Anotherblog

Bengal Boogie
Paul has dubbed the music video “Bengal Boogie”, and I am delighted to say that my part of the filming has finished. We did the rest of the filming today, and my arm is sore from holding the steadicam, and I have learned so very much about what not to do - but at least today’s filming wasn’t as bad as last week.

Last Sunday, 5:30am
The alarm goes off. I press Snooze.

Last Sunday, 5:39am
The alarm goes off. I press Snooze. And again and again and again until:

Last Sunday, 6:15am
Leaps out of bed, fresh and alert, bounds downstairs and makes a quick breakfast, rushes over to the computer to read the morning mail, dashes around the house getting the steadicam and video camera and extra tapes and lens cleaning cloths and other bits and bobs, opens front door, ready for the filming.

Last Sunday, 6:30am
Sitting waiting for my lift.

Last Sunday, 6:45am
Get interrupted from browsing the web by frantic knocking suggesting that my lift may have arrived. Reluctantly stop reading “The Register”. Hop in the car bright and cheery, exchange pleasantries with very nice Paul and his wife Greta. Drive Like the Wind! towards Circular Key, the first location for the filming.

Last Sunday, 7:05am
Arriving in town, there appears to be some confusion about whether filming commences at Circular Key, as Paul suggests, or Hyde Park, as Greta recalls. Call Pete, the director, and establish that filming will, in fact, commence at the fountain at Hyde Park, and that all the dancers are there and are waiting for us. We’re late!

Last Sunday, 7:15am
Find a park near the park, rush over to the fountain and can’t see anyone yet. Weather slightly overcast. Greta points out Christian, cheerful drummer in Pete-the-Director’s band and one of the cameramen, who greets us and points out Pete, standing slightly off to the side, talking impatiently at his mobile phone. Dancers nowhere in sight. Slight confusion evident in our faces. Pete introduces self and immediately lays down the rules of the shoot. The dancers are unrehearsed amateurs, apparently, so we have to try to at least appear to be professional and try not to look like dickheads. Do we think we can manage that? Also, Pete shouldn’t be questioned in front of the dancers as it will drive them into a panic, possibly causing them to trample each other and ourselves, endangering the shoot. Fails to add that we should avoid impaling ourselves on our tripods, and many other important safety tips that immediately leap to mind. Slightly disconcerted by Pete.

Pete adds that Paul hadn’t mentioned Greta was turning up, and while he is delighted at her presence, she will not be paid for her time. Fair enough. Paul somewhat embarassed, and even more embarassed when Pete asks where all the lighting equipment is, as he didn’t think we were going to use it. Never mind, we reassure, the (rather daunting) list of locations for todays shoot involve going roughly past my place, we shall drop in and pick it up before we head off to the locations that will require the lights.

Sunday morning, 7:30am
Dancers still haven’t shown up, so Pete and Greta disappear in search of coffee shop.

Sunday morning, 7:45am
First dancer, who is also the producer, who’s name I have forgotten isn’t that terrible? - shows up, and shows us her handbag, which was soaked through from being dropped in a puddle, thus causing her mobile phone to cease working, hence her inability to organise the dancers. She appears rather worried. We attempt to reassure her. Her worriedness turns out to be because she has forgotten something - the boom box that will allow the dancers to synchronise in a “rhythm”. She remembers a friend who lives nearby, and disappears to their place, hoping to borrow a boom box.

Sunday morning, 8:00am
The three breakdancers arrive. We have breakdancers? We have breakdancers! We are delighted to have something that we can begin to film. But Pete is still off in search of coffee.

Sunday morning, 8:05am
Pete and Greta arrive back with no coffee. There are no places open in the city on a Sunday morning this early. Townsville… er, I mean, Sydney… obviously not cosmopolitain enough.
Relieved to have something to do. Select location by fountain, assemble steadicam, and breakdancers start doing warmup exercises.

Sunday morning, 8:15am
Start filming some breakdancing. They’re not bad. The whole attitude of the breakdancing scene is a weird set of formal poses, quite deliberately stereotyped. Steadicam work not particularly steady, and have some quiet discussions with Pete about what is possible and what isn’t possible with the steadicam. Reach amicable agreement to film things that are possible to film. Attempt Pete-pleasing pseudo-crane shot by holding the steadicam really high up and swooping down and at the breakdancers. I have no idea how well this works, as at no point in the proceedings, is the viewfinder of the camera visible to me. The day is overcast but bright, and the viewfinder is not particularly informative at the best of times. No doubt will find results entertaining whenever we get around to looking at the footage. There are three of us filming - one camera (Paul’s) on tripod getting a wide angle shot, which then gets ruined for the majority of the time by Christian on hand-held and me on steadicam getting in and close.

