Anotherblog

Cooks River Project

Cooks River Project
We got in! Anna’s short film *and* me-and-Paul’s short film are both in the top 15 films for the Riverlife short film competition. Our films are going to be shown on Thursday, at which point the judges will choose the top three. Very, very exciting! Although, it must be admitted, there were only 22 films submitted when we showed up at 3:30pm on the day of the deadline (which was at 5:00pm in the end). I’m guessing that there were about 30 films submitted in total.

Paul and I are getting together tomorrow to chat and see what followup films we might like to make. Time to dig out the back-catalogue of unmade films…

Die Puny Humans!
Warren Ellis has a web-log, and asked for people to send him “A Thing: Take a photo. Ensure it’s no more than 320 across X 240 down. Monkey with it with art programs if you like, but I want it based on an original photo. (320×240 is webcam size, so, you know, don’t think you have to be some clever art bastard to play.) Take a photo that somehow says “Die Puny Humans.” Whether it has the words in or simply communicates the tone is up to you.”

So I whipped something up - what the hell - and sent it in. The pic at the top of the weblog is randomly selected, and that’s where the submissions go. Well, mine’s up there now. You could randomly select a bunch of times, but there are a lot of them, as I doubt they’ve rejected too many of the submissions…

…or you could just go straight to mine. Yay! Warren Ellis may have looked at something I did!

Alexandra’s Project
…um… well… it’s a film, right. Ever seen a David Williamson play? Yeah, a film like that, but with the provocativeness turned up to “several people walking out”. Deeply unpleasant. Nice technical aspects. Camerawork was excellent. Beautiful steadicam work in the opening sequence (can’t stop noticing good steadicam nowadays!), terrific sound engineering, good acting. Still not exactly sure what to make of it otherwise, though.
Anyway, Anna and I saw it last night with two of Anna’s friends, and they were giggling almost all the way through (especially in one particularly revolting scene). Curiously, this didn’t spoil the ominous atmosphere.

Other projects
I’ve been thinking and writing up a script for a short film that I can’t actually talk much about, because it’s for work. Kind of a presentation thing that I though might work really well to illustrate this idea I’ve had. Can’t show to anyone outside of work, ’cause there may be patent issues. Very frustrating.

Aargh

Aargh!
I avoided caving in the other day and chomping a chockie. Hence, more sugar cravings today. I first hit my target weight about three weeks ago, and I’ve been hovering just above it ever since. Every couple of days I hit the weight again and have some sugar - and the next day, whaddaya know, I’m back above it again. I need to do more exercise. I haven’t been doing my half-hour walk in the mornings recently ’cause I’ve been waking up too late, but I have been playing table-tennis. Anyway. This kind of blather is what makes blogs the reviled medium they are. Urgle.

Warning
I kinda decided that it’d be a good idea to write in the blog most days whether I had anything to say or not, just to stay in the habit of writing. I think it’s Jack London who wrote a minimum of three hundred words a day, regardless of whether he felt like it or not, from pretty much the moment he decided to get serious about writing, up until he died. Regardless of the truth of this, it seems a good idea. And what the hell, I might as well share the pain.

Tired

Tired
So tired. Up until 2:00am last night playing the last weekday D&D session for two months or so. We didn’t do well - a run of dozens of rolls under 10 had us soundly defeated by the evil mage-queen, who chose not to kill us on the spot, but rather give us slow poisons and let us go. Bit of a bummer of an cliffhanger, really. Anyway, I’m feeling really quite stuffed today. I’m half inclined to break the no-sugar thing (I’m somewhat over 86kg at the moment thanks to a couple of hearty meals) just to try and keep awake with a coke and chocolate. Except that it would be breaking a run that’s been going for months and months now, and I hate doing that. Will tiredness win? Apathy? Sugar cravings?

8 Mile

8 Mile
Saw 8 Mile last night. It was alright, the usual shite, cliches from head to toe, sporting movies moves but no slow-mo, just to show what I’ve seen before - nono, theres a bit of conviction, big-diction like an affliction, spree-killer eyes on that Eminem guise. But no real surprise.

