Anotherblog

A Lotus blossoms

A Lotus blossoms
Two minutes past midnight, and I’m already running a word or so behind schedule. Still, I’ve put together a web page for the whole enterprise, and even linked to it (unlike, say, Cesura). It’s the weird icon at the top of otherplaces, to the left.

Should I do any writing tonight?

Naah.

Table-tennis
The big table-tennis tournament has commenced. I’m against Eugene A., a tough opponent who has beaten me in three out of our four encounters. He has a one-point start on me because I’ve been rising up the ranks since I last played against him. Hopefully he hasn’t improved as well.

Naomi Watts & Seth Green
I still can’t remember their real names. I think her real name is Diana. Anyway, *they’re* making a short film in mid-November and have asked me if I could help out. I think I will… I mean, it’s not like there’s anything that I really ought to be doing…

Energetic Healing
Finally, after almost two years of business, Energetic Healing has closed its doors at the Hilton arcade. Anna and her father and brother and some of the therapists got everything pulled down and rented a truck and now the shop looks roughly like it did before she moved in, only with a couple of boxes yet to be removed, and a truly filthy carpet from all the oil that’s been dropped over the years and has been impossible to clean out. Fortunately, no cleaning bill because they’re tearing the whole place down.

Juggling
Did some juggling at lunchtime with a couple of co-workers, both of whom can juggle clubs as well. We started practicing some club passing, but it was a little too windy to get really going… they’re both pretty good, and I reckon we’ll have some nice club-feeding patterns going some time in the next month. It’s not, as I keep remembering, as if there’s anything really pressing I have to do in my spare moments this month…

Table-tennis

Table-tennis
There’s a big competition coming up in table-tennis at work. It’s a handicapped tournament, which means that those who aren’t as highly rated on the rankings get bonus points at the beginning of the games, which means that, in theory, people could start deliberately playing worse now to drop their rating to give them more of an edge in the comp. Since there are no big cash prizes, this is rather perverse behaviour, but, y’know, competition does strange things to us all. Anyway, they’ve closed down the regular ratings adjustment until the competition is over, just to avoid temptation. I reckon I’ve got a fair chance. I’ve been gradually improving for a while now, and I think my rating isn’t quite as high as it should be.

radwm
Work on rec.arts.drwho.moderated came to a screaming halt when I got stuck installing inews, but recently I’ve had some excellent help from Jim M., and now I’m feeling optomistic again. To think I started on this whole thing in June. At least the end is in sight. Again.

The Usual Suspects
Thanks to Simon, I’ve finally got a copy of the very excellent soundtrack to “The Usual Suspects”. God-damn, that main theme is fine. I have been listening to it on the way to and from work, leaving aside my Greek learnin’. Dagnabbit. Anyway, I’ve started looking into the muchos other goodies on the cds, and I’m rather impressed with Dave’s cover for the new Spit album, not to mention the photos from the ski expedition. I shall do a bit of work on them, and present them to this very forum in due course.

Anna’s business

Anna’s business
Anna’s closing up shop on Thursday, as the Hilton have finally gotten around to renovating the hotel and surrounding arcade. Energetic Healing has had a run of almost two years, and even now is going OK (though business slowed down severely when Anna stopped advertising a couple of months ago). She’s going to take a two week vacation and then get back into it with a vengence, I suspect. I’m very glad she’s taking that vacation, though. She was going quite mad with the stress of it all, you know.

A Lotus blossoms in the Monastery Garden
I haven’t done very much thinking about the story yet, partly because I feel that it’s kind-of cheating to write anything down in advance, partly because I’m still not certain that it’s going to carry 50k words, partly because I’m just plain nervous about my ability to write ten pages per day for the next month. It’ll be slightly easier with Anna on holidays – less stress – but I don’t know how well I can “just write”, because I’ve never really done it before except for streams of consciousness rubbish. The more I think about it, the more I realise that I’ve been drawing on “The Name of the Rose”, in themes, and even kinda in the title. So I’ll have to avoid that. ALBITMG was originally going to be a murder mystery with a rather weird setting, but now I’m beginning to get more interested in the setting for its own sake.

Sugar
I’m in an odd state at the moment. If I stopped the no-sugar, no-dairy thing at *right this minute* I wouldn’t take a can of coke or a chocolate if it was offered to me. I just don’t feel like it. And that’s a rare thing.

