Anotherblog

Filmwise

Filmwise
Oh yes… I got another 8/8 in Filmwise. Pleeeasing.

Happy Christmas!

Happy Christmas!
I’d planned to write something earlier, ’cause I’m just mad for weblogging you know, but I am also very un-newsworthy. For example:

- I killed twenty-two mosquitoes in our bedroom last Saturday night.
- We saw “Love, actually.” today. It was precisely as the reviews stated: soppy, but good anyway.
- I have been muchly enjoying work lately, and am looking forward to getting back to it on Monday. Coding can be fun.
- I am muchly - too muchly - looking forward to “The Return of the King”.
- Workmate A. King, who fell one hundred and fifty metres down a New Zealand mountain, returned to work on Monday. He had escaped with concussion but otherwise just cuts and grazes. The number of jokes included, but were not limited to “Did you have a nice trip?”, “Look! The Return of the King!”, “So, you must be A. King!”, and a couple of us Magic the Gathering players preparing special decks to commemorate the occasion - earthbind, shock, snow-covered mountains, etc. Mr. King had a very pained look on his face, but I’m sure it was just his wounds.
- I have been exercising, playing guitar, and playing computer games.
- Anna’s shop is going very well indeed. She is tired.
- I have been watching Twin Peaks. It is still good.
- I was defeated by only the third episode of “Fawlty Towers”, and had to leave the room in sheer embarassment. Anna couldn’t stop laughing at my feebleness.
- I saw the news guy I had done the filming with, on the news. Cool.
- A car caught fire outside our work yesterday. It was just sitting there, in the visitors carpark, when it started spurting smoke and fire from under the hood. The fire brigade were called, dealt with the problem, and determined it to have been caused by oil on the engine. I think. And obviously, an overheated engine. Anyway, it was very impressive, and naturally, the whole thing was caught on film because we happened to have people doing video footage very nearby.
- I have learned a, i, u, e, o, ka, ki, ku, ke, ko, sa, shi, su, se, so, ta, tchi, tsu, te, to in hiragana, the “simple” Japanese script. It is rather challenging. In spare moments, I now draw hiragana on my leg instead of trying to tap out morse-code, doing coin-rolls, practicing card tricks with business cards, or going through the pentatonic scale on imaginary guitar frets (which is, it has to be admitted, the most embarassing).

Now I think about it, this is pretty news-worthy, by my low standards.

Happy Christmas.

Massage is Go!

Massage is Go!
Anna opened her new massage clinic in the Town Hall arcade yesterday, and had a wonderfully full day of work - lots of seated massages, and a couple of others. Apparently the through-traffic is terrific and the number of enquiries was great. She’s already gotten a couple of bookings for the rest of the week. Now it’s just a matter of building up a… um… body of therapists. She hasn’t held an official opening yet - that’ll probably be next week some time, but in the meantime she’s working and getting valuable, valuable income. So far, so good…

The Eye of Argon
I’ve been reading The Eye of Argon, on and off, to Luke and George on the way to work and back. Or rather, more correctly, I have glazed my orbs over the stygian lusty tomb that is the inconceivable Eye of Argon and resonated my vohacular glands to spew out the crimson gore of its very marrow.

The whole exercise started when George was wandering what “Purple Prose” meant, and I discovered that neither George nor Luke had read “The Eye of Argon”, though Luke had heard of it. I figured that a reading was in order. Various fan groups have readings in which they must pass the story to the next person when they start laughing, and to be honest, I thought I’d be immune. Not laughing is a simple enough matter of will power, and I’ve read the story a few times so I figured it’d be easy.

Oh, how naive I was. Reading the story aloud is an amazingly funny experience, far funnier than just reading it normally. The reading experience is usually a bit numbing because the sheer density of the badness causes eye-glazing (or in the vernacular, orb-misting) and rampant skimming. Being forced to confront it by reading aloud, bypasses the usual embarassment and goes straight for the funny bone. It really is hilarious. Having said that, once reaccustomed to the prose, it became a little easier to read without actually crying with laughter.