A nice distraction from work, you know. I have a fairly full weekly schedule at the moment: squash on Tuesdays, D&D on Wednesdays, tango on Thursdays, The Prisoner episodes with Jon & Kate on Saturday or Sunday, and roleplaying on Sunday or Saturday. This week, that’s going to change - midweek D&D will stop for eight weeks after tonight (which conflicts with squash, but oh well - I played Dad on Sunday anyway), and the Prisoner stuff will end this weekend, and hopefully I’ll have the first couple of chapters of Lotus rewritten soonish too. Gah!

Rest of the weekend

Rest of the weekend
The rest of the weekend was, by comparison, hugely relaxed. Went to dinner at an Indian restaurant with Anna, Dad, Claire, Aodhagan and a couple of other relatives. Played squash on Sunday morning with Dad (and got absolutely thrashed by him, as I might have expected), said farewell to CB and Aodhagan who are now headed back to Ireland, played billiards with Dad and unexpectedly beat him thanks almost exclusively to potting the red ball over and over again, dropped Dad off at the airport, went to roleplaying on Sunday night, and came home early since everyone else was pretty tired too.

And that, in microscopic detail, was that. Thanks for pretending to read all the way through.

The Cooks River Documentary Documentary

The Cooks River Documentary Documentary
It was a big weekend. I went home early on Friday, partly because I was feeling unwell, and partly because I had a feeling that I might be needed. Since I had been driven into work, I caught the bus into town, picked up the latest League of Extra-ordinary Gentlemen, a copy of the “Fortean Times” and Season 2 of Futurama on DVD, and caught the train home in nerd heaven.

Paul was doing fine on editing our short film, so I decided to concentrate on helping out Anna and Anna and Khaleigh and CB on the editing of the film that they had written and acted during the course of the day. They were all pretty stressed out by the amount of work they had done, and the amount of work they had to do. My stress levels rose as well, as they revealed that they had broken the casing of the boom mike - left it standing against a wall on the boom pole, and accidentally knocked it over. Grr! CB did her best to keep tensions down, but smiles were forced. Gazes were wild and bloodshot.

I figured it’d be easier to teach them iMovie than FinalCut Pro or Adobe Premiere, so set iMovie to capturing all their footage - about 20 minutes worth - while we had dinner, an excellent vegetarian lasagne prepared by CB and Anna. Finished dinner, went back to the computer to see how iMovie was going.

And this, gentle reader, is where my troubles really began. iMovie had crashed part-way through capturing the footage. This wasn’t a particularly big deal - though a bit unusual - so we just sat and watched the raw footage while we captured the rest of it. Fine. I hadn’t used iMovie since a very early version, so I was rather interested to see what improvements had been made. Firstly, the new version seems to have two different views of the time-line - one showing clips in sequence, the other the actual length of time that each clip should take. I was aware that iMovie only allows one track at a time - no problem, we just need to top and tail the captured clips, and we’ll be happy as Larry.

Could I figure out how to trim the clips? Could I buggery. After about half an hour of frustration and swearing (I banished the others from watching over my shoulder as the force of their gazes became too much to bear) I gave up. The help system wasn’t working (it seemed to be getting confused between the current version of iMovie and a previous one) and iMovie itself remained outstandingly opaque. I still have no idea how you are supposed to trim clips using iMovie. After hearing all the glowing testamonials of how easy it is to use, I can only assume that either nobody cares about trimming the clips, they capture precisely the clips they need, or they’re a hell of a lot smarter than I am. I gave up. Time to show - in less than 24 hours - a group of Mac novices how to use FinalCut Pro and edit together their film.

It started fairly smoothly. I created a project for them and copied the clips into it, and showed them how to drag the clips into the time-line and trim them. They made a start on that, and I figured that that would keep them occupied for a good length of time while I went over to Paul’s place to see how he was doing, and whether he needed any help.

Drove over to Paul’s place and watched his preliminary edit. The footage from Wednesday was, surprisingly, rather disappointing. The sound, and lighting were a lot better and my delivery was smoother - but it didn’t have the energy of our first session. It was pretty flat, even a little boring. We went over it and tried to work out what we’d have to reshoot, and figured that we could probably get by with just redoing the closing statement. We started reworking the script.

