Anotherblog

Recording Session

Chris Dunne (my guitar tutor) and I went to the St. Peters Recording Studio on Wednesday, as suggested in a previous blog, and recorded the soundtrack for Bullet Hole. We went from 4:00pm until about 8:30. The St. Peters Recording Studio was rather a surprise. It was run by a pair of aging goths, she with blonde hair piled up in an smoothy-swirl on her head, he with raven-black dreadlocks going to his waist. The studio itself was an amazing warren of narrow passages, the office and recording equipment upstairs and three rehearsal rooms and the recording room downstairs, in a big old brick building that they were sharing with (I think) a mechanic and a design studio and assorted other random businesses. All the corridors had elaborate graffiti of different styles and eras, going back to the 1980’s. There was old furniture and odd artifacts scattered about the place - the studio had recording and playing equipment of vintages going back to the 1960’s, including a super-8 film editing console and projector.
They did not, however, have a monitor in the recording studio, so the first order of the day was to return home and grab my old TV for the purpose. I set it up in the recording studio with the DV camera and a DV tape containing my first “soundless” edit of Bullet Hole (and it was lucky that I made that copy, as you will discover later), and we were ready to go.
I’ll admit to being worried about our sound engineer, Patrick, who was the gothy chap with the dreadlocks. He didn’t look particularly comfortable with the recording suite he was using, which was a daggy looking PC (though with some fairly hefty grunt behind the facade) hooked up to the multiferous equipment and a cable that must have been 50 metres long leading to the recording studio itself. He sat up in the office area while we were in the recording room, and we communicated via the many microphones that he placed around Chris and the guitar.
However, once we got going, I started feeling better about the whole thing. The initial sound was very harsh, but Patrick quickly responded to Chris’ suggestions on improving it, and by 5:00pm or so, we had started recording the initial soundtrack. Bullet Hole has several sequences of a guitar player (me, with Chris doubling for the guitar hands) playing a piece on-screen, so we had to fairly precisely match the soundtrack to the visuals. Next time around, I’d probably do it the other way - get the recording studio stuff done first, then mime to that. Anyway, Chris had a little trouble getting up to speed on the pieces - he’d composed the music himself, and it was a difficult piece even by his standards, and he hadn’t played in a while. (Side note - Andrew: I’m finishing Bullet Hole. When do you want to do the studio recording? Chris: I’m ready any time. Just give me a week’s notice to practice the piece up. Andrew: Consider this your week’s notice.)
Once we had the essential stuff down pat - Chris was finally happy with one or two versions - I got Chris recording as much atmospheric music as possible, taking advantage of his improvisational abilities. We got some nice variations on the theme, and emerged from the studio quite happy with the whole process and considering using that recording studio again.

Bullet Hole
Bullet Hole, first draft, is finished. At long last. If you read this blog back far enough, you’ll see when I was first putting it together, doing the filming, and so on. About a year and a half ago.
It was a bit of a struggle.
The last-minute stuff was particularly struggle-some. For the first time ever, Final Cut Pro did a major bugger-up and destroyed the Bullet Hole project file. Fortunately, I had a backup. Unfortunately, it was a DV tape backup, recorded for the purpose of the recording session on Wednesday. Reconstructing a project from the completed footage is a real pain, and I spent all day Thursday and Friday trying to recover from the setback, finally completing Bullet Hole at 4:00am on Saturday morning. There was a while there when I was despairing of finishing the bugger in time, which was every time I looked at how much there was to be done.

The Inaugural Otherleg Film Festival
…I’m glad to say, was a roaring success. Woke up at about 10:00am on Saturday after editing much of the previous night, and looked out to see it lightly drizzling. Rain - just the thing to put a damper on the Hangi plans, which require a roaring fire in a trench in the garden. Despite the dubious prospects, we wrapped all the meat and vegetables up in alfoil and I bought some firewood from the local service station, and it stopped raining. I dug the trench, got the fire started at mid-day, and quickly had it blazing nicely. Ah, scouts - good for something at last! To cut a long story short, it didn’t rain until late on Saturday night, when we had already retrieved the hangi food which was cooked to perfection.

