Anotherblog

A touch of web-madness

I did a bit of work on the studio webpage the other night, and Amanda did some touchups. I figured it was about time to get some content there, now that we have three films made and several more in the works, and given that we’ve just about hit our second anniversary of otherleggedness. It’s a start, anyway.

Floored
Now the spare room’s floor is down, Anna’s going to paint the walls, and then sand and varnish the floor. Finally, we can move stuff in - I am frankly looking forward to that part because the current computer room is very warm and crowded with junk, and is hardly suited to extended periods of editing/writing/game playing.

I love it when a plan comes together

Well, it all happened, pretty much according to plan. Got Jon to Artarmon, we came up with a bunch of ideas for “Hard & Easy”, got the engagement rings, got the spare bed over, the floorboards should now be on the spare room, the engagement dinner went very well, the readthrough of “The I Job” went well, the dinner at the “Alexander The Great” Club was fine, and Sunday was pleasantly relaxing!

Rabid Ferret on a Stick
Actually, Sunday was pretty busy because I came up with an adventure for the roleplaying group - I am an infrequent GM, which annoys the others because that means they have to GM more. So I came up with an adventure that we have christened “Rabid Ferret on a stick” and ran that… it seemed to be OK, but I’d rather be playing board games… which we’re doing every second Wednesday now! Wahoo!

Artarmon

Gotta get over to Artarmon with Jon Blum, to show him the cool CA room - at the moment, we think we can shuck the room into a scene of the short film Jon started writing a while ago, with the working title of “Hard & Easy” - a kind of reverse-Matrix film with an “Edge of Darkness” feel. Then straight off to town to pick up the engagement rings, and finally grabbing the Ute to move the spare bed from my old place in Dulwich Hill to the spare room in Marrickville, so that my parents (who arrive tomorrow) have a place to sleep.

Then
Tomorrow we have the engagement dinner with both lots of parents, which I decided to cater. French food, so lots of cream and eggs and milk, and probably about four hours worth of cooking. Hosting at our place carefully chosen as neutral territory. Meanwhile, floorboards are going onto the front room (not the spare room used to accomodate parents) and may even be ready by mid next week.

Meanwhile
On Saturday we’re heading over to Jon Blum’s place for a readthrough of his brilliant radio-play “The I Job”. I’ve just read the script, and am willing to loudly proclaim that it is the best thing I’ve read of his. It’s a kind of Blake’s 7 homage mixed with “The Usual Suspects”, with sparkling dialogue, a cast of charming sociopaths, and surprisingly deep subject matter concerning the nature of self. After talking through that for a couple of hours (and having left my parents to their own devices) we zoom back to Marrickville and do something with parents, the nature of which has yet to be determined.

Finally
Relaxing on Sunday with a cool drink and a touch of roleplaying in the afternoon. Excellent long weekend! Now lets see if it all goes to schedule.

Holess

I didn’t do a hell of a lot of Bullet Hole work yesterday - but I did play a couple of games of “Hera And Zeus” with Anna, which were pretty interesting - there are about five different ways to win, and I think we covered every single one of them. A clever game. I have also discovered that Anna enjoys winning a lot (actually I knew before, but this reinforced it) because she still hasn’t stopped taunting me since she won the last game.

Floored
We’re getting a floor in the spare room, just a little bit too late for my folks, who are here on Friday (news flash for thick people: Friday is a public holiday, so I… whoops, that is, theoretically thick persons, don’t have to go to work then.) Still, it’ll be nice to have the extra space. We’ve already completely filled out the rest of the house with mess. What? “Tidy”? That’s a silly sounding word. You just made it up, didn’t you?

Dogmatically watching and creating more crap

Anna rented out “The next best thing”, which was far, far worse than Dogma, which was at least ambitious in its badness. But I cannot comment in full; I gave up in apathy less than half-way through and went to work on the new Bullet Hole script a wee bit. It is a difficult script to work on - I’m not completely sure what it is actually about at any given time, because several ideas went into it and simmer under the surface. The tone has varied wildly from draft to draft, and I’m currently editing out some of the slapstick (from rehersals, it looked a bit dodgy) and emphasising the atmosphere a little more. This film is going to be more an exercise in style than anything attempted thus far… I hope it doesn’t translate into a long shoot.

