Anotherblog

Weak of Townsville

Has it been a week already? Apparently so. It’s been pretty relaxing and good; everybody is getting along well and Anna and I are going for swims most days and playing a lot of frisbee - Magnetic Island was agreeable and Anna wants to try out the reef now. I went over to Marco’s place last night and caught up with Sandor, Renee, Marco and Kylie. Oh yes, and their multitudinous children. Boy could those children sing. OK, their tone may be a little off in a charming teeth grating kind of way, but they made up for it with astonishing volume levels.

It doesn’t look like Anna’s parents are coming over to Townsville after all - I suggested to them that I might bring my folks to Sydney instead, given that Anna’s dad isn’t doing all that well. That also gives a bit more time to get those pesky rings organised.

Greta
The short film has (surprisingly) been going along fairly well - I’ve got all the props, worked out the shooting script, and shot about half of it. I figure it’ll be about half live footage, and half stills, in a documentary style. If I can get all the filmed segments done in the next week, I have half a chance at getting it in time for tropfest in mid-January. It’ll be a real rush, though…

And now: the escape

I’m off to Townsville, fleeing the wrath of those who found out I got engaged over email… er, that is, who found out over email that I got engaged, presumably not over email. Which is correct, I didn’t get engaged over email. I did, in fact, get engaged (to Anna) about eight months ago, but we didn’t get around to telling anyone until Juneish, and even then we only told our parents. Since then, I’ve told anyone who’s directly asked. “So, when are you getting married?” Actually, I figured most people’d know by now through the process of ozmosis, though I don’t have a good picture of how that is supposed to happen.

And yes, I really am heading off to Townsville for two weeks… ancesteral home, back to the hot sticky weather and… oh wait, that’s Sydney. I’m hoping (hah!) to film “Greta” while I’m there, but we’ll see how far *that* goes. It is supposed to be my official tropfest entry, what with Mobilenet and Bullet Hole being so far behind schedule. We’ve decided that filming Mobilenet on a train is just too hard at the moment, and we’re currently casting about for an alternative venue - I’m keen on a cinema, Jon prefers a cafe.

Now I must go and sort out the ring. I decided on a puzzle ring kind of thing with inlaid opals - ambitious or just dorky? Why can’t it be both?

Ya Doity Rat!

Fancy telling us over the web!

Get a ring on ya

I’m shopping with Anna for engagement rings this evening - Anna’s parents know a jeweller, so we will no doubt get a discount by going to them. Anna’s parents, who are traditional Greeks, are keen on coming up to Townsville for a couple of days, to meet my Mum and to preside over the exchange of rings. I’ve no serious objections to these traditions, but if they think this means that they can organise the wedding, they’ve got another thing coming…

Me Punk Revisited

I thought I’d have a go at posting a piccy - and what better way to start than by this rather disturbing one from the weekend?

Blue Lines

Ow, ow, and other onomatopoeic sounds of pain. Woke up this morning with a pain in my neck. I said, I woke up this morning with a pain in my neck. Don’t know what I’m gonna do. Might have to head of to werk.

Yeah, but it’s cold in Canberra
Oh, and work is so much better! The air-conditioning has done a wonderful thing today, it has gone to Antarctica to help fight global warming (yes yes, I know it won’t help because it still generates net heat. But it’s a nice thought.) Unfortunately that means that we are suffering from horrible sticky stinky heat. It was much like this yesterday, a couple of people have protested by wearing non-officially-approved shorts today. I shall do the same tomorrow if things are not resolved by this afternoon. We may have to shoot Carlos the evil next-desk workmate; he has collapsed on the keyboard and is causing the computer to make that beeping sound that tells you you’ve collapsed on the keyboard. It is very annoying.

