Anotherblog

Holiday at Home

Holiday at Home
I took all of last week off work in order to do some work on the novel, but didn’t do very much in the end. Partially to blame was the cold that I caught on Wednesday evening, thus extending the break for an additional day but making the first couple of days pretty sucky. Partially to blame also was that I didn’t really set any hard deadlines for myself. What I need to do (and have now done) is announce a date that I will be showing the story to someone else - in this case, I’ll be reading the first three chapters to Jon & Kate the weekend after next.

Table-tennis

Table-tennis
I did rather well today. I played against Farris, who hasn’t played in a while, and he was having a great deal of trouble returning serves in the first game, so I won 21-5. Since he’s much higher rated than me, that catapulted me up the TT charts. He started getting some form back by the second game, and I only won 21-19. We’ll see how we go tomorrow - no doubt I’ll have my head handed to me.

Squash
Doing well in squash always seems to result in doing well in table-tennis the next day, too. I played squash last night with the regular crowd, and did pretty well. I still can’t quite volley to my satisfaction, but at least I’m returning a higher percentage of serves than last week. My serve and fitness have been gradually improving too.

D&D
Got my second roleplaying session happening regularly on Wednesday nights now. It’s pretty interesting - much more traditional hack & slash than the Saturday night sessions, but there’s a bit more actual role-playing than I might have expected as well. Owen came up with an ingenious incentive scheme for writing journals on our progress - we’ve got the game up on a web-site and he publishes our progress (and potted character histories) up there. If we write journal entries for a day’s play, then we get dragon tokens, which we can redeem for once-off automatic-15 or automatic-20 dice rolls, or extra experience points.
What is particularly ingenious is that this scheme has managed to get me much more involved than I usually am in roleplaying activities, which in turn makes me realise how poorly I understand my own motivations for doing things. In any case, I’ve written a fairly extensive potted history of my character and weekly journals for both of our previous sessions, which is far more than I usually do even to GM a game. Kind of pathetic, really.

Holidays
Holidays after tomorrow. I’m taking the three days between easter and anzac day as a “writing holiday”, in which I hope to actually do some editing on Lotus. Hope springs eternal etc.

The Little Snail

The Little Snail
Went out to dinner last night at a French restaurant in Pyrmont, with Anna and Marija and Ivo. The food was pretty good, but both Marija and Ivo are hugely temperamental people, and I think they fought and made up at least three times during the course of dinner. I couldn’t be sure, however, as they were talking in Croatian the whole time.

Budget

Budget
I set myself a “toys” budget yesterday. I figure I need to put a cap on my reckless spending, and budgets always make the anticipation more enjoyable as well - there’s nothing like waiting and waiting for something when you have to, rather than just going out and buying it. One of those stoopid human condition things. Anyway, having set my budget…

Gameboy Advance
…ah, yes. Now my budget is almost gone for the month. The new GBA has a completely different design and is rather cool - rechargable battery, brighter screen, silver casing. I’d been putting off getting a GBA ever since they came out, and now I’m glad I waited. This one is pretty cool.
I got a couple of games to start me off: “Legend of Zelda”, and “Advance Wars”. The former is a rather cool adventure game set in a great big world with lots of extras, and the latter is a turn-based strategy game of surprising sophistication and it quite enjoyable. Mmm. War games in the middle of a war. Tasteful!

Shanghai Knights
It’s a sequel to the Jackie Chan/Owen Wilson vehicle Shanghai Noon, and it turned out to be quite OK. I kinda like the older, slower Jackie Chan - his schtick is now more oriented towards physical comedy with comedy coming slightly ahead of the gosh-wow-that-looks-tricky. It works. There were a number of scenes (as with most Jackie Chan films, even the bad ones) in which I was laughing out loud. The rest of the film - well, it was alright. It passed the time, was a wee bit too twee and cute, and didn’t engage to nearly the same effect, but it was pretty skillfully put together and didn’t hold the action scenes too far apart. A hell of a lot better than Rush Hour 2.

Weekend
Missed my roleplaying fix on the weekend due to various clashes, so I mainly sat around playing GBA games and relaxing. Parties on Friday and Saturday night with Anna’s friends and relatives, so I’ve been asked over a dozen times when we’re getting married.