My phone rang. The others were having terrible trouble with FinalCut Pro. I tried helping them out over the phone for a while, but it was impossible - they’re unfamiliar with the Mac, and I’m not experienced enough with it to guide someone in its use over the phone without having a mac open in front of me. No matter, no matter. Paul was doing very well indeed with the editing, so we agreed to meet up on Saturday morning at 6:30am, go over to the river, and reshoot the last scene. And in the meantime, come up with some alternative lines.

Rushed back home. One of Anna’s team had taken off, too stressed out to cope. FinalCut Pro kept crashing. It looked like the problem was the clips that had been imported from iMovie. Some of the clips ended oddly, and whenever they were replayed, would crash the program. Also, the format of iMovie and FinalCut Pro captured clips are different - after a while of trying to work with them I gave up, and came up with a new plan. Sat everyone down in front of the TV with a log book and suggested that they watch through all the footage and select the IN and OUT points of each clip they wanted to capture, and then we’d run it through FinalCut Pro and capture everything properly. They got to work doing that, and I sat back and relaxed for a bit.

They finished logging all the clips to be captured. I sat them down at the computer to copy out the times that they had logged. They were getting visibly tired at this point. The hour was late, and their entire editing experience had consisted, so far, of about ten seconds of footage, three clips.

We captured the logged data. That took a while. Firstly, I had forgotten to remind them that they shouldn’t record anything important on the first ten seconds of the tape, as automatic capture needs a little bit of “head room” to get up to speed before it can capture accurately. So we had to recapture the first clip manually. And there was some persistant problem with the tape - I’m still not sure what that was. Another clip, in any case, had to be captured manually. I left Khaleigh (the only one still up and awake) with the resulting lot of clips, to do what she could before tomorrow morning, and went to sleep.

Got up early the next day, went over to Paul’s place. His edit was very nice by this point, a couple of extra voice-overs and a genuine laugh-out-loud moment. Happy! We worked out our shot list - first the river, then a car wash. Headed over to the river.

This time it was just Paul and me - the day was nice and overcast (but not raining) so we didn’t need the reflector, and we just put the boom mike on a microphone stand. No worries. We hadn’t had much time to go over the lines, although Paul had come up with an alternative set, so I just went through substantially the same stuff as I had done on Wednesday - I could still remember them, miraculously! - and improvised around the theme and tried to inject as much energy as I could.

This lot of acting has been an interesting experience. The first time through (last Sunday), I didn’t know the lines at all, and largely improvised around the themes of each segment that I was supposed to present. There was a lot of energy but not much time, and there were a lot of ums, ahs, and bits that didn’t make a whole lot of sense, or didn’t say exactly what we wanted them to say. The second time through (on Wednesday) were a lot smoother. Even though we’d changed almost all of the lines, I had remembered enough of the old ones to be able to get a couple of decent takes that were word-perfect. The trouble was, concentrating on getting the lines right really sapped the energy away.

This third session was the trick. I knew enough of the lines to be able to go over-the-top and read them as if I was thinking them up on the spot, and I was equally able to go off on slight tangents each time, which also visibly contributed to the freshness. I finally felt like a bit of an actor. It’s the first time I’ve had to memorise lines in order to act in a film. Strange experience.

Anyway. We did two good takes of the final scene (with a lot of mucking around and fluffed lines in-between) and headed off to the car wash.

We ended up going to two car washes. The first one, a BP, refused to let us film there. Fair enough, we hadn’t asked permission, just got the ticket to the car wash and set up the camera. The attendant running at us, waving his arms. Second time lucky. Went to a specialist car-washing place, asked them permission *first*, and got it quite happily. Got the footage. Went back to Paul’s place, happy, and I headed back home to see how the other lot were going.

Well, most of them were still asleep. After a leasurely breakfast, we got back into it. We still had basically only three clips. Khaleigh hadn’t managed anything the previous night; the IN and OUT points she set for the clips were too restrictive, and were missing bits of footage that she needed. D’oh! I should have reminded them to capture a couple of seconds to either side of the footage they needed. So in the end, I grabbed the iMovie stuff out of the garbage bin, deleted the clips that we knew were problematic, and left them to continue the editing.

