Anotherblog

Massage

Anna is stressing over the non-business of the massage place (Energetic Healing Therapeutic Massage, Shop 614-618, opposite the QVB, under the Hilton Hotel) despite the fact that she’s only been open for two days - the weekend, which is pretty slow in town - and hasn’t done any leaflet drops yet, or convinced the Hilton to refer guests. Still, I know where she’s at. There haven’t been any customers at all yet.

Trajectory
After much hassle trying to organise extra people to help out with filming, it was just Jon and I for the majority of Saturday. One of them (Kit) was held back because the embroidery shop where she works was broken into on Saturday morning, and she had to help out - and then she had a recurance of a medical condition and was in hospital on Sunday (!). Steven, brother of one of my workmates, was unable to make it at the last minute due to suddenly remembered prior commitments.

We found out a lot of this on Saturday morning in a flurry of non-mobile phone calls - my mobile batteries ran out and I couldn’t find the charger, Jon’s mobile also ran out of batteries and his charger was in Canberra, Kit’s mobile was stolen in the break-in, and Anna’s mobile had a faulty connection and wasn’t responding! So there was much stress and running around trying to find public phones. On the bright side, Anna caught the train into town and I had the car all day - after a good day’s filming of Bullet Hole, Jon and I headed back to his place, we had dinner with Kate, and then dragged her back for the night filming as we desparately needed an extra. Finished, completely stuffed, at 1:30am.

The next day I picked up Jon and Kate and drove them back to the flat and had a car accident. There was a car ahead of us turning right into a driveway, and we stopped behind it. The car behind us, however…
So the car got a mid-sized dent in the rear bumper and we got a bunch of details from the stressed-out driver behind us, and more hassles to report to poor Anna. Anna has not had a good run with cars. In a similar incident, the other person refused to pay for the damage and Anna ended up heavily out of pocket. And when she was on holidays in Greece once, one of her brothers crashed her previous car. It now sits in a barn, serving as a chicken roost. Her brother still hasn’t recompensed her. So fingers crossed that this one will turn out a bit better than the other accident after-effects.

After the near-death experience, we powered through the rest of the script and had the whole thing finished by 4:30pm. By that stage, the mobile phone hassles were sorted out and I went to the massage shop and broke the bad car-news to Anna (who took it remarkably well) and then, to celebrate the completion of the principal filming of Bullet Hole, went out to dinner with Jon and Kate at a Mongolian restaurant in an extremely exuberant mood.

Massage

So, Anna’s massage business ought to be starting Real Soon Now - the curtains go in today, the reception desk arrives, the massage tables are there, and she’s done most of the necessary painting… just gotta get a signwriter and minor bits & pieces and then a grand opening party later in the week. Thursday night would be a grand time to start, but it might be a bit ambitious.

Filming
We’re hoping to knock the remainder of “Bullet Hole” off over the coming weekend. In preparation, I’ve finally gotten stuck into the editing of the already-filmed bits. As always, there are a lot of shots that we did take after take, and it’s really hard to see why - they all look fine. And then there are others that we only did two takes and it’s missing footage that would have been rather handy. Dem’s de breaks, I s’pose. It’s not too hard to fill in most bits, anyways, especially if you’re not especially concerned about continuity. Continuity is nice, but I’m prepared to live with mistakes if they’re minor.

Work
Yike. And that’s all I’m saying on the matter.

Blah

I have a horrible feeling that I didn’t tell Chris, Amanda, and Andrea about my trip to Canberra for Dave & Fiona’s engagement party on the weekend, and that they were expecting me to show up for roleplaying. Blah. Got to get my life together.

Hole in the head
I’ve just sent off a fax to the real-estate agent for my flat, giving three weeks notice. Let the countdown begin. Three weeks to finish off Bullet Hole.

Party
The party in Canberra was fun, but too short… we were only in Canberra for 20 hours before we had to catch the train back. Still, Anna and I caught up on a lot of reading, which made it a whole heap better than the last trip where we drove.

Carlos the evil next-desk worker

Carlos’ sense of humour is vile. Here’s an example - just one example - from today.

Carlos was bouncing on his chair, producing a squeaking sound.

I looked at him.

“I’m squishing dolphins!” he said, brightly.

“It’s that kind of day,” I responded. “Why, just on the way to work, I must have pulverised a dozen pachyderms.”

I admit that I encourage the lad. There followed several moments of non-sequiter, which ended with Carlos demonstrating the musical possibilities of a dolphin with more than one blowhole.

“They call him Tuba… Tuba…”

Gin Rummy
I’ve caught up, and even briefly overtaken, the computer. The score now stands at 59-60, with me slightly in the lead. My progress has slowed somewhat with my recent acquisition of Steven Bury’s “Interface” (actually Neil Stephenson & relative), which has taken over as thing-to-do-on-the-train. The style is instantly recognisable, despite the pseudonym. And really rather addictive.

Almost Famous
Last night, I have mostly been watching “Almost Famous”, which was very good. Beautiful nostalgia piece/coming-of-age story - it covers the ’70s without mocking it, and had me smiling all the way through. Cameron Crowe does wonderful characters, people who are smart and alive and who you can and do instantly fall in love with. Pure joy. Now if we could only harness him to a kick-arse science fiction film…

Advent & Equinox

Jon & Kate have some friends in the UK who make amateur videos - a lot. They’ve got near 100 hours of tape. Most of their work is centred around a universe called the “Protoverse”, and centres around the adventures of two surrealists in surrealist-land named Advent and Equinox. They also make Dr Who videos, and as an in-joke had the Doctor break out of an insane asylum with a security system called “Equinox Security Corporation”. So, as an in-joke for Hard & Easy, Jon suggested naming the security company (which is featured heavily) “Equinox Security Corporation”. So we did that, made up some nice polo-shirts for the purpose, and filmed with them, and it was all good.