A fish called Wanda
I also watched a bit of the “A fish called Wanda” documentaries and was suitably impressed by some of the deleted scenes and John Cleese’s extremely analytical take on the writing and editing process. One of the scenes, which is shown in full in one of the documentaries but not in the deleted scenes themselves, was a hilarious extended scene of John Cleese’s character trying to get Michael Palin’s character to say where the safety deposit box containing all the diamonds was. Their efforts to write it down go on and on - there’s a typewriter but no paper, so John tries to feed in tissues. There’s a pencil, but the lead is broken and they can’t find a pencil sharpener, and when they do, they’ve lost the pencil. Just hilarious, and a real pity that it was deleted - it would have been one of the highlights.

Firewire hard-drive

Firewire hard-drive
I got a firewire hard-drive today, in the hope that it will help with my FinalCut Pro woes. Perhaps, the reasoning goes, the hard-drive on my mac is fragmented thus causing the poor resolution problems.
Admittedly, I find this unlikely. If such were the case, quicktime and iMovie would suffer identical problems, and they’re running just fiiiine. Still, I *do* need the extra HD space, at least until I’ve finished editing bullet hole.

Trivia
Anna and I went to Ryan’s farewell last night, at a pub in Newtown in which Ben was the trivia master for a big trivia quiz. Very good he was too, not unexpectedly. Anyway, it was a fun time. Our team came equal second, mainly thanks to Phil’s (he’s another ex-Baltimore chappie) efforts. I handed back Ryan’s video camera with a copy of the semi-edited “Elder Sibling” on it, which provided sporadic amusement through the evening.

Roleplaying

Roleplaying
Went out to Owen’s place for RP last night. He lives in French’s Forest, just bought a house for an absurdly large amount of money. It’s enormous. Four bedrooms, a swimming pool, double garage, and a half-dozen rooms downstairs that are bare brick and dirt on the ground. One of the rooms has been done up, presumably a long time ago because its colour scheme is brown and yellow. Wood panelling, yellow carpet, copper light fixtures. A bar along one side next to the stairs. Welcome to the Pad.

Action!
I get periodically irritated when films put their protagonists in absurd amounts of peril, through which they survive due to arbitarily astonishing luck. For example: in Lilo & Stitch, there’s a big air-borne chase in which characters seemed to periodically fall off one airplane/flying-saucer, only to land on another one. The factory floor scene in Star Wars Episode 2, in which our heroes avoid being stamped into oblivion again and again, until it becomes numbing. Any number of James Bond films where the bad guys have machine guns.
The scenes of travelling-very-fast. Rocks, avalanches, explosions, bullets, great big shards of metal falling mere centimetres behind.
Impromptu surfing using found objects.

Such scenes are intended to be exciting but the luck involved is so arbitary, the level of skill of the protagonist so irrelevent, that I become bored. I instinctively recoiled from seeing “Ice Age” after seeing the ad showing a scene in which the characters sliding down ice-chasm-tubes. I had the feeling that it would attempt comedy and excitement and kinetic energy and be, y’know, hip, and probably last a good ten minutes. All true. The film as a whole was alright, but the action scenes were a chore.

I kinda enjoy analysing why many action scenes are so poor. Rapid and incoherent cutting is certainly a factor, but one that seems to be on the decline - as fads go, it is bound to be short-lived, as it has only novelty going for it (and, of course, it makes things much cheaper if you don’t have to choreograph for more than half a second at a time). Recent CGI advances are allowing much more clarity in the action to a degree not seen before, and I suspect that after this year - provided the Matrix sequels are any good - audiences will be much less forgiving of sloppy action scenes.

Then, there’s sense of peril. The big problem is that most films can’t kill of the protagonist, but want to put them in apparent peril, ’cause that’s exciting. The bigger problem is that there’s still the equation *more* peril = *more* excitement, which is pretty easy to implement. The big problem with all this additional peril is having our protagonist deal with it. It’s tiring to film them actually acknowledging the peril and having them doing something about it (ref: Jackie Chan almost always *deals* with the perils that are presented to him). Simpler for the peril to be random and impossible to avoid except by luck. Then our protagonist merely has to run while the rubber rocks fall behind them, and the squibs go off on the ground behind them. Easy-peasy.

Boring, no matter how prettily kinetic.

No sugar

No sugar
No sugar (more accurately, no sweet things) for a week and a half now, and I think I’ve settled into it, just in time for the temptations of easter. Curiously, I’ve timed this diet (ack!) with my beard growth. It fits in nicely with this self-denial kick that I don’t shave for the period.

And between the exercise (squash) and the no-breakfast and so on, it’s been working well - I’m down to just over 89kg again. I suspect the loss will slow down as I get closer to 86kg, ’cause that’s what happened last time. I’m considering getting out and doing some rock-climbing when I’m a little lighter. There’s a bunch of people at work who go indoor rock-climbing on a semi-regular basis, and given that I haven’t practiced guitar since December (ack again!) maybe I should climb while it isn’t so important that I have longish fingernails. Or perhaps I should get back into guitar practice so that I can actually play something in July when Ev comes over and we record the new spit album.