Greek
Recently I have been arguing with shop-keepers on my way to work, having evidently given up on asking a woman out to dinner (thank goodness). I am learning the Greek art of bartering, which is that every time the shop keeper tells me a price (“Mu Hrostate theca-tria tholaria”) I suggest a price one dollar less (“Sas Hrostau tho-theca tholaria”). The shopkeeper will then generally agree with me (“Endaxi. Tho-theca tholaria”), and then, for fucks sake, I viciously undercut him (“Ohi, signomi. Sas Hrostau endeca tholaria”). And so it goes. I’m glad I’m driving, ’cause otherwise the shopkeeper would probably beat me savagely, and I haven’t learned the greek word for “help!” yet.

“Take 2″ and “Single Dad”

Donnie Darko
I saw Donnie Darko on Friday night, after a particularly draining guitar-lesson, and was quite spooked out by it.
Recommended. It’s a semi-independant film (produced by Drew Barrymore) with a hugely uncommercial feel, lots of bizarre humour, some parody that misses wildly and some wonderfully imaginative stuff that somehow stayed past the first-draft despite all common-sense but *still works*. What kind of film is it? Let’s see. Cross “American Beauty” with “Twelve Monkeys” and add a bit of “Heathers”, “Harvey”, and “Mulholland Drive”.
Donnie Darko quickly achieved cult-status in the US (it’s been out there for about two years, during which I have been impatiently awaiting its release) and you can really see why. Good stuff! Recommended!

Take 2
I helped out with the lighting again on “Take 2″ on Saturday. Once again, a pleasant learning experience. I tried out more shining-lights-against-walls-and-ceiling and it worked well, made the room look like it was normally lit, and avoided harsh unpleasant shadows. Nice! Also nice was Lachlan’s TiBook, on which he did the editing for last weekend’s work. (Lachlan = Hugh Jackman from my previous weblog entry) The results thus-far looked really very nice. It’s an incredibly good experience to work with real actors. There was one scene where the Seth Green guy, who’s name I still can’t remember, goes through about three different expressions, and you can *see* what the character is thinking. Brilliant.
Unfortunately, we ran a bit slow and I had to leave for roleplaying before they had managed all the shots for the day, so I left them the lights and they returned them yesterday. Nice peoples.

Roleplaying
We’re into the second of the “Bright & De’Ath” games, titled “Amusement-Park Sugar”. These games only form a small part of our roleplaying evenings, but I’m really enthused about them – they’re quite different from most roleplaying I’ve done before, and are very much in a direction that interests me, somewhere between traditional roleplaying and theatre sports and Once Upon A Time, but without any real pressure. It’s great. The first story came out wonderfully in the end, and I gave high audience appreciation figures for it. It’s a pity (but very necessary, as it’s draining) that the game can only go about half-an-hour.

Ted
Ted came over and delivered the new Spit album cover and “The Usual Suspects” soundtrack – thanks Ted! Thanks Simon! Thanks Jimbo! Er, yeah, then we sat around and chatted a bunch and recorded some lines for the slow-fated “Bullet Hole”, now entering its third year since I started writing it. Anyhoo, it was most pleasing, because not only is Ted good company, but he is also Mr. Fixit. I’ve been having problems for quite a while with my sound-recording equipment. One of my microphone/pre-amp setups is dodgy, producing lots of ground-noise (ie. a low hum) whenever I try and record onto minidisc. I moved the microphone downstairs in the hope that getting it away from all the other electrical equipment might help, and then Ted pointed out that the power-cord for the minidisc player was directly above the microphone input for the pre-amp. Once he’d fiddled around with the cables for a bit, we had perfectly crisp and hum-free sound. Woo-hoo! More thanks to Ted!

Wrap-party for “Single Dad”
Anna and I went to the wrap-party for the short film I helped make about three weeks ago. It came out pretty well, actually, they hired a professional editor to put the footage together, and he did a decent job. On the technical side, the sound quality was excellent, which was particularly nice because we were rather worried about it, given the poor results on “Hensnightmare”.

The Bourne Identity
Finally, last night Anna and I went to see big-dumb-action-movie to find out that while it wasn’t astonishingly clever, it wasn’t by any means dumb. Events and motivations pretty much made sense throughout. And the action bits were good and actiony, and Famke Potente was great again, and Matt Damon, eh, but he didn’t drag the whole film into a morass of eh with him. Another recommended one.

