Anotherblog

Tropfest

We would know by now if we’d made the top 60 entries with “Hand Relief” - so it’s fairly clear that we have another tropfest failure. Oh well. I’m still very proud of the film, and this will allow me to start posting up all the details on the website.

Watching the Monastery
I got tired of being stuck writing “Fork” yesterday evening, so I quickly knocked off a short story set in the Monastery (a group world I designed for David Versace to write stories in - he hasn’t done one yet, natch.) Actually, I’m at least as bad as Dave in this respect. I’ve thought about and promised a number of monastery stories over the years, but it’s never come to anything yet. I spent quite a bit of today putting the story into usable shape so, without further ado, here’s Watching The Monastery.

State of the Onion

After two weeks and a day, how is unemployed life stacking up? Well, I’m regularly sleeping in until 10:30am at the moment, I’m driving Anna + towels into work every day, and I’m eating lunch at about 3:00pm, from the local bakery. I read my regular websites and newsgroups every day, do a couple of chores, watch a movie or the tennis or the cricket, and laze around a lot. I sometimes get some work done on Fork, which makes me happy, and I sometimes go for a walk or bike ride with Anna.

Things have to change, unfortunately. For one thing, I’ve got a short film project coming up that really needs to be done soon - this is the one written by Simon Laing’s son Tony, who’s in school holidays at the moment. He came up with a fairly nifty premise that we need to film in the next couple of weeks, if we’re to catch him in school holidays. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to maintain a light touch in this kind of role - he’s director and I’m producer, and while the script is his, I keep coming up with ideas for it. I don’t want to tromp on his story, but I want to make something as good as we can do it… so what’s to be done? At the moment I’m procrastinating. Need to get something done on the topic today.

Also, I need to start setting more of a multitasking schedule. I don’t want to be *only* writing Fork - there are plenty of other writing projects, so I’m going to try and work out how much time I spend on each per day.

More news when I create something…

Mulholland Drive

Saw it on Saturday night with Jon & Kate. Anna didn’t go, wasn’t keen on it - in the mood for a comedy - though in the end I think she might have enjoyed it, at least the first two-thirds. A thought-provoking film. At first, I figured that the last one-third was art-wank. And I still do, but I’ve begun to see what Mr. Lynch was getting at, too, even though the “real” plot is far less enjoyable than the “mini-series pilot” plot which comprises the first two-thirds of the film (and a couple of bits from the opening).

Caddyshack
I finally got around to seeing this on video, about half an hour ago. Boooring. A few mildly funny moments of Chevy Chase’s “It may sound like I’m reassuring you, but I’m not” schtick, but the overall plot was truly dreadful and conventional, and I hated Rodney Dangerfield. The film could have been redeemed by a massive explosion on the eighteenth green at the ending - something they seemed leading up to - but unfortunately, they blew up all the other holes instead, leaving all the main characters alive. I’m a bit dumbfounded by the sub-Roadrunner antics involving the gopher and Bill Murray. Wasted. Oh, and lets see:

Rodney Dangerfield farting
Chevy Chase pissing
Vomiting, and then sitting on the vomit
A very large reefer
The “chase girl” showing her breasts

and

An apparent turd in a swimming pool
Bill Murray apparently wanking

Things have progressed nowadays. If Caddyshack was made today, it would be a real turd and a real wank.

Fork
A couple more frustrating days trying to wade through Fork. I’ve done the plot summary once, and now I’m going through it again trying to make it more coherent, removing excess coincidences, tightening the logic and the character motivations, and so on. I’m still a bit shaky on the ending. In one sense, it’s quite conventional, what Greg Egan would call a “mother and apple pie” ending - everything goes back to normal, despite the profound changes that the science ought to cause. But honestly, that’s how the plot worked out, all by itself. And how far from the status quo can you go in a Dr Who novel proposal?

The Two Towers
Continuing the walking tour of Middle Earth, and Prof. Tolkein is settling into the whole “endless discussion about what just happened”. I’m in the middle of the meeting with Faramir bit, and I’m hoping that by some point in “Return Of The King”, every character in the book will have worked out precisely what happened when Boromir died. I’m half expecting a page of dialog as Gollum falls into Mount Doom - “Ah, precious! Boromir trys to take precious from nice master, gollum!” “Yesss! Then other little hobbitses gets taken by nasty orcses! I sssseee!”

Revenge of the lazy day

A couple more lazy days, going to sleep and waking up late (despite previous vows to the contrary). Watching the tennis during the day, then settling down to some work on “Fork”, or doing the household chores, or playing pool. Not much progress with the computer fixing - the CD ROMs are still stuffed, which is holding up most of the rest of the work. The spare room is largely cleaned up now that the new bookcase has arrived. I’ve worked out that the existing DV cature card will definitely not do the job for the firewire network, and I’ve found a card that will do the job, for $88. Anna’s brother Bill is coming around at some point, and as he’s a sysman/network engineer, I suspect we’ll see a bit more progess then. Still haven’t found the win98 CD.