FCP3
Final Cut Pro 3 is still being obnoxious. I picked up my CD, and installed the patch, but it didn’t make any difference. Now I’m just perplexed. I’ll have to scan newsgroups/message boards at this rate. It is a very, very persistant and irritating bug.

Retail frenzy

Retail frenzy
I went on a buying frenzy on Sunday morning, getting DVDs and CDs and flowers for Anna to thank her for all the help with the film-making. And got some stuff for myself, too, while I was at it - the DVD of Koyaanisqatsi, Singin’ in the Rain, Rear Window, and a bunch of Charlie Chaplin short films, as well as The Pixies’ Surfer Rosa/Come In Pilgrim, which was particularly interesting because it had the original version of “Cactus” on it, which I’d only heard as the David Bowie cover before. Verdict? Well, I enjoy the Pixies’ version - odd mixing arrangement notwithstanding - but the David Bowie version is very nice indeed, and added a bunch of stuff to round out the tune nicely. Much better than Bowie’s cover of “I’ll be waiting for you” (Neil Young).

Dreams
Yet more dreams about eating chocolate. Honestly. It’s embarassing.

Feeling more awake now
Yes indeedy, and I’d like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who came along. The experience was not unlike that of regressing to childhood, in all the best ways. An incredible feeling of playfulness pervaded the house, and for 24 hours, it was like Christmas ought to be.

Now, having ostensibly failed to get the film finished in 24 hours, I have to do all the editing. First step: sort out what the heck has gone wrong with my computer. I’m thinking of getting an external firewire hard-drive.

Table-tennis
My playing improved today. I won two out of three games, and in the third, did very well against a much-higher-rated player. I blame the new bat for all my success. It grips the ball a great deal better than the old one.

Japan
I may be getting a trip to Japan some time in the next couple of months or so. Dunno when, dunno for how long, can’t say what for. But for a geek-toy fiend like me, this means only one thing: looming poverty.

24 hour party movie

24 hour party movie
We did it. A 24 hour film, started on Friday at 7:30pm and completed - kinda - at 7:30pm on Saturday night.

Who
We had a pretty big turnout in the end. Chris T. and Simon A. came all the way from Canberra, and then there were such locals as Ben and Ryan, Anna’s friend Marija, Jon & Kate, Paul, and of course me and Anna.

What
It rained fairly heavily on Friday night. Ryan arrived promptly at 7:00pm or so, and we stood around and discussed what we might end up doing. Should we base the film on words randomly selected from a dictionary? Neither of us were keen on having a “sit-down-and-write-script” phase, preferring to improvise all the dialogue around some theme.
Jon was catching a train which didn’t go all the way to Marrickville, so I drove over to pick him up from Sydenham, leaving Ryan to hold the fort, and picked up Paul (who lives in that area, and had been planning to cycle over until it started raining) at the same time. By this stage, it was 7:30pm so we started trying to come up with real ideas.
Anna had bought meat for the BBQ, so despite the rain we slapped a bunch of food on, and continued trying to work out what we were going to do as the rest of our cast and crew arrived. Ryan was the chef for the evening, braving the drips of water coming down from the balcony as the rain poured down, and the smoke that hung around in a desultry fashion, creating a pleasantly cinematic haze through the dining room.
Pretty much everyone was happy to appear in front of the camera (apart from Jon and myself, and even we had a fair bit anyway) and after a bit of riffing around a couple of short skit ideas, we decided to base the film around a “Big Brother” kind of concept.

Elder Sibling
We weren’t particularly concerned with keeping authenticity (eg. pretending the cameras were hidden, or that the characters were locked into the house and yard), but we did come up with a couple of scenarios we could work through and improvise. We should show bits of the house meeting, scenes of people being voted off, scenes from the “diary room” in which we aired our private thoughts about the other house members, and scenes of the characters sitting around watching TV and being boring.

A satire of Big Brother. Well, it’s been done a bunch of times, notably by itself, but we figured that the scenario would give everyone a chance to do something, and that the format would allow us to do several independant bits of filming that we could combine in the editing suite. We had three video cameras, so there shouldn’t be any problem with getting simultaneous footage. More of concern was availability. Kate had to go to a Democrat’s meeting on Saturday morning, Anna and Marija had other plans on that day as well, as did Ryan. And Ben had to take off on Saturday afternoon. We figured this wouldn’t be too much of a problem, as Saturday would be mostly pick-up shots and editing (which turned out to be the case, happily).