Weekend o’ parents
Hm, just realised I have a schedule conflict, again. My parents are arriving on Friday for the weekend, and I’m pretty sure Jon wants to do a script readthrough of “The Eye Job” on Saturday, the night of which is the “Parents meeting and exchanging engagement rings” bit, which is apparently traditional greek stuff. My folks are slightly nervous, but we’ll be doing the ceremony at my place. Neutral territory, so to speak. There’s a lot to organise (and I hope you’ll excuse me if I use the weblog as a todo list) - gotta move the spare bed in, gotta check the fit of the rings, and gotta find out when Jon wants to do the script readthrough. There. Isn’t reading other peoples shopping lists a bit of a vicarious thrill? Actually, I always enjoy reading about the work that other people have to do and I don’t.

Weekend of mostly quietitude

Did a lot of digging in the front room with Anna and friend - we’ve lifted the floorboards, removed the support beams, and dug the subfloor down to 50cm below the floor level, which is required for any kind of access. We need to be able to access the subfloor in order to check for termites - in fact, I bought the house on condition that we could rip up the floorboards of the front room to do the appropriate checks. So they were ripped up even before we moved in. We finally got our acts together and filled a big skip with dirt, and now the subfloor looks nice and deep. Didn’t find any bodies or buried treasure though, I was tempted to keep digging until we found *something* interesting. “Do bricks count?” “No, keep digging.”

Hera And Zeus
I bought a new two-player card game “Hera And Zeus” based on wild recommendations of a friend, and Anna and I gave it a couple of play-throughs. It’s good. A bit like Stratego, but with quite a bit of depth. It seems like there’s a lot of strategic depth to the game, and the scenario excuse (a battle between gods) is actually implemented fairly well. I’ve also ordered a few more games: Wiz-war, Tigres & Ephrates (sp), and the traditional Illuminati. The only problem is - I don’t have a regular board-gaming group of friends, because Chris, Amanda & Andrea are usually more keen on roleplaying. I say “usually”, however, because they suggested that we could have a board-game night during the week, so that it doesn’t interfere with roleplaying and so that I stop trying to make them play board games on roleplaying nights :-) Now that is tempting. Anna is keen too.

Dogma
I saw the film “Dogma” last night and was unimpressed. The dialog went on and on and on, which I don’t mind in Kevin Smith’s other films, but in this one it is about tedious catholic mythology. I was bored. I barely made it to the end before dropping into a deep, restful sleep filled with images of the Swamp Thing and the weird teddy-bear-like thing called “Frank”.

And another one!

Jon finished off “Reach Out And Touch Someone” last night, and Anna dropped it off at the tropfest office this morning, so that’s it! Our most tropfest-entriest year yet! Looking back on it, I’m really pleased with the way it all went. I wanted to get at least one film out in time for tropfest, and we got two out. The long drought is over!

Dungeons And Dragons
We saw a preview of the film with a bunch of workmates on Wednesday, and it is a genuine kobold of a film (trans: exceedingly stupid dog-man film. Not related to Ted, who is is an exceedingly magic dog-man). Surprised? We kinda knew in advance - it has received shocking reviews in the US - so we proposed a drinking game. The noticed film behaviour inducing a drink is on the left, the number of times we noticed it on the right.

“Thee”, “thou”, “thy”, “thine”, or “Hast” - 3. Mostly “hast” done by the extremely british bad guys.
A dragon blowing a fireball straight at the camera - 1. Unbackable odds, of course, but surprisingly under-used considering the tone of the rest of the film.
A comic sidekick doing something cowardly - 4. Omigod. And this was a conservative estimate.
The bad guy killing his own henchmen - 0, disappointingly. Does putting a weird creature into his ear count?
Extremely anachronistic language - 2. We had to adjust the scope of this one, or it could have been a couple of dozen.
A dwarf mentioning gold - 2. The dwarven anti-defamation league will be out in force about this one.
An elf scorning “you humans” - 0. This role went to the magic user scorning the lower-class. The elf merely did a couple of withering glances, which we didn’t feel warrented a drink.
Gratuitous reference to strength, intelligence, wisdom, dexterity, constitution or charisma - 2. And they said it in such a way as it sounded like a stat.
Love-interest gets captured and trips and falls in getaway - 1. Remarkable, considering how specific this one was.
Bad guy laughing maniacally - 3, at least. That Jeremy Irons. What a fun-loving guy.

