Long time, no post
April 26th 2002 -
I’m slightly startled to see how long it has been since I last posted anything. Fortunately, so little has happened in the last almost-two-weeks that it barely rates reporting.
Contracts
I got the contract with Baltimore, for two weeks of work on an old product. I’ll be training Raman-from-Systems-Integration who will then go to Hong Kong and face the rather unpleasant mob for whom they’re doing the contract. I was offered Raman’s current albatross earlier in the year, but expressed profound misgivings along the lines of “Not at any price”. So now we have a sacrificial lamb, who I must train to be a butt-heading ninja sheep. Now, where are my chopsticks?
I also applied for a very small contract doing video editing, but I suspect I’ve been undercut on that one – they haven’t called me back. It’ll be a bit dodgy if they do call me back next week, because I start the Baltimore job on Monday!
Resident Evil
That bloody director doesn’t have an original synapse in ‘is ‘ead. I only realised who the director was in the title credits – should have paid closer attention. He’s the same guy who directed the excerable Event Horizon, which was even more notable for its unpleasantness and cheap rip-offs. Resident Evil was especially frustrating, because I reckon if I’d had my hands on the raw footage, I’d have been able to make a fairly decent film out of it. Many of the action scenes were unnecessarily confusing, and since it was impossible to see where the characters were or where they could go or where the baddies were, there was no tension at all. Oh, a monster behind her? Gosh.
Films they directly ripped off:
Dawn of the Dead
Cube
2001: A space odyssey
Aliens
Real work
I’ve done some more work on Fork, believe it or not, but on the other hand have become completely stalled on Cesura. Bullet hole re-editing continues, and now that Ted’s back I can get his voice for one of the extras.
Squash
It turns out that Roland, ex-boyfriend of sister of semi-friend of Anna, is a squash player, and since we’ve become friends through short film work (he was in Reach Out And Touch Someone) he invited me to play with him and his friends on Tuesday evenings – can’t say no! And it has been very good for me too. I’m improving heaps, since I’m slightly better than Roland and worse than his friend-who’s-name-I’ve-forgottten. It’s a nice combination. Once I improve my fitness, I should do even better – my best games are usually my second to fourth, and after that I go into a bit of a decline…
Film appreciation
Roland and fellow film buff Suzanna and me have started a film appreciation night, every second Wednesday at the moment. So far, we’ve watched and discussed Brazil – Suzanna has done a film course recently and we’re going to start watching the films on her course. The first one, oddly, is John Carpenter’s “The Thing”.