Dave, Fiona, and Simon arrived at about 5:00pm, and we happily had them helping out around the place. I did some last minute editing on Society Cookery 2, putting on a soundtrack, and eventually had everything together. We didn’t have to wait long before the guests started arriving - for some reason, many of the people I know are early-birds, arriving at 6:00pm or so for the 7:00pm start. Not to worry, they all congregated downstairs and chatted while we had showers and put on costumes. Anna went as the princess from Shrek - a princess costume with shrek ears and a faint green tinge of makeup to the face. Looked fabulous. I went as the prototypical director - jodpurs, smoking jacket, beret, black boots. Couldn’t get a riding crop or a monacle. Dave was Dick Van Dyke from Mary Poppins, and Fiona went as Drew Barrymore from E.T., a costume that was remarkable for its “Oh, of course” accuracy.
James C. (who later became obnoxiously drunk) came as the Phantom of the Opera, Dave & Kyla came as zombies from Night Of The Living Dead, and a spookier pair I haven’t seen in a while.
People started coming in more and more by about 7:30, and I figure we had about 30 people in all, despite a couple of cancellations. Happy! The Hangi was a hit, as were the showings of Bullet Hole and Society Cookery 2 - here is my theory regarding film premieres: If the film is a comedy, show it when people are drunk. If it is a drama, do NOT show it after comedies, and do NOT show it when people are drunk. Jon had the unfortunate timing of having a couple of dramatic pieces in the middle of the comedies, and people were giggling all the way through, at all the wrong parts. Poor guy was quite depressed about it, but there was nothing to be done - the audience was in the mood for comedies, and that’s all there was to it. Louis’ effort, a video clip set to something by Brittany Spears, recieved much laughter and applause for its shameless puns and visual gags (and was, actually, quite brilliant). Hand Relief was reshown to good effect.

We gave out prizes for best costume - some of the more impressive efforts were Carlos and Kathy’s Blind tropfest judges, the aforementioned zombies, and a plethora of princess costumes of various sorts - but the best three we judged to be Carey’s Xena costume (despite not being properly a movie character), Fiona’s young Drew Barrymore, and last and best of all, Simon’s Silent Bob, which was not only an amazingly accurate costume but also an impressive piece of performance art - Simon stayed (mostly) silent for the whole evening! Not to mention his Silent-Bob-isms.

I count the whole affair as a resounding success. Yay! We’ve almost finished cleaning up, too!

Off to Townsville
Tomorrow morning Anna and I are off to Townsville for a week, catching up with the relatives. It’ll be one of those rare occasions where my sisters and I will be in the same place at the same time. Then, to Brisbane for a couple of days to catch up with Evan. Return next Monday, when I will doubtless have more news to report, not to mention some more Cesura…

Long time, no blog

Yes, it has been a while. But look! I’m blogging from the mac. That’s right - the PC and the mac are finally both talking to the internet and each other. In the end, I got a network hub, one that specifically mentions it works with cable modems. It has a built-in firewall, so no more mucking around with zone alarm! Yay. I had a bit of trouble configuring it, until I realised that the cable I was trying to connect things with, was a cross-link cable. They only work with computer to computer network connections, not computer to hub. That sorted out, it was the work of a couple of hours for the PC, and approximately the time it took to plug the cable in, for the mac.
The mac has some frustrating features, but networking support ain’t one of them.

Cesura
Continues, despite me not knowing really what I’m doing with it. There’s a telling comment in a set of writers guidelines I read a while ago. It mentioned the cliches that science fiction writers should avoid (eg. the old pull-back to reveal the whole story was about ants in a sugar shaker!) Anyway, one of these cliches was that the characters would appear in a formless white void, simply because this is what the writer was staring at when s/he was trying to come up with an idea.
There’s a certain amount of truth to that, with regard to Cesura. I mean, I knew what I was trying to do. The visual style is aimed at somewhere between Red Meat and the works of Brian Michael Bendis. I have the background kind of mapped out. But I went over to Jon & Kate’s place tonight and watched Jon’s re-edit of a Dr Who fan video called “Paradise in Chains”. I’d seen it once before, a while ago. And it’s set in a formless black void with the characters not knowing why they’re there, and endlessly asking questions of one another. It’s also very tedious (sorry, guys). The concept fundamentally bores me. So why did I write the beginning of Cesura to be the same kind of thing?

I guess it’s because drawing backgrounds is hard work. Though come to think of it, many comic strips have simple or non-existant backgrounds, and they’re not usually set in formless voids.

Count down
The count down towards the party continues - five days to go. I have to finish editing Bullet Hole, Society Cookery, and Society Cookery 2. The Bullet Hole visuals are nigh-done, just a couple of subtitles to go, and I have booked a studio in St. Peters for four hours on Wednesday evening - thrilling, the first time I’ve ever gone to this level of professionalism before. Surprisingly cheap, too. I met with my guitar tutor and we walked through what he’d be doing in the session, and came up with some more ideas. I think we’re ready. Dad and I also spent between 11:00pm and midnight last night sitting outside my old flat recording background car sounds and the pedestrian crossing going “Freow! Popopopopop.”