Novel-writing Month

Novel-writing Month
Once again, I’m seized by a frenzy of enthusiasm for some speed-challenge. Previously I’ve been enthralled by the possibility of doing 24-hour comics and 24-hour short films, but haven’t done anything about them. Yet. Now I’m excited about Novel-writing Month, an effort to co-ordinate many ordinary “I’ll write a novel some day” people into an act of group masochism – writing a 50,000 word novel(la) in 30 days. November.
I’m up for it. It’ll take a silly amount of effort but I’m sure I can turn down my quality-control dial a little further and make a serious effort. Let’s see… roughly three-thousand words per day… two hours writing, say… that’s only 25 words per minute! No worries!

Gaaah. Anyway, I’m in. I figure, with work and the sugar-free dairy-free challenge and now this, it’ll be a fun November. My current plan is to write a Monastery story, the one I’ve been thinking about for a while about the competitive gardening. I may throw in a couple of the other Monastery ideas, and maybe include some stand-alone short story bits if I run out of main story.

The title: A Lotus blossoms in the Monastery Garden

More things I have learned about lighting

More things I have learned about lighting
I’ve got a couple of fairly high-powered lights for film-making. In some senses, they’re usually a bit too high-powered. If I point any one of them directly at the subject, from close-up and without filters, the light looks like the sun. I usually get around this with filters and distance and by bouncing the light off reflectors. At the film-shoot last Saturday, I was forced to try some other solutions for some stuff.
There was a reception desk with a receptionist behind it. At one point, she gets up. The lighting in the room was just enough to give her huge shadows under her eyes. How to light this setup? She was sitting too close to the desk to put a reflector in front of her – and besides, then she gets up as well.
In the end, we simply turned two of the lights upwards to reinforce the existing lighting. The reflection off the roof was strong enough to further bounce off the reception desk, and voila, problem solved. This might sound a little ridiculous, but it was a real eye-opener for me. The lights are powerful enough that I don’t have to point them at the subject or even a dedicated reflector. Sometimes just pointing them at the wall or the ceiling is enough to light the room.
Another nice thing we haven’t done much before, was use the polystyrene boards as blockers instead of reflectors. The office was full of glass and posters, so we had to be very careful of hot-spots (areas where the lights are reflected into the camera). Strategic use of the poly boards fixed it very nicely.

Juggling
I went to juggling last night, for the first time in a while – Paul came with me, and it was pretty good fun. The only problem was, I’ve lost most of the skills that I could previously do, and it’s a bit frustrating working to get them back. I managed about 20 catches for 5 balls, which was an OK start after the kind of break I’ve had, but still a long way from the giddy heights of what I used to be able to do. I guess the most fun part of juggling is still the socialisation. Julian, the organiser, is excellent company. We all headed off the the usual cafe afterwards, and I watched jealously as people hogged into chocolate cake and were unable to finish it all. Bastards.

Further short film stuff

More Take-2
Here’s the exasperated Naomi Watts taking out her frustration on Hugo Weaving. We did approximately fifteen takes of her leaping over the desk and attacking him. Hugely enjoyable for all concerned, I think.

Take 2

Trying again
I spent thirty minutes or so on Sunday writing up the film-making experience on Saturday, and then Mozilla crashed out on me. It wasn’t even the weblog window, I just hit “back” while looking up something in the IMDB, and bam, goodbye Mozilla. I swore at the time that I’d only compose entries in a text editor, and then transfer them over to Mozilla when they were finished, but here I am again typing it directly in…

Guitar practice
I went to guitar practice on Friday, but forgot to bring my guitar or sheet music. This is nothing new – for a while now I’ve been using my guitar tutor’s guitar, since it’s simpler than carrying my own guitar from Chatswood station to his place, a twenty-minute hike. But now I’m driving straight from work. Anyway, the point is, he didn’t have a copy of the music either so I couldn’t play the piece I’d been practicing, and instead Chris pulled out some duets.
Wow. The guitars weren’t perfectly in tune with each other, and I was missing every other note and my left-hand was clenching the neck of the guitar like it was a live snake, but – we did music. It was thrilling. There’s a huge difference with this kind of playing. The piece was designed with a back-and-forth kind of structure, tossing the melodic lead from player to player and, for the first time, I really felt musical. Something clicked.

