Holidays
December 28th 2001 -
A nice lot of holidays. I’d write more, but I’m still – several days later – feeling bloated and lazy. For christmas I scored a great-big-bookcase, a PS2 game (Jak and Dexter), multiple books, videos, and CDs. No boring presents! Yay! Christmas dinner was at some friends of Anna’s parents. We ate a bunch of cows and I impressed the women by doing – this is really pathetic – a bit of the drying up. The men now hate me.
On the weekend we hit a thrilling climax for the Guards game with Amanda, Andrea and Chris, and immediately moved on to another game with the same characters that raised the stakes even further. We’re playing again tonight. The rest of the time was spent doing bugger all – I wrote a script (he tossed off, casually) that Anna and I had been meaning to do for a long time, started thinking about doing a New Years party, and slept a lot.
The script
I may have mentioned this project before – it’s a short script based on Anna’s experience at Energetic Healing, and it’ll be Anna’s first tropfest entry if we get it done by then. Anna and I talked about it, then I wrote it up and we sent it around for comment. Andrea read it, and immediately wrote a rather better version which sorts out some of the problems in the original (especially the rather lame conclusion). So we had two drafts in as many days. We’re hoping to do the filming next week – we’ll see how it goes when Jon & I have a production meeting tomorrow.
We’re getting closer to the 24 hour short film (writing, filming, editing, and showing a film of at least 4 minutes, all within 24 hours). Scott McCloud has a list of 24 hour projects on his website, but hasn’t listed any 24 hour films yet. Who’s up for it? The way I see it, Kate can write the script, Jon can direct, I’ll edit, Evan can write the soundtrack from Brisbane, Amanda can do the poster, and we’ll get whoever we can to act.
LOTR
I don’t care what Ted says, I’m going with the sheep-like response to say that this was an incredible film that caught me up for three hours and it’s brilliant and deserved academy awards, at least a lot more than Gladiator, and I’m seeing it again tomorrow. On the other hand – and this in no way detracts from just how great the film is – it isn’t in my all-time top ten yet. And some of the fight scenes were a bit dodgy, in that the enemies seemed far too numerous for the escapes that occured.
Monsters, Inc.
Anna and I also saw this on Saturday afternoon. It was fun and short and had lots of amusing touches but was a bit slight. I can barely remember it now, though that may be more due to LOTR.
Fires
The sun has been red and dim behind the smoke, these past few evenings. I’ve been unable to keep my eyes off it, despite nagging feelings that it will make me go blind. The smoke is everywhere in Sydney.