Three cameras, unrehearsed dance moves. Surely there will be some usable footage, something in which one of us caught that great move entirely in shot without any of the other cameramen visible? Surely?

Sunday morning, 8:30am
Some of the Indian dancers arrive, as does producer, with borrowed boom box and mobile phone. She is calling and getting through to those Indian dancers who have not yet arrived. Some of the Indian dancers start getting into costume.
Breakdancers stop being impressive, and start being very impressive. The breakdancer who until now had been concentrating on posing at the expense of getting down and spinning, starts spinning. He spins on his head. He spins to the left. He spins to the right. He does funky stuff that I am unable to describe. As it turns out, he is a breakdancing instructor and the other two are his students. Descriptions: he looks a little like Michael Biehn from “The Abyss”, definitely ex-Army in appearance, though not in attitude. The second of the breakdancers looks like a very tall and slightly more asian Keanu Reeves, while the third one is definitely Shaggy. Since I have forgotten their names, they shall be Michael, Keanu, and Shaggy. All are very nice people, unusually friendly and engaging and quite humble about their quite cool skills. Perhaps this is typical of the Australian breakdancing community. Whatever, I am impressed.

Sunday Morning, 8:45am
The fountain starts to get a little crowded. A chinese wedding party arrives for photos at fountain. At 8:40am?! Tourists start to converge. Getting very difficult to film breakdancers without including spectators. If there were many spectators, this would be fine, but it’s just dribs and drabs who are barely paying attention, which don’t look good any way you look at it.
Breakdancers continue to do impressive stuff.
I do a couple of long tracking shots inwards, which will be sped up for impressive effect in the editing room. Hopefully. There are *tiny* little jolts in the picture as I walk forwards, not being a steadicam expert yet, but perhaps this can be smoothed over.

Sunday morning, 9:00am
Remainder of Indian dancers arrive. Pete declares the fountain location lost, as there are now far too many tourists. We all head off to the just-open coffee shop and order breakfasts, taking what turns out to be a disturbingly long break.

When vegetables get the job
Much to my increasing considerable surprise, I got the job with the Canon mob. The second interview (obviously) went very well. I was pretty charming, if I do say so myself, and although I didn’t get all of the interview questions right, I was impressive enough on one or two of them that they gave each other little nods. The point at which I think I got the job though, was when I was talking about a data collection buffer: “So, we’ve got the data going in, and it’s going in faster than it can be processed, but that’s OK, it’s more important to get the data than to process it - much like science, really…” at which point they guffawed and labelled me a philosopher-cynic.

And that’s enough rampant egotism. The thing about interviews is, you have to get into that mindset of self-promotion while making it clear that this is not your usual mode of operation. I felt pretty good after that interview, and the vibes got stronger and stronger yesterday as they did my reference check and sent out feelers for what kind of salary I’d go for. They mentioned that there were some reservations, particularly with regard to my bredth of experience - I have only had two jobs, both doing fairly specialised stuff. But the fact that I have only had two jobs in ten years also counts as a big plus. CISRA apparently don’t have a high turnover of staff, as there is plenty of variety within the company, and it’s a stable working environment. They have never had layoffs, and their profits are strong. This job is going to be fantastic.

I start the week after next, though I still don’t know exactly what I will be doing. More news as it comes…

The filming
I’m kind of at a loss as to where to begin in describing the experience I had with the filming last Sunday. It was… yeah, I’ll need a couple of pages to describe it all. And I’ll have to do it today, because we’re doing the second lot of filming tomorrow, due to a last-minute change of plan from Sunday to Saturday. To get a flavour of what the filming on Sunday was like though:

- the filming is on tomorrow rather than Sunday. They let us know yesterday that this would be the case.
- the number of locations from the shoot has gone from one to three. And they are three new locations - the previous one isn’t being used any more.
- we are apparently taking the monorail from the Star City Casino to Martin Place, two of the locations. This may come as a surprise to Sydney locals who weren’t aware of the Martin Place monorail station.

Yay! The most professional shoot I have ever had the pleasure of experiencing!

When vegetables defend
Much to my considerable surprise, I have been targetted for a second interview with the Canon mob. The interview is due on Wednesday - I keep thinking I should study up for it a bit more, but I can’t quite focus on what I should study. Concentrate on C? Been there, done that. TCP/IP? XML? They asked questions on those topics last time, which I didn’t answer particularly well. Hohum. Maybe I should just study the CISRA web site. And buy a Canon camera, for promenant display at the next inner-view.