Return of the King
Nine days to go. Tickets: booked. Reviews: overwhelmingly positive. Expectations: ridiculously high.

Work Christmas party
Anna and I went to my work’s Christmas party on Saturday night. It was grand; a retro-themed party at the Sydney Superdome ballroom. I went as a 1950’s science nerd, with thick-framed glasses, slicked-back hair, button-down shirt, pocket calculator etc. Not bad, but I wish I’d managed to get my “Clockwork Orange” costume together in time - I was missing the cricket protector and the bowler hat that would have made the costume complete. I couldn’t find them anywhere, and I really wasn’t going to rent them out from a costume shop, ’cause that would have been just a little bit too much of a pain.
And also, I’ve already done the Clockwork Orange theme at one of Baltimore’s parties that had a 60s and 70s theme. It’s just that it was a very good costume.

Final Fantasy: Tactics
I’ve been playing a fair bit of this lately, and it’s quite engaging. Simple tactical play, lots of options. It’s based around a series of battles, in which you select a subset of your “clan” and customise what role they will take in the battle, and arm them accordingly. The number of choices is quite overwhelming.

Filming

Filming
Last night’s filming went well. I got to the location fairly early (5:00pm) in order to set up, and Lachlan was there early too, so it came as no surprise at all to find that the presenter was going to be late - about 7:00pm or so, as he had just found out he had to present the weather for Channel 10. Fortunately, the other guy, who was doing the introduction, was there, so we had a bit to get on with.

As usual, I have forgotten names: besides Lachlan, the first presenter (who belonged to the medical company that are producing these films) resembled Steve Busey, and the teleprompter operator resembled Jennifer Tilly. Lachlan and I set up lights in the room - a small office, basically - and Jennifer got the teleprompter going.

It was an interesting device. I’ve seen them before, but not close-up: this one was designed to work with small cameras, and consisted of a metal wedge that sat between the camera and the tripod, and extended in front of the camera to a small black and white TV facing upwards, and a half-silvered mirror at a 45 degree angle. There was a cloth hood that covered the whole apparatus, along with much of the camera. Cables from the TV ran to Jennifer’s laptop computer. She had a big dial control that she used to control the speed of the teleprompt, and another black and white TV to show what the presenter was seeing, along with the text on the computer. She could change the teleprompt text by retyping it directly, and it instantly changed on the teleprompt. Obvious, but still pretty cool.

I couldn’t do the classic lighting setup - fill light (the 1k softlight) behind the camera, key light (800W redhead) at 45 degrees, and a kicker (650W Fresnel) behind - because behind the desk where Steve was sitting were a set of metallic horizontal blinds, which flared out with direct light on them. I had to move the fill light to 45 degrees on the other side from the key light, and angled it so that it wasn’t putting much light on the blinds, and I adjusted the barn doors on the key light so that it was just illuminating Steve without much of anything else. The kicker worked really well where it was, especially with the background being quite dark - I put a couple of blue gels on it, and we had a nice Terminator 2 style back light. Very pleasing for such a small working area! Because the fill light was a bit dim, I also stuck a reflector on a C-Stand and put it right in front of the desk, picking up some of the fill light and getting rid of the shadows under Steve’s eyes (sorry about all this detailed lighting explanation, this is partially for my own benefit when I try and remember what I’d done).

Ah, the C-Stand. I realised that although it wouldn’t fit into the boot of the car, I could stick it down the passenger side next to the door, and it fit quite well. I haven’t used the C-Stands much because of that bloody transportation problem, and was mighty pleased to have them around this time. In fact, I’m thinking of getting a third, smaller C-Stand now. They’re just very useful. If I’d brought the second one along, I could have used it to hold the boom microphone; the third one would have been handy to hold lighting equipment (like, bits of poly to block out light, or filters).

It took about an hour to set up, and it was quite fun. Lachlan is easy to work with, and we didn’t feel at all rushed, ’cause we’d arrived nice and early, and Lachlan had already visited the office and decided on the camera angles, and prepared the shooting script and storyboards. Very efficient!