Papa
Dad came to visit for a couple of days, just leaving today. A nice time was ‘ad by all. We went out to dinner a couple of times, hung around and talked a lot, and caught “The Royal Tennenbaums”, the latest film from Wes Anderson, he of the highly rated “Rushmore”. Full review later, perhaps, but meanwhile I’d recommend it. It was like “Amelie”s big, sociopathic brother.

Other fillums
Also recently saw “Me, Myself and Irene” which was truly awful. Surprised you may not be, but I was actually expecting it to be a guilty pleasure in the same way as Ace Ventura 2 was. Not so. It was a complete mess of a film, varying its tone wildly, trying a hugely complicated mob plot and then giving up and putting a voice-over on top to try and get through the dull bits faster. Amazingly inept.
Then, “The Shining”. The Stanley Kubrick version. I’m not a huge fan of his, nor am I a big fan of Steven King, so it surprised me greatly just how good it was. Languid pace, wonderful camera work and set design, some of the best steadicam work I’ve seen, creepy atmosphere. One thing that surprised me was that there wasn’t a single boo-scare in the whole film. I’ve become used to having to jump once or twice in a horror film, but they clearly didn’t care for cheap scares in this one.
Standouts -
The scene with Doc playing with toy cars on the carpet, and the ball rolling up to him.
Doc’s tricycle tour around the set.
The conversation at the bright red urinal.
The steadicam work in the maze.

Very impressed indeed.

Procrastination

More Cesura work at the expense of Society Cookery 2 and Bullet Hole - at least I got a little bit of work done on Hand Relief, mailing a copy to Evan for musical purposes. But I’m back into SC2 now. The mac is batch-capturing as I speak. Unfortunately, my miniDV deck doesn’t quite work properly with batch capturing, so I’ve still got to use the camera, which is a bummer, because that’s one of the reasons I got the deck in the first place. Even the camera isn’t working perfectly - both of them have managed to make FinalCut Pro crash while attempting batch capture. Yay!

Minidisc
As opposed to miniDV, something else entirely - I got a minidisc deck yesterday to add to my list of equipment. It has line-out levels, so at last I can capture the sound from the minidiscs to the computer properly. My minidisc recorder only has headphones outputs, which are completely the wrong impedence and level for the soundcards on the mac and the pc. This deck much improves matters. I can now record some of the incidental sound for Bullet Hole.

Stretching

At last, that stretching feeling of having too much to do. I’m working on Cesura, Society Cookery 2, the Hand Relief edits, Bullet Hole, and Society Cookery 1. I feel that old sense of urgency, that old not-enough-hours-in-the-day.

Society Cookery 2
I spent yesterday running around like a crazy beast getting props for Soc. Cookery 2 - a black apron, a chef’s hat (which we didn’t end up using, oh well) a fire extinguisher, kero, a couple of wooden spoons, welder’s gloves, and lots of ingredients for the recipe we were demonstrating. Oh, and I also wrote the script at 10:00am and sent it out to all the participants. In all the fuss and frenzy, I clean forgot that I’d made an appointment with John Dalton to play tennis. Oops. In fact, I only looked at the answering machine today…

The filming
I met up with Jon & Kate at about 6:30pm for dinner, and then we scooted off to Ryan, Ben & Edwin’s place to get things going. I did a couple of trips back home to pick some stuff up that I’d forgotten, while the others set up the lights and got stuff ready, and we were finally filming at about 8:30pm. We were running three cameras at the same time, with me on one, Ben on the second, and Jon on the roving third camera, which should make editing fun. The multi-camera setup was a bit of a pain to get started - making sure the cameras couldn’t see each other, and that shadows were all out of the way - but once we were rolling it was a terrific saving in filming time. I did the directing, but it was a really simple job - everyone was energetic and motivated and the guys (Ryan, Edwin, Ben) had some great improv going. Lovely experience - even with all the fire stuff (about which we were very, very careful indeed. Nice to see after some of the more cavalier fire-safety things I’ve been involved with) we finished at about 11:30pm and then sat around and chatter for a while afterwards because we were still buzzing. Fun!

Internet Explorer vs. Opera

I finally got sick of Internet Explorer and downloaded the web browser “Opera” which promised to be much faster. First impressions? Despite the ads that the free version automatically sticks up in the top right hand corner, it is faster. Quite a lot faster. It doesn’t crash on the pages that Internet Explorer crashes on, and it doesn’t print up the “error: do you want to debug” thing that is so annoying. The only downer is that it doesn’t work perfectly with blogger - for some reason the window that you type your blog into is only very small, and can’t be adjusted. So I’m still using Explorer to type out this blog.