Other film stuff
I got together with Ryan and Richard at Friday lunchtime to eat sushi, delicious sushi, and discuss where we’d gotten up to with our respective film scripts. Ryan had produced an impressive dozen pages of script for “Training for the Pain”, which Richard had been whittling down to a more sensible length. Very impressive. I had whipped up four pages of “Leaf Heist”, none of them about the car chase that will be the majority of the films focus. Not so impressive. Still, it prompted me to get a move on.

More filming!
This filming stuff just doesn’t stop! Paul, with whom I hit it off at HensNightmare, was asked to do some filming for a music video on Sunday - he called me up and asked if I’d be interested, so I said, sure. Just give me the details.
Well, the details weren’t easy to come by. The director, a friend of Paul’s wife Greta, was busy trying to finish off some coding of his own (we’re all computer programmers. Madness!) before the deadline on Saturday and wasn’t in much of a mood to hand out details on the shoot, eg. where we’d be meeting. Paul and I had pretty much given up on the whole thing when he got a call saying that it was still on. There would be four locations in one day, ranging from the city to Paramatta to Manly, starting at 7:00am and finishing at 7:00pm. The music video, apparently, had something to do with traditional Indian music and dancing. Sounded interesting, if a little disorganised, so I agreed.

Oh boy.

Interview with a Vegetable
Well, I got to the interview with that wildly ambitious job this afternoon, and it went OK. The job is at CISRA, the R&D arm of Canon. If I get it, it’s pretty much ideal - exciting work, casual workplace, etc. except that it’s in North Ryde and I’d have to buy a car. Far too early to be looking at that, however.
They seemed awfully keen on riddle-style questions - they hit me with two really tough ones and then a fairly simple one to finish with, and since I only got 4/5 on the C test, I think I may be off the list. I’ll probably know within a week.

Filming HensNightmare
So the film turned out to be called “HensNightmare”, a broad short comedy in the Australian Gothic kind of style. The bunch of people were tremendously impressive. I made friends with Paul, the cameraman, who was also new to the enterprise and who lives in Sydenham and is a C++ programmer by day who is unemployed. We have vowed to make short films together, after the experience on HensNightmare: he did the camerawork and I did the lighting, and we worked pretty well together.
As it turns out, the mob at “The Pad” are a bunch of comedians.
No, really, they’re all stand-up comedians of various experience. They do gigs around the city, and running “The Pad” is their new enterprise, branching out to run their own thing. They’re a pretty tight group - while they didn’t get very many extras, everyone pitched in (since all of the extras had to be female, there were, at one point, four guys in drag wandering around the place). I was well impressed with the acting. They had long, long takes with many lines, and the actors carried them off perfectly time after time. Wow. And they were all excellent voice actors, too.
The lighting turned out to be fairly easy - they only needed a basic setup, and so for most of the time I was sitting around watching, or holding a reflector. It was nice to be able to concentrate on the lighting properly for once. And I think they were happy with how it went.
So when we finished at 4:00pm - early! - it was tired happiness all around, and they promised to help out with my next short film. So now I have to actually script it. Yay!

Work
I finally bit the bullet, got my CV into semi-workable shape, and sent off a couple of applications. There’s one job that’s wildly ambitious - I don’t have the qualifications, but I should be *just* good enough to get an interview before it all falls to pieces. I figure on getting two or three interviews before I’m really into the swing of it again, so that’s OK.

rec.arts.drwho.moderated
It looks like we’re on track for a Monday opening of the rec.arts.drwho.moderated newsgroup - all the current moderators are up and going with their accounts, and several of them have done all the testing they want to. I tell you, it’ll be a big relief when it’s open - it has been about a year and a half since the proposal first came through.

Pool
Still playing a lot of pool - most days, I can get a score of 19 (to pot all 15 balls) and sometimes an 18 or a 17. At one point last year, 19 was my best score ever, so this is a nice improvement. I have still yet to beat my best score of 15. At the moment, I really want to just equal it, but this time without potting more than one ball at once. The time I got 15 previously, I potted four balls in one shot, and had three misses.

Film
I’ve become involved in another short film, about which I know almost nothing. I had lunch at “The Pad”, a cafe in Marrickville near the station, and overheard a bunch of people talking about making a short film this Sunday. Naturally, I had to introduce myself (which I did with extra-ordinary awkwardness, but oh well) and convinced them - I think - that I wasn’t so much of a nutter as to be a liability. So, this Sunday, I’m heading over to Seven Hills to help make a short film about a hen’s night. I have no idea what this will be like.

Aaah
Ah, the comforting burning sensation of “Deep Heat”. You know you want it. That’s, “Deep Heat”.
It’s pretty good. According to my doctor and physiotherapist (a.k.a. dad & mum) the strained knee should last for about six weeks, after which point I ought to be able to play squash once more. And golf, and tennis, and all those other things I was doing before I went skiing. I think it’ll be a close thing as to whether the skiing made me fitter - my muscles were aching at the end of every day, but six weeks of relative inactivity will probably drop all that fitness right off again.

