Anotherblog

Camera Club Presentation

Camera Club Presentation
I worked a wee bit late and headed straight out to Chatswood to help Ray with the Lighting presentation. Earlier in the day I had let Ray know that we were missing a C-Stand, and he grabbed one from Premier Lighting (since he was there anyway picking up an HMI light). So all was well, and I arrived good and early after only two wrong turns and we set it all up. Ray gave the talk, I interjected once or twice, and it was all over. The talk was fine, if a little short - I learned quite a few low-budget tricks and also about something called, I think, black foil - it’s thick aluminium foil painted black, which you can attach to lights and cut holes in. Ray showed the benefit of the lights, the different price ranges, and we did a very basic lighting setup (not even the classic three-point lighting, either).
The audience however - well, I think they weren’t particularly interested or convinced or something. They were all about the age of fifty or so, about forty of them, and most of them had their arms folded as if they had already decided they didn’t need all this fancy lighting stuff. Their questions reflected this. Oh well.

Magic: The Gathering

Magic: The Gathering
It turns out there are a couple of people at work who are MTG players. Since I’ve got a great big bunch of cards at home and don’t ever touch ‘em, I think it’s probably a good time to bring them all in and let people build their own decks out of the set. I’ve got enough cards (thanks to Ted) that we could probably run a tournament on my cardset alone… I’m enthused about it enough to be thinking about ways to ensure fairness. I might try and log all the cards (or at least the rares) onto the web and people can build decks by some kind of auction process.
I guess it depends on how keen people are, really. I’ll bring all the cards in tomorrow and see what people think.

Lights!
I’ve got a whole bunch of lights in the car at the moment, ready to take to Ray’s talk tonight. Just one problem: I forgot half of the century stand, the clamp bit that goes between the poly-clamp and the stand itself. It’s currently being used as a makeshift microphone stand using one of the light stands (which I also forgot! D’oh!), the boom pole, and the boom mike. I suspect that if I do any talking, it’ll be along the lines of “Make a list of things that you need to take to/remove from the film set, and tick them off as you add them to the car”.
Oh well. At least I can use the century stand in place of the missing light stand, so all three lights will still have a home.

Garage Days

Garage Days
…ain’t so good. No surprise, really. The reviews weren’t favorable, but I thought I ought to give it a chance, as I quite liked “Dark City”.
The main problems was the dialog. The plot was rather hackneyed, but had some nice elements and even a couple of surprises (though it had more clunkingly obvious moments, really). But the dialog was irretrievably bad, trite and dull and pseudo-hip, delivered by people desparately eager to prove themselves and trying really very hard not to sound crap, which made it all worse.
The film was almost saved, however, by a rather charming little bit of schtick that went on over the closing credits. If you even found that you have accidentally rented this out, fast-foward to the end. You won’t regret it.

Personal life
Not really much to say, except that I’m currently consumed with guilt over Jennie’s birthday. I kinda remembered on the day (June 16) but didn’t do anything about it. And the same has happened pretty much every day since. Aargh! So slack!

Spit preparation

Spit preparation
I was pleased to discover that I pretty much have all the cables I need to run the microphones from the living room to the computer room - I’m hoping to scrounge together something for the headphones too, and then the setup will be complete and I can pack it away for another two weeks. Meanwhile, I’ve been busy learning Cubase. As it turns out, I *can* record multiple tracks simultaneously. Unfortunately, the microphone-that-sometimes-acts-up is acting up. Currently I’m getting very faint radio reception when the thing is plugged in but not turned on - ground loop, bad connection, something like that. There are doobiewakkas that you can put over the power cords; I’ll give one of those a try.

Lighting presentation
Ray, the lighting guy from Chloe’s film, is doing a presentation on Wednesday night, and I said I’d come along and help out - lend my lighting equipment, and possibly say some stuff about the films I’ve worked on if there’s anything that I *can* add. I’m actually looking forward to learning some stuff, and kinda doubt I’ll have anything to add.

Spirited Away DVD
Lovely. Just lovely.

Beard

Beard
The beard is now gone. Actually, I shaved it off on Sunday, but it’s been a slow news week so I thought I might save this bit of trivia. All through the week, expressions of mock astonishment have been cast in my direction. One person, who has not seen me without the beard before, could not make the connection and couldn’t (and still can’t) work out who I am, although I talked to him a number of times when I had the beard.

It’s this kind of thing that makes life the rich pagent that it is.