Me Punk
Anna and I were invited to a birthday bash by Mel Gibson and her boyfriend Keith (heheheh) on the weekend. It was at a bowling alley, and the theme was 1970s. We were shopping for outdoor furniture all afternoon and the time kind of ran away, so that there was about an hour to go and neither of us had prepared anything. I was prepared to go the cop-out cardboard trouser extensions (into flares, that is) but at the last minute decided to go punk. I ripped up a shirt, got a whole lot of safety pins, grabbed my oldest jeans, dyed my hair red with temporary hair stuff, and applied vast quantities of hair gel to make it stick up a lot. Unfortunately it didn’t spike very well; it looked more like a very messy slicked back ’50s kind of thing. But it gave the vaguely right impression, and I was the only punk at the party - Anna went as Nana Mouskouri, which we both kinda associate with the ’70s, but is apparently more ’60s. The party and bowling were a bunch of fun, anyway. Anna took a whole bunch of photos afterwards, to capture the red-haired moment. She’s actually a pretty good photographer, I’m thinking of buying her a digital camera for her birthday.

Speaking of Techno Fetishism
I finally got sick of the PCMCIA disk drive that came with my video camera - it works well enough, you can capture JPEGs to disk, but it kind of hangs off the side awkwardly and only holds 8 piccies. So I bought a 32M Flash memory card yesterday and gave it a try on the camera. Sweet! It holds 172 pics nicely. I also bought a card reader for my computer, and contrary to expectation, it all worked fine on the first try. My ghast was flabbered. Meanwhile, I’m still mucking around with the voice channel pre-amp. There are a whole bunch of switches, buttons and dials that are largely unexplored, and I’m itching to use them in a project.

Project for my voice channel pre-amp
Actually, it’s not a project specifically to take advantage of the voice channel pre-amp - it’s stupid to make a film based entirely on a prop or piece of technology. I would never do anything like that. However, currently all my film projects make very little use of voice - so I decided to write another short film, which might as well be “Support Call”. So I started writing it, and quickly got depressed. It’s just a bunch of scenes of silly users and annoyed support people, a field that has been more than adequately covered by Dilbert and numerous US sitcoms. So I talked it over with Chris Fellows on the weekend, and he suggested turning it into an adaptation of King Lear. Brilliant! Now, I’ve also seen many adaptations of Shakespeare done in a modern corporate setting, but I still think this will work - at any rate, it’s freed up my muse somewhat. However, it seems likely that it will blow out from 5 minutes to about 20 minutes.

Film Project based on a prop
We’re moving to new offices in April of next year or thereabouts, and we had a presentation on it yesterday. We have two large floors of a new building, with a possible third floor. Excitingly, one of the lease options on the possible-third-floor is a rent-free-but-rented first year. But we will only be using two floors for the moment, expanding to the third floor only when we need to. Which means - and here’s where my heart leaped and I started bouncing - we have a lease on an unoccupied 1000sq metres of floor space in Pyrmont. I asked the admin people that if this was the case, might I be able to use it as studio space for film-making? And they said, yes, no problem. Wahoo! Now to make films based around 1000sq metres of unoccupied office space!

Officially sponsered company fun

Yesterday was the big company sailing day - ten yachts and two catamarans carry around drunken Baltimore people scooting around in Pittwater. The weather started out miserable, but got better and better as the day progressed, so that by the end of it I had sunburn. I had many riveting conversations about the weather and the amount of wind, which because you asked, was enough so that we sat around becalmed for a good part of the morning, watching the water for traces of roughness, which would indicate that there was a breeze in that direction, or possibly many sharks. The conversation turned to the film Dead Calm, but before we could start digging out the underwater harpoons we decided to break for lunch. I met up with Jon, and we talked film stuff until we were too embarrased to go on. The food, unlike last year, was substantial enough that most of us sat around bloated for most of the afternoon watching keen people eg. Evil Carlos, my next-desk workmate, playing soccer. We winced as they sacrificed their knees and much of their epidermis for our entertainment. We laughed cruelly as JT, workmate of extreme enthusiasm, once again damaged himself in bizarre ways (eg. attempting to tackle a duck).