Work
I’m no closer than the previous blog entry to finding a job. But I *did* find the demo for the game “Thief 2″ which is quite interesting. And the rec.arts.drwho.moderated thingy is going OK. I now have two moderators up and going, and have two more to go before next Monday, which is my proposed “opening” date.

Knee
My knee still hurts, after a week. It’s stiff and sore and despite the fact that I had a massage yesterday and I have been putting “Deep heat” on it for a week, time to face up to it: time to see a doctor. Or call my folks.

Work
Bloody CV. Bloody looking for jobs. Bloody no jobs around. I’ve been grumpy all week due to the whole “end of the holidays” schtick, and I’ve been procrastinating like crazy. I still haven’t got my CV in working order, having spent a total of about two hours on it. Over the course of a week. I’m feeling particularly unemployable at the moment. Really not looking forward to this job hunting at all.

So, I’ve been playing pool and I finally cracked that last “undead” mission and got onto the fun orc missions in “Warcraft 3″ and I’ve been reading the newish Flashman (”Flashman and the Tiger”, I think) and an old Carl Hiassen that I’ve been putting off due to the fact that an allegedly bad movie was made from it (”Strip Tease”.)

I have also been plugging away on the rec.arts.drwho.moderated newsgroup thing, trying to motivate people and get things going and aieee! It’s hard work. The moderators seem like nice people, but they’re not exactly driving the whole process. It is the one area that I can honestly feel I’m achieving something. I haven’t so much as touched “Fork” or any of my movie projects since coming back.

I did watch “Fellowship of the Rings” on DVD, including all the bonus features. Yes, I watched the Two Towers preview footage. I have little self-control at the moment.

It’s at moments like these that I like to quote Bob Buzzard from “A very peculiar practice”.

Got… to get… my act… together!

Skiing
Well, yeah, it rocked a lot. I went from reasonably confident at the beginning, to feeling utterly indestructable by the second-last day, at which point I tried a stupidly tricky jump, crashed, and pulled a muscle in my knee. It still hurts.
The strained knee didn’t stop me from skiing, thanks to a knee brace on the last day - I had been planning to sit the last day out, but there was a nice bit of snow overnight on Thursday, so I had to give it a try.
I’m glad I did. The snow during the week had been pretty good, since there had been a fair bit of snowfall before we arrived, but in the afternoons it was getting icy in the shade, and slushy in the sun.
I did a lesson on Thursday before doing my leg in, and finally got the hang of pole-planting, which allows much tighter turning on steeper slopes. That was what finally did it for me, the thing that gave me the confidence to try that stupid jump.
I had ever such a good time. The company was fantastic. I have always been suspicious of groups, but it felt really good - there wasn’t any of the stupid power play that you sometimes find, and I came out of it liking everyone more than ever. At some point everyone except Jimbo exhibited remarkable snoring abilities - for some reason (probably the earplugs that Dave bought) this wasn’t a problem. Wonderful.
I’m sad that it’s over, that everyone has gone back home and I won’t be talking to them for a while. We may not go skiing again for years and years.

Fork
I did a read-through of Fork on Monday night, which went pretty well. It made me realise that there’s a lot of characterisation still to go, but also that the basic structure is pretty sound. The reactions were encouraging. Happy!

Schild’s Ladder
Another impressive Egan book, finished during the ski trip. He’s making fewer and fewer concessions for the readers, but it doesn’t matter because it’s still possible to skip over the hard-science bits and treat them like technobabble, concentrating on the real meat of what he’s doing. I like his vision of the future. It’s a bit like the Culture, only humans are a bit closer to the AIs in intelligence (ie. not morons) and it really feels real. Not reassuring - Mr. Egan is fond of “Burning the Motherhood Statement”, a phrase I love (can’t think of a decent explanation, sorry) - but real.

Work
I’ve started getting my CV together, sadly, and commenced looking at jobs available. It really doesn’t look good. [Sigh] Had to happen.

Lindor
Only three days of madness to go, Linda! Keep those blog entries coming. They’re great fun for us spectators. I am constantly amazed at what goes on in that “class”.

Fellowship
OK, I cracked and bought the Fellowship of the Rings DVD. I wasn’t going to do it, figuring it’d be too expensive to get both this one and the extended one in October, but then noticed that this one was less than $30, and what’s more, the October release has *only* the extended version, not the cinema release.
And the DVD is great, very well put together. Some of the extras overlap somewhat, but there’s enough interesting stuff in each one to keep me glued to the set - especially the Two Towers preview footage. Lots of new stuff there…