Take 2
On Saturday I went along to another short-film shoot, this one by Tara B., a friend of Richard A. (a friend from Baltimore days who is writing the Bob-the-Headless-Chicken script that I may have mentioned). This was Tara’s first short film as a writer/director, and she was very nervous before the day. She had some excellent actors lined up – stage actors – but not much in the way of crew. So I brought along my sound and lighting gear for a day’s filming.
It was good fun. I made friends, the experience was pleasant, and there was drama.
I will now introduce a little bit of foreshadowing by pointing out that the location for the shoot was in an office block opposite the Powerhouse museum, and that on-street parking was only two-hourly, so when I arrived at 10:30am, I was very relieved that they let me into the underground carpark.
There I met the cameraman, who’s name I have forgotten, as with all who were present except Tara – and I only remember her name because I have emails from her. Anyway, during the course of the shoot we were working out who resembled which movie-star. He was Hugh Jackman. (Pathetically, I was Hugh Grant once again, a sure sign that I need another haircut.)
We had two hours to get used to the location, the second-floor office of Clear-Blue Day, where Hugh worked. The actors weren’t due to arrive until 12:30. Apparently, they had already done some rehearsals during the week on location, which was a bit of a novelty for me, and Hugh had prepared a remarkable set of story-boards. He’s a graphic designer. The story-boards looked cooool.
We did some trial lighting and camerawork and tried out Hugh’s microphone versus my one, and decided to use mine, because it has more reach and has slightly better bass performance. The office had quite a few big glass windows, so we carefully worked out which angles didn’t show any of the crew or lighting. And the time passed quickly, and lo, Tara showed excellent producing skills by providing many sweet snacks, and I was sorely tempted, but resisted temptation. The other member of the crew, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, arrived. He was the stills-photographer and ended up doing first-assistant-director work throughout the shoot, while Hugh and Tara and I crowded around the camera LCD screen and mucked around with the framing, the actors, and the lighting respectively. It was a very smooth shoot. Tara had a very definite feel for what she wanted done but was perfectly happy to take suggestions, so we were all happy and felt nice and creative.
The main actor, Naomi Watts, proved to be excellent. She knew her lines perfectly and gave a wonderful reading for the stressed-out main character, including a terrifying attack of her boss, Hugo Weaving, who was so enjoying the shoot that he stayed on for quite some time after his last shot, which – foreshadowing again – he may perhaps have regretted. The secretary, Suzie Porter, had a very brief but concerned cameo and got to play with a great big toy airplane.
Anyway, I could talk about the shoot for a while, but it was all really rather boringly smooth and fun. We got some excellent shots done, some really nice footage, and although there were heaps of problems with my bloody microphone power, it pulled through when it counted, I think. By the time 5:30 rocked around, I was still happy and energy-filled. At that point, we still had a couple of indoor shots remaining, but we also had to do some outdoor shooting with Naomi and her boyfriend, Seth Green, so we decided to do the outdoor filming while we had decent light. Hugh and I headed down the elevator. Just before the doors closed, Hugh shouted out, “Don’t forget the pass-key!” There was a pass-key required to let us back up to the second floor, you see, and we only had the one.
We went downstairs and got the camera and sound-gear ready, and the actors arrived and happily, Tara had remembered to bring the pass-key. We hadn’t quite left enough time to do the outdoor filming, though, and some of the shots were a little bit dark. Oh well, we figured we could reshoot them later. Then we tried to get back upstairs.
Well, the pass-key worked fine. It let us in through the front door. Unfortunately, there was also the matter of the elevators. Hugh had unlocked the elevators to level 2, but there was also another company on level 2. One of the office workers there came in, and when they left, locked the elevators.
Hugh’s keys for the elevators were upstairs, as were my car keys and mobile phone, and everyone elses mobile phones. And also the remote control to open the door to the underground carpark. Basically, nobody was going anywhere.
Craaaap.
There were a couple of emergency numbers listed downstairs – for security, for the elevator company, and for the building management. We called all of them then sat outside and waited. And waited. And waited. We talked about our favorite films. We bought some beers and drank them. We improvised a bit. We bonded, even more than we had with the film-making. Hugo Weaving, who had hung around after his bits had been shot, was with us, because he’d left his stuff upstairs as well. Much silliness went on. We had the camera and sound-gear, so after two hours or so, I turned the camera on and we did a little documentary about how we had been locked out – and after about twenty minutes of filming, and after Hugh had disappeared on a desparate quest to find a workmate with an elevator key, the security guard finally arrived, and we convinced him to let us up. Hugh arrived back, and swore hideous revenge against the level 2 office worker who had locked us all out – apparently he had done this kind of thing before, knowing full-well that we were still there, and locking us out anyway.
So anyway, we did the final couple of scenes (Naomi and Seth’s car was also broken down, so they had to wait for the NRMA anyway) and I finally got home at about 10:30pm, approximately three hours after I had hoped to. Anna was very sad, she had arrived home early especially because she thought we could have Saturday night together.