Dancing
The noble Tango has suffered debasement after debasement as Anna and I continue with our dancing lessons. Actually, it would be nice to debase the Tango a bit more, but of the ten dancing lessons (Title: The mambo and the Tango) only three have been actually dedicated to a very basic Tango, and the dance instructor admits a dislike for and unfamiliarity with the Tango, thus putting her right next to Adolf Hitler, in my book. So, after four weeks of mambo, we went on to the Tango, finished *that* after another three weeks, and over last week and this week have gone on to the cha-cha, a feeble and ludicrous dance suitable only for stomping inferior cask-wine grapes. Even the mambo was better than the cha-cha, and I was not overly fond of that one except for the (incorrect) assumption that it would in some way prepare us for the Tango. Feh. They have nothing in common. These dance lessons have only cemented my belief that the Tango is the One True Dance. All others suck.

Weekend
This weekend is dedicated to preparing for the Spit invasion in two weeks time. I’m preparing and sending off some singles CDs for Marco, becoming more used to Cubase (I’ll try recording some test music of some sort. Heheheh.), and getting the necessary cables to run the studio setup. Should be good fun.

Beard

Anna’s Birthday party
Anna’s birthday was a pretty big gig. There were about 50 people, we did a hangi, and believe it or not, we vastly over-catered and were still stuffing ourselves and many other people by Wednesday. Amazing. Anyway, many people turned up in costume (theme: mythical and mystical). Anna went as Titania, and I was inspired by this picture:

To try for King Arthur. Well, it took me a full day of sewing and cutting and salvaging stuff to make a costume that wasn’t completely embarassing, and this was the result:

Not the best photo, but at least it doesn’t show the cheap plastic sword that I used in place of Excalibur. The helmet it too tall, the sun is too orange and a bit mis-shapen, but on the whole, I was pretty pleased with it. The chainmail head-dress was a flimsy grey sequin material, surprisingly effective. Without it, the costume wasn’t even vaguely recognisable.

Phew!

Phew!
It has been a rather busy time as of late, and I have had very few moments when not either actually working or collapsing into bed. Of the moments in which I was doing neither of these, the most interesting as of late has been…

The RiverLife Film Festival
It was particularly exciting finding out that we had made the finals of the RiverLife film festival. On the day of the festival itself - almost two weeks ago now - I was running rather late. It was due to start at 6:30pm, and I only set off from work at 5:00pm in Sydney traffic. Anna called at about 5:15 wandering where I was, at which point I realised I had been confused and thought that we’d agreed that I should leave work at 5:00pm, rather than arriving home at 5:00pm. Not to mention, the festival started at 6:15, not 6:30. No matter, no matter. Anna caught a taxi to Newtown, while I hooned my way as much as I could through the traffic, to arrive at pretty much 6:15 on the dot.

I rushed into the cinema and straight into an interview with a reporter armed with a minidisc recorder. Wow! My first interview as a film-maker. I babbled on for a wee while, while casting about for the others, and eventually spotted Anna & Anna & Khaleigh. Then Paul and Greta arrived and we all stood in the queue chatting as the reporter went around interviewing other suspicious types. Photographs! Official photographs! Oh, the *glamour*!

We were eventually summoned into the cinema - a fairly good-sized one - and subjected to the usual introductory talks. High standard of the film-making, etc. Introduction to the judges. Then, a nasty cunning little trick: the judges had already decided the top three films of the fifteen finalists, and those three would be shown last.

The cinema went dark. Immediately, every one of us in the theatre - I presume most of us were film-makers and friends - started glaring at the screen to curse away our own films. The first film titles started: groans from one section of the audience. And I started realising that our film might be in trouble - the first film started very well indeed, with camerawork and shot choice clearly very professional, excellent music, decent acting, a fairly good theme. Then, about four minutes in, the theatre started to notice that the film was still going. Mentally, I was crying out for the editor to be shot. All that lovely footage, in the service of absolute tedium… no wonder it wasn’t in the top three. And despite the excellent start, I started feeling as if we had a chance again. What a cruel way of showing the films! Imagine how it’d be for the twelfth finalist!

Second film. Notourfilmnotourfilmnot… our film. Oh well. Paul and I had been rather nervous up to that point, but we could relax now, except for the fact that, in a very real sense, our film was taking the piss out of a number of the competition. In the meeting the week before I had noticed a prevailing attitude of “rub their noses in it” (the subject of the competition was “Pollution in the Cooks River”) and we decided to mock the attitude while trying to put forward a more… egad… positive message.

