Another recommended one.