For some reason, everyone was a lot calmer in the morning.

I headed over to Paul’s place again, with a couple of Ev’s CDs that I thought we could use as backing music. Bad news. The footage we’d taken in the morning had intermittant drop-outs in the sound. Aargh! The first good take - ruined. The second take… fine! Phew. And the carwash footage was fine too. The problems seemed to occur only in the first minute or two of the tape. Lucky I hadn’t gotten it right perfectly twice in a row. I will never, ever, ever move on to a second shot without getting two good takes of the previous shot. I was already pretty fixed on this, but it’s just made me more determined now. We put the footage in, and captured some of Ev’s music and inserted it.

Paul cycled over to Newtown and got the still-photographs processed and blown up to 6×8 size; I went back to see how Anna’s team was going again. They had gotten their acts completely together and had a full sequence, beginning to end, to show. Aodhagan had arrived on Friday night and was hanging around too, and was recording the soundtrack using my guitar and a pair of minidisc recorders - one to record into, the other to play back while he recorded, thus allowing crude multi-track mixing. I took over the editing briefly to insert the soundtrack, and show them how to do the titles.

By about 2:00pm, it was finished. Anna’s film was gloriously light and fluffy, despite the odds of inexperience and time working against them. We transferred the results onto mini DV tape and they headed off to Newtown to submit it. I started off to Paul’s place again, and noticed Dad walking along up the road - we knew he was arriving on Saturday, but he wasn’t sure at what time he’d be able to arrive at our place. We were kinda hoping he wouldn’t arrive in that small gap in which everyone was away, but that was (almost) what happened - instead, I picked him up, headed over to Paul’s place, copied the film onto mini-DV, drove out to Newtown, dropped the film off at the WaterShed, and Paul, Greta, Dad and I had a very relaxed and relieved bit of late lunch.

And that’s it. I’m still exhausted.

Really rather stuffed

Really rather stuffed
Yesterday was a pretty big day. Paul and I got together on Tuesday evening after my game of squash, and thrashed out the script again, rewriting pretty much all of the presenter scenes, and in the process - I hope - improving them a lot. Then, yesterday morning, got together early, ran through the script again, made our final changes, and headed off to the river with George to do all the filming. We got to the river by about 11:30am, filmed at three different locations until 4:20pm with pretty much no pause (or sunburn cream - d’oh!) then rushed off in our separate directions to go to a creative writing course (in Paul’s case) and pick up Anna and little sister CB from the airport (in my case). Then, rushing home again and writing up my diary entry for D&D, then rushing over to George’s place to actually play the game.

The filming went pretty well. It took vast numbers of takes (again) to get my lines right, but this time we had a boom microphone and reflector, so we’re hoping the footage will look a little better and sound a little clearer than the stuff we did on Sunday. There were plenty of other distractions, too. This time there weren’t too many people on the path, but there were planes taking off and landing from the airport nearby, helicopters passing by, and the sun kept going behind clouds and then coming out again mid-shot. We managed to get almost all the shots we wanted. Tonight or on Friday, we get to see just how good or bad it really was. And I suspect Friday will be a late night indeed, getting the film together for the deadline.

Cooks River Project

Jon’s birthday party
Friday was Jon’s birthday partee, in which about eight of us ate pizza and played a very nasty card game for most of the evening. It was fun. The initial rules of the game are that you play around the circle, you try to get rid of all your cards, you can play any card of the same colour or suit on the top card, you are forbidden from asking questions, and if you don’t play a card when you are required to, you must draw a card. Oh, and the winner of each round must propose another rule to add to this set.
The penalty for breaking any rule is that you must draw a card.

The completed set of rules that we had before we gave up in panic were:

1. If you play a King, skip two players.
2. If you play a club, you must sing a fanfare that has not been sung before.
3. If you play an Ace, the turn goes to the next person alphabetically by surname.
4. If you play a Queen, it is your turn again.
5. If you play a three, everybody gives their hand to the person on their left.
6. If you play an eight, reverse the direction of play.
7. If you play a seven, you must touch a part of your face. Last person to copy you draws a card.