Sick
On Sunday we headed out to the CISRA fun day, which was kinda fun, but I was feeling sick (and still am) so headed home early and lounged around at home until Anna convinced me to go and see “My Big Fat Greek Wedding”. Which was pretty good, fairly mindless romatic comedy fun, but with some surprisingly nice romance bits. I was tired and emotional, and I even got a bit teary. The story has quite a few parallels with Anna and me, except that I resembled the male lead only in that I am male and non-Greek, and Anna has always been beautiful. Heck, all of the details are wrong, but the feel is right.

Don’t gimme no sugar, baby: day 4

Don’t gimme no sugar, baby: day 4
Fourth day without explicit sugar products, or dairy. I’m not being absolutely fanatical about it – incidental sugar and milk in bread isn’t enough to stop me eating that, I’m just not eating anything that is sweet or obviously dairy. It’s not too bad, since I’m not going cold-turkey on sugar altogether. I’m not getting physiological cravings, just the usual psychological ones, which aren’t so bad. It feels kind of good, actually. I love a good bout of self-denial.

Yet another short film maker
I’ve agreed to help out yet another short film-maker on Saturday, Tara B. It’s her first short film as writer/director and I greatly fear I made her a bit nervous about the whole experience by pointing her at the Once Upon A Time webpage (here on otherleg). I looked back on it, and egad – we were very, very prepared for that shoot. I’ve never been as prepared since. Wow.
Anyway, Tara sounds pretty nice, and there’s hopefully some other experienced crew around, so with any luck it’ll be fun. The script “Rock” is decent enough, though I think it’ll benefit a lot from good acting – apparently all her actors are stage-actors. *More* lovely contacts! This will make four film shoots since I last make one of my own films. At least. Those storyboards are sitting next to the mac at home, folornly waiting to be drawn upon, and the shooting script is still awaiting the gender changes I decided on.

Greek
I was fiddling around with the Greek tapes in the car, trying to swap a tape without looking at them, and stuck in the wrong tape, tape #13 instead of tape #8. And much to my surprise, it loudly announced that it was “Pimsler’s Language Program, Unit 25 of the Portugese 3 course”. And then they started rapidly talking in Portugese. Um…

Sickness

Sick
I’d been copping the odd stomach cramp through the weekend and on Monday, but on Tuesday morning everything decided to cut loose and announce “You’ve got a stomach bug, buddy!”. After a particularly gut-wrenching session on the toilet I could feel my vision fading away, and instantly thought of Ted’s shower incident. But I held on, and after sitting in a doctor’s waiting room for an hour, had it confirmed: you’ve got the bug that’s going around.

A big day off for Tuesday, then. I lay around in bed reading “No Logo” and comfort magazines, then watched “Fellowship of the Rings” again and played a bit of “Red Faction”. I mention this purely because it so greatly resembled how I used to spend my time when I was unemployed.

rec.arts.drwho.moderated
The admin for thecabal.org has been having trouble getting some of the news software going, in order to get radwm off the ground. So he passed it on to me – apparently there’s some kind of bug in the C code. I can’t believe that we still haven’t got the thing working yet.

No sugar
When I went to the Doctor, he mentioned that killing off the stomach bacteria would mean not having any sugar or milk products for a bit. Dave and Fiona went on an interesting diet earlier in the year, one in which they couldn’t have sugar or dairy, which was taken to the extreme of no fruit (because it had sugars in it) and no bread for some reason. I don’t remember, there seemed like a lot to it. I remember that meat was allowed. Anyway, I figured: what an excellent time to start something similar! So as of Tuesday morning I’ve been on a no-sugar, no-dairy diet. Actually, diet is the wrong word. I just want to see if I get sugar cravings. I’m curious as to the strength of my dependency on chocolate and coke. I’m not particularly serious about it, so I’m just cutting out obviously sweet things. I’m sure I get some sugar and dairy in peanut-butter and bread.
Anyway, this is day 3.