Fork
Fork progesses with agonising slowness, but I’m working on it every day again. I’m trying to fix plot elements, but I keep getting held back by trying to include everything from the original outline - it’s hard to just write something out of the story which you spent weeks developing. But it’s what you’ve got to do.

Tropfest
No news yet. I strongly suspect that this means we didn’t get into the top 60 with “Hand Relief”, but the optomistic reading of the forms suggests that the top 60 will be informed on the 28th.

Lazy day

It has been a very lazy day indeed. I spent most of the afternoon snoozing, and have only just woken up into a kind of daze of “boy it looks dark for the morning”. No sleep for me tonight! This is the kind of thing that I’d half looked forward to, and half feared - complete change in sleep patterns, which will eventually settle on going to bed at 3:00am and waking at 11:00am. Which is kind of alright by me.

Chores
Blahdy blah. I ordered a bookcase for the computer gewgaws, a CD bookcase, and a metal chest for the tripods and light stands. But none of them are going to arrive until at least Friday. The reason I wanted them earlier (especially bookcase #1) was so that I could effectively tidy the study, thus finding the Windows 98 CD, thus fixing up the CD drives in the PC, thus being able to install the firewire network between the mac and the PC, thus being able to browse the internet from the mac, thus being able to upgrade MacOS 9.2.1 to 9.2.2 and 10.1 to 10.1.2, thus being able to install FinalCut Pro 3, thus being able to do some of the editing stuff that I want to do.

I figure there are a couple of likely obstacles.

Firstly, while the idea of a firewire network is just fantastic - it goes at about 200Mbps (peaking at 400Mbps) which is about twice as fast as your ethernet card - I think that my DV capture card (which has a firewire port) is kinda non-standard (it’s a DV Raptor) which means that I wouldn’t be able to use it for the network. However, nowadays you can get generic firewire cards which don’t offer DV handling, for about AU$100. Which is about the price of an ethernet card anyway. So I’d sell the Raptor, buy a cheap ethernet card, and have a kick-arse home network.

Secondly, I’ve got windows 98, which is only kind-of supported by the firewire network software (FireNet). So maybe I’ll have to upgrade the OS. But I don’t want to support microsoft, and besides, I’d have to get a new hard drive ’cause my current C: drive is (only!) 2Gb and keeps running out of space.

Thirdly, I’m no network guru. In fact, this is completely new territory for me. I queeble, and frankly don’t expect this whole thing to be working for months yet.

Hence the afternoon procrastinatory snooze.

Still relaxing

Had lunch and dinner with Carlos and Kathy on Friday, met their pet labrador ’tilly, and a jolly good time was had by all. Carlos and Kath couldn’t stop talking about ’tilly, about her astonishing trailability and her cute habits and the way she scoffs down a full plateful of food in less than 20 seconds, and how she eats standing up except when she finds and especially chewy bit. Then she sits down.

Apparently also, the methods of training dogs have changed since I last was acquainted with them. Nowadays they greatly emphasize the positive - rewards for good behaviour, rather than punishment for bad. This parallels my dad’s experiences with small (and large) children, and leads me to the conclusion that it’s an interesting world innit, make no mistake.

*Good* reader.

Weekend
I’ve been relaxing so much that I was practically comatose on Sunday - I just lay around and watched TV, got up to do a few minor household chores, and started “The Two Towers”. Anna’s been having troubles with insomnia lately, I think I’ll try reading it to her. Snooze.

And now…
Today has been chore day - writing letters, arranging quotes for house repairs, sweeping the yard, and so on. I’ve also sworn that this week I’m going to get the computers (the mac and the PC) talking to one another. I was pricing network cables for the mac, but then was distracted into Dymocks and ended up buying a book on Firewire Film-making, which had a chapter on Firewire networking, something that I’d looked into before but found nothing. Hooray! There’s a product out there that does it, and it’s shareware, and rather cheap too. Of course, I couldn’t get things working yet because it asked for the Windows 98 CD and I can’t find the damn thing. Time to buy yet another bookcase for the study - the computer stuff spilleth over.