Verrry very difficult game. We pretty much stuck with fairly basic rules, but it quickly became difficult to figure out who’s turn it was and many, many penalties were handed out. Strangely, the “no questions” penalty tended to be self-policed - people would ask a question then immediately draw a card without prompting. The earlier rounds of the game were very, very quiet as people concentrated on not doing anything wrong, but it degenerated very rapidly.

Stephen, who introduced the game to us, said that he’d never played a game that lasted more than ten rounds. And that the one we played was pretty simple - there was nothing like “All hearts are one greater than their face value” or “All prime cards must be played face-down”.

Cooks River Project
Paul and I spent the weekend pretty much working on the Cooks River Project, a documentary in which we set off to find the truth about the Cooks River and got lost and they only found our video cameras and… oh, right, wrong project.

We got together on Saturday morning to go to a compulsory meeting at the Leichardt RSL, where the people running the competition gave us the item that we had to include in our films (which were steel bowls), gave us some presentations about the Cooks River environment, answered questions, and got us to do a couple of brainstorming exercises (”What is film good at?”, “How can film-makers help the Cooks River?”) to get us all talking to one another. It actually worked pretty well. We got into some big deep-and-meaningfuls - very enjoyable - and really thrashed through what we wanted to say and how we wanted to say it. I was especially pleased, because although Paul and I had an idea, we weren’t particularly happy with it, and the discussions were really making me think harder about the problems.

Each table had someone get up and speak at the end of it all, so I babbled on at length about making sure we keep the environmental message positive, and that we pay particular attention to keeping the audience on-side. By the end of it, I was almost bouncing off the walls. And all that without sugar.

Khaleigh was also there, representing her and Anna’s project, and I was rather relieved that she wanted to do her own thing, only requiring my services in showing her how to use my video camera, the sound equipment, and the editing suite. I was a bit worried about the conflict of interest that seemed to be brewing between the two entries, and the fact that they didn’t want my input into the script was a bit of a relief - I didn’t want the possibility of anyone thinking that I was stealing ideas, though the prospect seemed unlikely given all the personalities involved.

Paul and I said our farewell to the others - there are about eighty of us officially registered into the competition - and went back to Paul’s place and got to work. Neither of us were really happy with my “no shit” script, although Paul was initially unable to come up with any non-scatalogical ideas, and the term “fecal coliform” became the catch-phrase of the weekend. We were getting fairly depressed about the whole thing, but then in a series of further brainstorms, came up with an idea that was so good we were jumping up and down with excitement. So we sat back down and wrote an excruciating first draft, and then it was 5:00pm and I had to go to Kyla’s party, so left it to Paul to write up our hastily sketched out script, and headed off.

Kyla’s “Narrative Cage-match” party
Rushed off to the party with my “Ice-house” game pieces (hoping for a game of Zendo) and the Once Upon A Time cards, and saw Kyla and David and a whole bunch of their writing friends (including Jon & Kate) and we had a great big feast, talked a lot over wine, and eventually settled into a game of Narrative Cage Match, a game that they had bought (and I had actually been given a while ago by the makers of Once Upon A Time, in return for sending them a copy of my short film) which was of a similar style to “Once Upon A Time” or “Universalis”.

Everyone around the circle, says one sentence at a time, which must involve their viewpoint character (if it’s still alive) based around a pre-determined scenario. The idea is to try and bring out the tropes of the genre. In our case, the setup was that we were in a deep-sea underwater station and… something… had eaten the captain. And from there, it’s a struggle to be the last remaining character alive. Our story evoked “The Thing” more than anything else, with its giant mutating turtles and rather self-destructive attempts to stop them (involving the successful detonation of a nuke). It got pretty silly, and was a lot of fun.