More of concern was the number of DV tapes we had: 5. Just barely enough, especially if we were going to do multiple camera setups.

Where
One of the big immediate benefits of doing the Big Brother parody was that we could film pretty much everything inside our house, starting with dinner. Which we did.
We set up my video camera on the stairs looking down over the dining table, and filmed ourselves eating dinner and having various conversations. At first, Jon and I stood there watching everyone else serve themselves, but ended up abandoning the camera and tucking in ourselves, occasionally leaping up to move the camera to a new location. So far, fun and easy.
The conversation around the table was light and breezy. The combination of people really sparked, and the dinner topics became amazingly strange and varied. There was an obsession early on with getting footage of everyone being bored or boring, but after a few token efforts at dull conversation they sparked again. If we hadn’t been filming, I would have regarded it as one of the most enjoyable dinner parties ever.
Although we didn’t end up using much of the dinner footage, it was an interesting start because I think it really made people less self-conscious about the cameras being on them - and that looseness (and the wacky improvisation) only increased throughout the evening.

After dinner, we started the “proper” filming with the group meeting, in which the characters would go around the table and air their grievances. Jon and I ran separate cameras, with Jon doing roving hand-held and me with a tripod. Jon’s camera (actually, Paul’s camera, a 3ccd panasonic) had excellent sound, as it turned out, and we would have used it by preference over my boom-mike (which seemed to get into every shot in the film) had we known how good it was, except for the fact that Jon was breathing a little too noisily.
The group meeting went off a treat. The wackiness continued unabated, people inspiring each other to greater hights of silliness, Kate’s roar of laughter almost unceasing. Actually, we were all laughing a great deal, and I don’t think there’s much point trying to edit out the laughter after any of the quotable quotes. Deadpan comedy this ain’t.

I’ll put some quotes up here once I’ve watched the sucker through a few more times. Most of the humour was of the “you had to be there” variety, or just plain strange, but there was also a lot of build-up comedy as well, repeated catch-phrases and running gags.

After the group meeting, Anna created a couple of little tasks on behalf of the “Elder Sibling” - a mission to get some jaffa flavoured ice-cream, to search for damaged fruit, and to floss each others teeth. All typical Big Brother scenarios, I imagine. Each of them turned into a strange little odyssey. The “floss each others teeth” thing was done by Ryan and Ben in a sharp rip-off of the Lady and the Tramp spaghetti scene, the jaffa flavoured ice-cream trip turned strange when Anna was forced to find alternative ingredients, as the supermarket lacked jaffa icecream, jaffa biscuits, and jaffas. The end result dessert was extremely tempting, and I was unable to film it for very long. Stupid sugar-free diet.

The rest of the night went by in a bit of a daze. There were further group-meeting bits, most people did the “diary” thing (which we set in the bathroom) and at some point there was a sword fight with one opponent (Ben) on a bouncy ball and the other (me) on a unicycle. There was the voting-off scene, and the farewell scene.

At about 3:00am, Simon, Ryan, Ben, Chris, Paul and myself were sitting on the sofa, logging the DV tapes by watching them all the way through. We had recorded onto all five of the tapes, and had fully recorded three of the tapes, with about an hour’s footage left to record. Finally, everyone went home or to bed, and I got on with the laborious task of capturing all our logged footage onto the computer.

The real problem was that I couldn’t just capture the entire five tapes. I already had a great deal of footage on the computer from other projects, and had only about 20G free, which serves to hold about an hour and a half of footage. We didn’t end up using the powerbook at all, as it just didn’t have enough hard-drive space to make it worthwhile, and I didn’t have my copy of FinalCut Pro with me.

So we had to pick and choose the footage carefully. The capturing process went on all night, and was finished only at about mid-day on Saturday. It was by far the most agonising part of the entire thing - it always is - and I just can’t wait until DV cameras (or HDTV cameras, or whatever we have in five years) capture directly to hard-drive. It will save huge amounts of time and effort. In the meantime, we probably should have had a dedicated editor who could have started logging and capturing the tapes as soon as we completed them.

I went outside to watch the dawn, and went back to the capturing. Simon was snoring hugely, of course, sending mild reverberations about the house that were strangely soothing. It was kinda fun working while everyone else was asleep, though I was really beginning to suspect that there was no way on earth I was going to survive the entire 24 hours without sleep. By about 5:00am I was a shambling wreck. I almost fell asleep a number of times, and debated imbibing some caffeine or sugar, but in the end managed to hold on after a couple of 30 second micro-snoozes (I watched the clock) while sitting up in the chair. It was a surprisingly cold night, too, which may have helped.