Needless to say, we ran out of alcohol fairly quickly and amused ourselves shouting MST3K-isms at the screen for the remainder of the film.

Location, location, location
One thing that really was impressive - the location where we saw the film. It was in the CA building in Artarmon, part of my company, but with a very secure area with a faraday cage, retinal scanners, airlock room, viewing area with one-way glass, and a big while room full of black computer cabinets. I was in movie-maker heaven. We have to, and I really mean *have* to, make a short film there before the facility is complete and we’re not allowed to take video cameras inside (or any electronic devices at all, for that matter!)

It is off

I finished off “Greta” last night, fiddling the sound levels and using the Voice Channel mixer in a fairly primitive way. Printed off a couple of copies, picked up the B&W photos from the photo shop who had finally got around to doing the prints, printed some fairly basic video covers, and gave it to Anna. Jon, Anna and I had some last-minute stuff for “Reach Out And Touch Someone”, so we met in the park where we did the filming two weeks ago, did some shooting, and took some B&W photos with Anna’s new digital camera. Then Anna set off for the tropfest office to deliver “Greta”. A few minutes ago, Anna called, panicked, said “You’re going to be really annoyed - the form was wrong - the due date was yesterday,” and I had a horrible feeling in the pit of my stomach before my bullshit detector kicked in. That Anna. She’s so wacky.

Work stuff, skip to the bottom
I also got the release done for work last night, which was nice - finished up at 8:00pm. It’s more than doubly draining to have two deadlines, but at least they weren’t simultaneous. The testing really takes it out of me - we still haven’t developed an automatic testbed for the C++ version of the product, so I had to painstakingly go through each test case one by one. And some of them are pretty complex. I’m not entirely happy with the release - it could have done with more testing yet - but it’s just a patch, and I don’t think anyone’s expecting it to be the last patch (there are quite a few known issues in the readme).

Bullet Hole
Thoughts now turn to getting together a housewarming party, once the spare room has a floor. I’m thinking of tripling it up - housewarming/engagement/birthday party, with a “movie” dress-up theme. And perhaps show “Greta” and “Reach Out And Touch Someone” - and maybe a prerelease version of “Bullet Hole”. Now that all the other film stuff is out of the way, there’s no time for sitting about resting, we have to get filming for Bullet Hole! Every week is another week’s lost rent!

It’s OK, you can panic now

The editing is almost done. I’m pretty happy with “Greta”. I’ve shown it to a couple of people and so far there’s been positive reviews. There’s only small bits to do now - tweaking the sound, particularly - and then I can submit. “Reach Out And Touch Someone” is coming together too - Jon is coming around on Thursday to do some more tightening, and then we can submit!

LOTR
I played “Lord Of The Rings: The Board Game” on the weekend with Chris, Amanda and Andrea, not to be confused with “Lord Of the Rings: The Board Game”. This is the first time I’ve played it all the way through. We lost, of course. It’s a pretty tricky game - the players are the hobbits on the quest to destroy the ring, and have to work together to get things done - when you win, everyone wins. There’s a nice balance of needing to work together with a (reduced) competitive edge. Nicely designed game - not surprising really, it’s by Reiner Knizia, the German games designer. He’s pretty good - I was so impressed with his “Medici” after playing it, that when I couldn’t buy a copy, I made my own board up.

Don’t Panic

More editing last night, of course. This lot was actually fun - Greta is turning into a fairly wacky little short film, with a pleasantly dark sense of humour. Jon was going to come over and continue editing as well, but he was caught up in something else. He’s coming over tonight, and we’re going to try for a joint “rough draft” showing to friends this weekend, for critical feedback. The chairs for the pooltable/table are arriving this afternoon, so we can actually seat everyone, which is nice.

Meanwhile, work is very tight at the moment - I’ve got a deadline today and have already discovered several bugs in the underlying system that I’m going to have to work around. It all comes at once, doesn’t it?

Dropped on my desk
I got the Coldplay album “Parachutes” for christmas, but only got around to listening to it now, after repeated exposure on JJJ. It is very good. To make up for lost time, I’ve already listened to it three times today. Another angsty british band along the lines of Radiohead or The Verve, but different enough that the impulse to scream “Ripoff!” is muted. Partly because the songs are so good.