Plague Zone
October 15th 2001 -
I have catched another cold, as of Friday. Even though there were all those reports of panic about anthrax, it didn’t even occur to me as a wild fantasy of a nightmarish possibility. Happily, I suffered an extreme failure of imagination in this case. I think it’s partly because there have been other sick people around the office for weeks now, and I always catch what’s going around as my immune system is feeble due to repeated lack of exposure to vitamins and healthy living. So: sore throat, bit of a runny nose, feeling run down. Hm, the I wonder if that expression – run down – was originally intended to have the implication of “being run over by a large vehicle?”. Anyway, not that bad.
Editing
Despite the misery etc. of the cold, I managed a good chunk of editing and realised that there were vast chunks of footage missing from the computer. What’s going on? Turned out I had never imported tape 3 (of 4). Hey, that footage looks great! And look, here’s heaps of extra footage of me playing guitar and looking like much less of an idiot! Happy joy! Suffice to say, Bullet Hole is looking better than I’d feared, and is getting up to as good as I’d hoped, though quite a bit longer than I’d wanted. But it progresses, and Jon’s camerawork is (so far) its proud outstanding feature. This one will look quite good, a lot better than anything we’ve done so far. The only down-side is how much work there is yet to do – all the subtitles, all the dubbing and the foley effects and atmospheric effects and studio time for my guitar tutor and back-and-forth with Ev for the soundtrack… oh well. One thing at a time. “Once Upon A Time” was a much bigger project than this one, and we got through that alright.
Fillum
Watched “Proof Of Life” (bleugh), “Croupier” again (yay!) and “Magnolia” on the weekend, in a binge that was prompted my my less than stellar state. I was impressed with Magnolia, but egad it was a long film, more like a mini-series. And after the first ten minutes of (basically) collage and music video I was beginning to panic that it’d all be like that, like a version of Koyaanisqatsi run through a Koyaanisqatsi filter, and that my brain was going to explode. Fortunately, it settled into some reasonably conventionalish narrative after that. A good film, which I will damn with faint praise by saying that it may well really hit home to some people and be a personal favorite of the decade/ever (cf. The Godfather, Citizen Kane, etc) but not for me. 3 hours, 15 minutes of film, and an entire DVD of bonus footage, which took up Saturday from about 1:00pm to 8:00pm or so.