Eventually, the others got up again. Kate went off to her Democrats meeting, and Jon started doing pick-up shots with Chris, Ryan, Simon, and Ben. With the sun up and the company, I became more alert again, and finished off the capturing in a big rush by just before mid-day, giving us eight hours to edit the sucker together.

Bugger
It is a pretty rare thing for me to curse Final Cut Pro. Adobe Premiere 5.0 and 5.1 were an absolute nightmare, crashing a lot, full of bugs, and I was cursing it almost continually during the long weeks of editing “Once Upon A Time”. But apart from a single, very badly timed crash in the making of “Bullet Hole”, I’ve had nothing but pleasure from Final Cut Pro.

Until Saturday afternoon.

For some reason, the computer was being slow. All the clips that we captured from the DV tapes were playing back at a much lower frame-rate than I’d have expected. It was very strange. Jon discovered it first. He wanted to edit the opening scene, as he had a number of ideas for it, but was unable to get the computer to work properly.

“Andrew! Could you take a look at this?”

And I did. I fiddled with the settings, tried restarting the computer, ran it with the camera attached and the camera not attached. Final Cut Pro was just running slowly, and that’s all there was to it. It was even running my old projects slowly, the ones that had been working perfectly happily the last time I looked. Was it the Hard drive? No, if I played back the captured clips using quicktime, they ran perfectly fine in full-screen mode. Was it some setting? If it was, I’ll be buggered if I can figure out what it is. I went through every setting in Final Cut Pro and Quicktime and even iMovie. The latter two worked fine. Final Cut Pro ran like a dog.

This went on for hours, and eventually we temporarily gave up. Jon tried editing with the slowed-down FCP, while I tried looking up solutions in the manuals and on the net. By this point, I was fuming. I was calm and happy for the entire shoot up until then, and just that one problem was driving me crazy. The finish line in sight! Eight hours to do the editing, and unable to do it!

Jon spent some time trying to get the first scene together, and when I took over the editing suite to try for some of the remaining scenes, I understood why. Editing was nigh-impossible. The lag was so severe you couldn’t work out what frames marked the beginnings and endings of scenes. Even with the editing suite working perfectly it would have been a very tight and quick editing job, but the lags just made it impossible. Jon only managed the opening scene by using audio cues.

So the afternoon went by in increasing frustration. People came in and out, looking worriedly at my dark expression. We decided to just string together all the clips in the rough order in which they’d appear - it was all we’d have time for, by the time my self-imposed 7:30pm deadline came around.

And then, all we had to do was transfer the footage off the computer and onto a DV tape, so that we could show what we’d done at 7:30pm.

Bastard thing. We couldn’t find any blank DV tapes to copy the sucker onto. Not a one. Aargh! There’s no way I was going to overwrite any of my existing tapes - just not gonna happen - so I was busily trying to hunt down a tape with enough remaining space, while simultaneously trying to burn the 50 minutes of footage onto a DVD (no luck there either - it would have taken too long and gone over the 7:30pm barrier).

In the end, miracles of miracles, we figured out a hack. I hooked the small television to my DV camera, and set FCP to “print to tape”, and it forwarded the complete film, without any slowdowns or dodgy frames, straight to the TV.

We watched the footage. It was funny.

We had dinner.

I went to bed.

The amazing subtlety of Andrew’s dreams

The amazing subtlety of Andrew’s dreams
The first of my expected “sugar” dreams happened last night, in which, in my dream, I break the no-sugar diet I have set for myself. I fully expect this to be a nightly occurrance. Last nights dreams were unusual, in that they also had the “self-doubt” dream of being unprepared for something at work, *and* the “can’t find a toilet” dream of needing to take a pee. And the aforementioned sugar dream. My dreams suck.

Preparation
I’m getting stuff together for the 24 hour film. I decided that it’s not against the spirit of the rules to have my equipment in a ready state before the film-making, so I’m making space on the harddrive and pre-recording my DV tapes with blackness (to get the embedded timecode right). Tonight I’ll buy snacks and possibly a spare blow-up mattress, and install Final Cut Pro on the laptop computer so that we have two editing stations if we decide to make two short films. All good.

Bengal Boogie
I realise I haven’t finished writing this up, but it still remains absolutely fresh in my mind. It’ll happen. As a coda, Paul passed on the money that I’d been promised for the shoot, which was rather unexpected and delightful. I had kinda written that one off.