And now, to the point… I was sitting on the train yesterday and noticed that the person sitting directly opposite me had a polo shirt with the logo “Advent Security Systems”. I looked it up on the web (www.adventsecurity.com), and yes, it really exists. So there you go, how ’bout them anecdotes. Yup, that sure is a funny looking one. Must be the radioactive soil.

There’s no escape. Television is everywhere.
So I was watching The Micallef Pogram last night and… well, yes. I was watching television. It deadens the inner core of my being. ANYway, isn’t it a rather good pogram? Half an hour of skits, and not a wasted, time-filling second. Remarkable. Very odd, wonderful sense of humour.

Bugger

On Saturday I have mostly been: sleeping. In fact, on Saturday, I completely forgot about picking up the drumkit for Sunday’s filming, and by the time I woke up it was 6:30pm and much too late to get it. I was about to call people and cancel, when I thought: well bugger it, this is an amateur film. Why should I be delayed by mere incompetence? So I did some last-minute rewrites (or rather, rethinks) to the script and when Winnie and Carey and Ted turned up on Sunday morning (thanks guys!), I had it planned out.
We moved a bunch of stuff into the bedroom to make it look like a living room, changed the curtains, opened the blinds, set up the french horn and the electric piano and the djembe drum and the stereo, did a couple of rehearsals, and ran through it half-a-dozen times for the camera. Total time on film: probably about ten seconds. Carey features for approximately three seconds, which leaves her with twelve seconds of fame (cf. Warhol) left. And then we went out and had Greek sweets and coffee and gelati and Winnie and Carey went home and Ted and I set up the bedroom as it was before, and then I was so stuffed I didn’t do any more filming and called it a day.

So much for filming.

Super-8
Anna’s Dad did a heap of super-8 films of Anna and brothers as babies, and we watched through three reels of those on Sunday night. Interesting. Anna was a cute baby, all right, and it’s easy to see where the sibling rivalry started between her and her brothers - at her birth.

Bullet Hole

So I decided it was much too much work to try and do screen printing given that there’s only two days until I need the shirts and Chris & Amanda are away for the weekend, and they have all the supplies. But I haven’t given up on doing the t-shirts. I bought a packet of six laundry markers yesterday (and checked out Anna’s new massage office under the Hilton - it’s right next to Games Workshop) and some t-shirts in what I hoped was roughly Winnie and Carey’s size (actually several sizes too large for Carey), and I’m going to write the “HARD” and “EASY” logos on by hand, dammit.

Mutter, mutter.

Still, everyone seems ready to go - I’ve got Ted to do the camerawork and I’ll try to get John Dalton to maybe do some sound work and heck, I can’t see any reason why this shouldn’t all work. Jon Blum is coming around on Saturday and we’re going to try out some preliminary edits to see how Bullet Hole looks so far. I’ve been meaning to make a start on the editing all week so far, but it has merely taken the trophy of “most-procrastinated plan”. Perhaps I should make a list of most-procrastinated stuff. Then if I don’t update the list, I can add it to itself.

Chris Dunne, my guitar tutor, emailed me to say that doing the sound recording isn’t going to be as straightforward as he’d hoped. The person he was hoping to use is booked out for several months. So no more progress there… still, the most urgent stuff should be out of the way soon, and that’s the filming. Once that’s done, I can relax a little bit, mentally, at least.

Bloody frustrating
I’ve been playing a horrible little version of Gin Rummy on my palm pilot lately. Horrible because it keeps winning. The score so far is Andrew - 48, PalmPilot - 53. Every time I think I’ve worked the game out and catch up to it in number of games won, it does a spurt of quick victories. I even overtook it once, in the 30s, then it won seven times in a row and I’ve been behind ever since. Here, if you’re interested. I wouldn’t though. Evil little thing.

Bottle Rocket
Saw Wes Anderson’s first film last night, Bottle Rocket. (He went on to do Rushmore, one of my favorite films). It was an inspiring little independant effort with a couple of name actors (eg. James Caan), a meandering plot, poor production values, and some hit and miss bits of acting. I enjoyed it (though it relied heavily on embarrasment as a source of humour, something I hate), especially watching how the production values and the acting improved throughout. I checked on the IMDB to see what happened to all of the actors - Luke Wilson, the lead, went on to do a bunch of stuff including a small role in Charlie’s Angels, and most of the other cast members have done the same. I think the most inspiring thing about this film is, I can see the direction behind it all, I can imagine what it might have been like to film, we’re *almost there* - and *they* went on to do Rushmore.

Hans

Feet was indeed renamed… to “Monty”. Curious, this was one of the other potential names, after Dave Versace’s old dog.

Bills
I closed my old ozemail account (at last) today, thus finalising the first of my “Bills that I shouldn’t be getting”. The second of these is the rent on the flat - but there are probably only a few more days of filming left, so I’m optomistic. As to when I will get to do those bits of filming - well, obviously there’s the lot on Sunday (I’ve got the french horn and a trumpet now) and then I’ve got to do a bunch of night filming and probably some outdoors filming… maybe a couple more weeks. By the end of March, for sure. Maybe I should give notice on the flat, that’d give me a bit of incentive…