Kris Kringle - the smutty vs. the nerdy
Every year, we have a Kris Kringle tradition - presents for everyone, worth less than $10, and given by an anonymous workmate. This presents opportunities for the slightly risque - hair spray for bald Donncha, condoms for almost everyone who became a parent in the last year - and the nerdy, which consisted of various dilbert merchandise. It became a game, predicting who would get the risque and who would get the nerdy. Alistair, of course, got the risque with a “penis enlarger”, extra-small condoms, and a magnifying glass. Jon fell strongly in the nerdy camp with an “Arthur C. Clarke” themed desk calander and immediately vowed to change his image. I scored a “neither” present, if you count billiard table accessories as non-nerdy, that is.

Hard drive follies
I got back the hard-drive of death, the one with all that nice-but-lost data on it. Our sysman didn’t have time to fix it, so he gave it back to me so that I could have a go if I wanted. I had a brief look at it and, suddenly, noticed the problem - a surface mounted chip, fried to the very core, complete with great bit blaster scorch marks. In my defence, I hadn’t seen the HD before, our sysman took it away too quickly.

Mobile - the film
We heard back from CityRail, finally. No problem with the script! We’re all go except for the ten million dollar personal liability insurance that we need for permission to film. Oh. I wonder how much that will cost?

Turn out the Luddites

Wow, Blogger crashes when I ask it to post&publish, and I lose today’s weblog. What fun that is. I really, really hate writing stuff for the second time around so I’ll just summarise, which is good anyway because I really babbled a lot in the first version of this one and… what? Oh.

Other peoples films
Anna and I saw “Unbreakable” last night. It was pretty good, understated and nicely composed, though deathly slow. Interesting camera work. I’m looking forward to the Christmas film-season at the moment, getting hyped up for “Chicken Run” and “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”. In the shopping mall where we saw the film, there were a whole bunch of videos for sale at $6.50 - fairly cheap, but what was impressive was the selection, which was mostly obscure and cult films - there were half a dozen Andy Warhol films there, for example. I picked up five Buster Keaton tapes, Monty Python’s Life of Brian and Holy Grail, and the Living Dead trilogy. I was tempted by Legend, Princess Bride, Labyrinth, and Dark Crystal, but somehow managed to hold out. Those are fairly easy to get at a local video store.

My peoples films
I also picked up my new pre-amp and microphone, which I’ll use for future filming. I’m more convinced than ever that the sound, even more than the picture, is the vital first step in getting away from the home-video feel. The new microphone is best for extreme close-up work, voice overs, and foley sounds, but the pre-amp has some really nice extra functions - it does voice compression (which is used to prepare voice recordings for mixing - it’s hard to describe, but it helps makes sure that the voice doesn’t get drowned out by any background noise/music that you add), and other sound trickery stuff that ensure we’ll need a proper sound engineer for the next film, not just the boom mike operator.

Meanwhile, still no word from CityRail about MobileNet. Hmm.

Orange-Red Monster of Death

I heard some marvellous news about ORMOD (Orange-Red Monster Of Death), my ex-volvo. I sold it two years ago to someone at work, and they mentioned recently that it recently completely fell apart while they were driving it. The panels fell off, and it karked it in the middle of the road. Still, they were pretty pleased with it - it lasted two years perfectly well, which is all you’re after when you buy a car that old. I’m so proud! I suggested a viking funeral.

On the weekend, I rented a ute that was even more decrepit than the volvo. It didn’t have a tailgate, and the suspension was shot, so it rattled along bouncing at the slightest pebble on the road. A fantastic ute for moving all my stuff, which is basically what I did all weekend. Ted helped move all the heavy whitegoods and sofas in time for roleplaying on Saturday afternoon, then Anna helped (in between watching many episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer) move boxes o’ books and all the other accumulated detritis from my stay on New Canterbury Road. I doggedly left behind the movie-making gear, still intending to make Bullet Hole. Anyway, thanks Ted and Anna!

Dr Clam

Dr Clam has (finally) been updated in the lab… Check it out.
Don’t buy furniture just for Saturday, Andrew. We’ll bring some fold-up jobbies and a beanbag.