Cesura
I’ve put a lot of behind-the-scenes work into Cesura, setting up directories and structures and playing around with Photoshop and getting various people to pose, so we’ll hopefully see someone other than my ugly mug in it once I’ve gotten through the opening remarks. It’s a remarkably fun displacement activity, Dave, you should try it…

Society Cookery 2
Jon Blum is back from the US and we had a chat today - he’s keen on helping out with the Society Cookery 2 filming tomorrow night. It’ll be the first time we have a multiple camera setup - we’ll have three - so I’m quite excited! The script is coming together, and if I can avoid displacement activities tomorrow morning we’ll have the script together in time. Hooray! All we need now is a fire extinguisher, and no rain. Oh, and Edwin, the main cast member, who hasn’t shown up for any of the meetings so far.

Wedding
Went to a wedding last night, between a Greek friend of Anna’s, and his Thai wife Denish (which sounds exactly like Denise with a Melbourne accent, which is funny because she *has* a Melbourne accent). Lots of Greek dancing, a fair bit of food, and lots of showing off of relatives. I felt like I was on parade, and Anna assured me that despite the sub-30-second meet&greets, I would be the talk of the gossip circuit for a month. Oboy.

Emails bouncing

Oh yeah, and for some reason, all my emails to Amanda are bouncing, claiming (reason: 554 5.0.0 rewrite: excessive recursion (max 50), ruleset canonify), which I interpret to mean that there’s some kind of forwarding loop. Amanda, have you done anything to your otherleg email address?

And what is it with computers today? I’ve been trying to get apache working on the mac, and I can’t even find where it is, let alone where I should put files intended for the website. Bleugh.

Very odd

I’ve been having all sorts of problems with computers last night and today. Last night I finished the first issue of my new web comic - don’t get too excited - and was all set to ftp it onto the web site when it claimed that I had exceeded the quota. Hm. I tried deleting some stuff - hopefully none of it important - and tried again: no luck. Called up Amanda and Dave to see if they’d stuffed something a bit too laaarge onto otherleg, but neither of them had. Emailed support. This morning, Amanda mentioned that we were only using 38M of our allocated 50. Interactive Online, our web providers, have a bunch of service web pages that I’ve never been able to access properly, for some reason. So, I downloaded Opera, the alternative web browser for people who like to see web pages load quickly, and finally got access to the service page. I also downloaded ws_ftp, another ftp client on the off chance that it was the problem. No go.

Anyway, the problem just spontaneously fixed itself not ten minutes ago, around about the time the support people reported that there didn’t seem to be any problem.

Cesura
So… without further ado, here’s issue one of the new web comic, Cesura. Be gentle. I’ll put together a proper title page when I’ve done the second issue.

Rest of week
Oboy, I’m feeling lazy. I completed “Escape From Monkey Island” this week, fiddled around with the computer trying to get the mac and the pc to talk, had meetings about getting a new short film made, slept a lot, drove Anna around a lot, cooked a soufle which turned out very nicely indeed, and did no editing or useful writing at all. Three weeks to go until the film festival. Still have to do the sound editing for Bullet Hole, the re-edit of Hand Relief (and getting Ev to do a soundtrack), and an edit of “Society Cookery” suitable for the festival. All this is weighing heavily on my mind, as I arse about with the web comic. Displacement activities rule.

Squash

I’ve started playing sports with John Dalton, a friend from way-back, with whom I’ve been rather out-of-touch until recently. We’re going to try and play a different sport each week - started, today, with squash. Next week, tennis - perhaps basketball after that. I’m intrigued to keep trying to play a different sport each week - we’ll see how long we can string this out. One of the real advantages (in a sense) is that we’re both unemployed.

Lazy
Yesterday was a very lazy Sunday, though. I slept and slept and felt quite sad for no really good reason. I’m a little frustrated at my lack of progress through my big list of things to do, but more, I’m bored with being unemployed. The novelty has now worn off. The trigger for the burst of ennui was the (entirely valid) criticism that my new web page design - which I’ve been working on all week - looks a bit samey and a bit like-every-other-webpage-out-there. The threat of redesign was enough to send the old creative circuits into meltdown, briefly.

Spike Milligna, the well-known typing error
It’s still hard to believe that Milligoon is dead, but in another sense it’s odd to realise that he was alive until just last week. I grew up with my Dad’s infatuation with the goons, and got infected myself, and I’ve read all the war diaries, and I watched a couple of the Q series, and I saw him alive at the Townsville Civic Theatre doing an exceedingly silly one-man show. I liked him.

More work

I’ve done a bit more behind-the-scenes kind of work - this is addictive. Also done a bit of work on the studio - I’ve added a bit more to the Once Upon A Time homepage. It’s almost done now, three years later…