Sunday’s film-making
I got up bright and early on Sunday morning to get back into the film-making, went over to Paul & Greta’s place, and we got stuck into the script again, debating and fiddling with the lines and trying - harder than I’ve ever done before - to get into the audience’s heads and really understand how they were going to see it. There are some of the most carefully chosen words I’ve ever written, in this script, and it’s partly because we got so passionate about getting something that would really work, be genuinely effective and not be cheesy, scolding, boring or irrelevent. I just wish we’d had more time, ’cause there’s a lot more that I feel we could have done. Trouble was, by the time we’d finished marking up the script, we had the rest of Sunday - about five hours - to do the filming, plus whatever time we could find during the week. We agreed that we’d both take Wednesday off work to finish whatever filming we couldn’t do on Sunday, and to do the editing. And it was just the two of us.

We made some calls. Greta, Paul’s wife, was able to help us out in the afternoon, and Anna’s brother George was available (at remarkably short notice) as well. Great! Paul/me on camera, the other in front of it, Greta on sound or reflector, and George on reflector or sound. We did some filming around Paul’s house, then headed out to the Cooks river to do the rest of it. By the time we got there, though, there was only about two hours of sunlight remaining, there were lots of people about, and I hadn’t had a chance to memorise any of my lines. So it was a rather hasty shoot. We filmed what we could right up until dusk, then had dinner, and settled back into watching the footage. It was pretty good. I’d had terrible problems with the lines (to everyone who acted in Once Upon A Time: while I was delighted with all your performances, I’m even more impressed now that I’ve had a bunch of lines to learn. You all rock.) and not gotten through the whole script. Oh well, not entirely unexpected. Wednesday it is.

We were shattered by the end of Sunday, but it was a really good shoot and I tucked myself into bed all happy and content at how cool my friends are.

The Matrix: Reloaded

The Matrix: Reloaded
Well, I’m glad I went in with reduced expectations. It’s not really particularly good, and even the much anticipated fight scenes - from which I was expecting (well, hoping, really) greater clarity and invention, were only barely an advance. Um. It was enjoyable enough, and there’s plenty of things to savour about it, and maybe the plot will all pull together in the third film - but really, it’s got a lot of work to do. I don’t think this is really a spoiler, but they didn’t go for my favoured option (in this one at least) that Morpheus was mistaken about the humans in the matrix being used as batteries, and that they instead are the computing power of the matrix itself. Not that there was any expectation that this would be the case, outside my own head. But they didn’t, and they introduced a whole lot more that just didn’t make any sense either. Yet.

Anna’s in South Australia
We got back from the showing at about three in the morning, and Anna stayed up the remainder of the night doing packing and work. I dropped her off at the airport to see her folks in SA, then went back home and back to sleep, so that I was nice and late for work.

Busy weekend ahead
Got Jon’s birthday party tonight, then gotta go to the Cooks River project presentation (which is compulsary, and apparently introduces an item of some kind that has to be put into the film). Anna has written some script fragments and wants her friends and I to put it into shape and do some filming, and of course I’ve already committed to helping out Paul with his script for the same competition.
Then, Saturday night is Kyla’s story-telling party and Sunday will probably be a bunch of filming and writing, if I get time.

Table-tennis

Table-tennis
I’ve been going from strength to strength lately - I’ve lost a few games fairly badly, but I’ve been winning a lot more, and I’ve shot up the rankings into eighth place today - lost to Matthew 21-10, then beat Ping 21-6, Farris 21-15 and Peter N. 21-18. The difference? I think a lot of it *is* the bat, which is holding spin a great deal better than the old bat. I have a topspin backhand serve that often causes trouble, especially if I ration it out (by alternating with an undercut serve, for example). I haven’t been doing a lot of smashing, either, which generally helps my play.

D&D
Very exciting game on Tuesday; we were badly organised and almost all died at the hands of two dozen kobolds, several of whom were armed with crossbows. George’s character got within two rounds of dying for good, and my character was almost as badly injured, though it was at the tail end of the fight when things weren’t looking *quite* so bad. My character has a lousy armour class. A *really* lousy armour class.

Matrix tonight
First, tango lessons. Then, at midnight, the new Matrix film. I’ve heard only middling reviews of it, so I’ve downshifted my expectations accordingly. I wanna have fun.