Anyway, the audience seemed to enjoy our film. They laughed at our laugh points. We were happy. We settled down to watch the rest of the competition.

I won’t go through all the films individually, because a lot of them were quite similar - documentaries talking to various people by the river, focussing on how ghastly it was *because of what we were doing, aren’t we bad*. There were some pretty interesting ones in the mix, but that was the prevailing theme, and it was rather embarassing because we had rather carefully taken the piss out of that attitude and our film was before all of theirs.

There was one film that I’m pretty sure was rather closely inspired by the classic short film “The Kitchen Sink”, a couple of surreal snapshot edit jobs, a CGI effort - and surprisingly, very little fiction. Anna & Anna & Khaleigh were beside themselves, because their film hadn’t come up for the whole first eleven films… and there it was, the twelfth. A rather sweet, bouncy, positive little film featuring lots of cardboard signs. Claire, my little sister, had written it based on the same concepts that we were using, partially based on the behavioural therapy theories of our Pa (to wit: keep it positive).

Anyway, we were rather hoping that the final three films would be better than the others, and such was the case: the first two, especially, were superb. One, the tale of a pair of mudcrabs who steal a model police car, exceptional for its insistant digressions into Crab TV programs - versions of the news, Big Brother, and so on. The one that eventually won was a tale of stereotypical Lebanese bullshitters, and their secret hobbies of being nice guys who are rather protective of the river. Nice. One thing I noticed especially about the winners was that they were all positive films (the vast majority of us losers were negative) and that three out of four of them had strong fictional elements - two of the top three, and the audience choice film.

We headed to the release party (which had very nice sushi) and stood around and talked for a while. It was odd. I was fairly prominantly in our short film, and was dressed similarly to how I was dressed in the film, so I was fairly easy to recognise. People came up and said Hello a lot, and even when they didn’t say Hello, I still saw the looks of recognition. Not used to that, but I’m sure I could *become* used to it… ah, celebrity! One of the judges was Christine Olsen, writer of the screenplay for Rabbit-Proof fence, and I overcame my natural shyness to ask her what she thought - and was delighted when she gave some actual criticism! She had felt that the themes of the film needed to be expanded and explored further, and that the end was a little weak compared with some of the previous segments. Excellent! I thought that her views were insightful and the fact that she had been paying attention and had such specific criticisms felt like more of a complement than any of the “It was good”s. Or else I’m in denial. Either way, I came out feeling pretty great.

Didn’t win

Didn’t win
As you may have guessed from the quietness in the blog as of late, I didn’t win the Riverlife film competition. The quietness has less to do with miserable-cause-I-lost, than so-very-very-busy-at-work. Aargh. I have barely had a spare moment the last week.

So, I’d love to write more about the Riverlife stuff and the dance lessons last night and the party coming up tomorrow and what a busy time it has been lately, but it ain’t over yet. Hopefully mid-next week…

I wrote a song

I wrote a song
I’ve added some more lyrics to the big pile of “songs to be recorded when Ev and Dave and Chris come over for a week in July”. It’s based on a very bad joke that suddenly leaped into my head, so it’s no “Down in the Meadow” - but I still like it and am really looking foward to hearing what Ev does with it. Anyway, it’s called “Improv exercise”.

Preparations for a gallon of Spit
I’ve got a lot of “Spit” preparation to do before the guys get here. I made a start by buying a Soundblaster Audigy 2 last night, which should hopefully take care of the poor microphone-to-PC transfer. Next up is to upgrade the PC to something a little more in-spec for today’s modern society - a computer capable of hundreds of operations per second. I have a budget of about $400, which should get me an AMD2600+, motherboard, memory, and case. I can keep the existing HD, CD-RW, video card, keyboard, mouse, monitor etc. thus saving big bucks. The new PC won’t be totally top-of-the-range, but as my PII-400MHz is very slightly below bottom-of-the-range for most software requirements nowadays, it’ll be very welcome.

Having said that, I don’t notice any practical difference at all between my work machine and the home one.

Let’s see, other Spit preparations… I visited a cheap-but-professional studio once to record a soundtrack for “Bullet Hole” with my guitar tutor, and was impressed with the simplicity of their setup. They had a bog-standard PC, and just ran some very long cables from the PC to the studio room so that the PC couldn’t be heard. The technician couldn’t see us, but we could communicate because we both had microphones and earphones. I’m going to try something like that. Have the technician in the computer room, and everyone else in the living room (which should hopefully do the trick, provided air traffic isn’t too bad). If necessary, we can just shout through the door, or even leave it open.