All done

Our tropfest entry has been signed, sealed, and delivered, half an hour before the deadline today. I’m a bit tired. I took most of yesterday to fix up the sound problems and tweak the content and some of the colour correction. Speaking of the sound - it wasn’t nearly as bad as I first thought. In fact, the problem was with the speaker’s playback, rather than the original sound. Most of the sound correction was setting the background noise levels as equal as possible, and adding the foley effects - lets see - the sound of water splashing, a phone ringing, a match striking, a thump, a scream, and a capacitor charging (actually a muchly sped-up sample of me whistling). Complicated by the fact that the computer, on which I was sampling all this, produced so much sound itself that I had to run cables out the door into the living room and record there. In future, I’ll just use the video camera with the mike plugged in, to record the sound. That’s what I had to use for the phone-call voice-overs at the end.

I’m pleased with it. It looks and sounds good, the performances are excellent, and it does what I tried to make it do. The read weakness is that the script is a bit of a one-joke tale, and I’m not sure whether it deserves even a six-minute treatment (which was the eventual running time).

And that’s enough on that topic for the moment - I’ll post something up on the website properly as soon as I’ve stopped relaxing.

Hand Relief: filming

We got the filming mostly done last night, a huge relief after Wednesday’s effort. In fact, the shots remaining are not essential - just a couple of reverse-angle shots of a conversation between Anna and one of the characters. What was the difference this time? We got started early, and we had enough people in the crew. Although Kit didn’t show up, and Kate’s Dad (and brother Andrew) were unable to make it, we had me, Jon, Anna, Irene, Thie, and John Dalton, a friend from Adelaide days. John got made redundent recently as well, so we were discussing what to do with the spare time.

John is an extremely good electrical engineer, and he had some frankly amazing ideas about getting an array of microphones in a room and using software adaptive beamforming to pick out conversations (and exclude others) within, in post-processing. What is particularly cool, he says, is that you don’t even have to precisely place the microphones - just run some test tones through first, and then the software can (still in post-processing, here) map the room. Sounds like a huge job to me, but John is brillant…

Speaking of brilliant, I now know why people are so effusive about each other on DVD audio commentries. It’s because people are bloody brilliant, like Jonathan who was one of those enormous support platform things under the Sydney harbour bridge. His camera work was superb, and he kept things moving and it wouldn’t have been made without him. Just outstanding. In fact, everyone was great, just terrific, very committed and tireless and the acting was wonderful… anyway, you get the idea. It’s how you really feel.

I ended up having to do one of the roles myself, which was a little disappointing in some respects, but OK in others because I’m always available for extra shots, and other actors probably wouldn’t have been.

Hand Relief: editing
So I woke up late this morning with a headache and a lot of editing to do before Tuesday evening, when I’ll have to do all the remaining filming based on what we think is lacking. Things didn’t really take off until after I had a nap in the afternoon - ah, redundency - but then I settled in to a solid afternoon’s work and got a rough cut together. It looks pretty good, but the sound is fairly disappointing. We may have to dub some stuff, but I’ll see what I can do with Final cut Pro’s inbuilt sound-handling software. As far as extra footage is concerned, we can probably get away without any other shots being done, but we still need to get together on Tuesday to get some still photographs, one of the tropfest requirements.

Hand Relief: what’s to go?
Well, there’s the Tuesday filming, sound-correction, tightening of the editing, colour-correction, and some kind of soundtrack. I’d love to use something of Evan’s, but none of it is *quite* suitable and we don’t have enough time before Thursday (the due date) to get a proper soundtrack. I’ll just put in windchimes if nothing else comes up.

And that’s it. My first “non-working” day.

First day of being surplus to requirements

Lazed around this morning trying to feel redundent, but it just feels like a weekend so far. Roland & Susana & Trish are around to edit their short film on the mac, and Anna’s headed off to work. Last night was fairly mild - we all went out for drinks and talked pub-talk and as people got drunker I starting hearing more and more gossip about the office that I’d missed all these years (in one sense of the word). There were some jaw-dropping revelations about the HR meltdown, all those months ago, and quite a few more rumours about the future of the company which was kinda interesting to hear because I still have stock options, which I can apparently exercise at any time in the next year. The stock options are at UK16p each, and the current stock price is 17p, so they’re worth 1p each. Profit!

Jak & Dexter
I’m about 75% of the way through the game now, and I’ve finished the bastard spider level - there was this horrible “climb the statue” puzzle that was so *long*. I spent *hours* on it, each time getting closer to the end, and getting frustrated. I put the game away for a month or so, and came back to it this morning and solved it in just under half an hour.

D&D
Tried writing a bit for my D&D game, but I’m not getting inspired. Fortunately, the characters can pretty much natter on by themselves without outrageous GM stunts to prod them along - it’s almost entertaining just having them wander around the countryside.

Aaahhhh

This feels good. I had a chocolate milkshake and a chocolate muesli slice, and now I’m settling into an afternoon of relaxation. Before I get too settled, I’d better write that email and burn that CD of my work email account…