Steve went through the introduction a bunch of times until we were happy with it. I don’t think he’d done any filming before - he was quite amused that he had to put makeup on, and in the first couple of takes, he spoke very quickly. When he saw the footage, his subsequent takes were a great deal slower and clearer. Just as he was finishing off the main presenter, who I shall name Adrien after Adrien Brody, arrived. He was still made up from the weather presentation and had brought his own makeup, which was good because his features were a bit darker than my foundation powder.

He was an interesting guy - he had a deep, authoritative voice which carried over to his personality - he was inquisitive and very cluey about the material he was delivering (though it was quite complicated medical data - apparently, he’s done Science presenting before) and made a number of excellent suggestions throughout the shooting process about the wording of the script. There was about fifteen minutes of footage to get through: we managed it in two and a half hours, which was just superb. Mind you, we were all stuffed by the end of it. I was holding the boom mike for the duration, and cursing myself for not bringing the second C-Stand; the lights were very hot - especially after the air conditioning turned off - and Lachlan was stuck in the very corner of the room filming him.

We had decided to go with a different backdrop for Adrien, as the desk would have been a bit too static. Instead, we put him in front of a book case - good idea in theory, quite tricky in practice. The books looked quite good, except that they had gold and silver writing, which flashed up very brightly on the camera. So I had to avoid putting light on them while putting light on Adrien, who was right in front of them. We had to move around the books a lot so that none of the white-covered books were in the field of view, and ended up shifting two of the shelves down two notches so that the PhD thesis books, with the nice bindings, were right behind him.

I managed to get a kicker light on him as well, by filming at 45 degrees to the bookcase, and putting the light at the end of the bookcase, just out of shot. And really layering on the gels so that it wasn’t too bright. It worked pretty well.

Also working well was the sound: the microphone was behaving itself nicely, and there wasn’t a great deal of outside noise to distract - a couple of planes, one or two cars, and the cicadas that started up once evening hit. I was rather pleased with myself for suggesting that we get room tone before the air conditioning cut out, because an hour later, it *did* cut out, and the rest of the presentation the sound was quite different. Room tone *good*. I’m beginning to think that we should get room tone as the first thing on any given shot.

Anyway, we finished at about 10:30. Lachlan and I chatted with Adrien and Jennifer about their various filming experiences, and learned bits and pieces; it’s all glamour and star-studded madness you know, darlings. Then I packed up and and went home exhausted but happy. I’m really getting there with the lighting kit now.

Days

Days
The last couple of days have been very much along the lines of “Get home, watch Twin Peaks, go to sleep”. Actually, I’ve been playing Gridrunner++ and procrastinating too, but mostly it hasn’t been hard: it doesn’t feel like procrastination when I’m honestly too stuffed to do anything useful. Perhaps I’m getting a bug of some sort, or perhaps it’s just a hangover from the month o’ writing.

Anyway, this evening I’m doing that bit of filming with Lachlan, which will be a nice change again. No news from the other tropfest guys; I assume they’re not interested given that I don’t have a full steadicam rig.

I’ve been getting enticed by movie goods lately. Particularly striking my eye has been the DV Jib Arm, a wireless monitor and the Sound Devices 302 Audio mixer. The benefits of the Jib arm are fairly obvious. The wireless monitor thing is just wish-list material, really, though it’d work very nicely with the steadicam. It’s not high on the list.

The nice thing about the last of these doobie-wackas is that it supports 12V T phantom power, which is what my Sennheiser microphone needs. Although it’s expensive - very expensive - it would be a greatly superior alternative to the current power box, which operates on 9V and is exceedingly dodgy - I have to be very, very careful with it, and it doesn’t support moving around very well. I’ve tried to build my own box, but haven’t done very well with it, so far. It’s sitting under the kitchen sink waiting to be completed, and I’m going to have to redo it since I realised that it would only hold the 9V battery (as does the current box).

Wishes, fishes. If these film gigs become more regular, I’m going to churn the profits right back into buying these goods.

George MacDonald Fraser

George MacDonald Fraser
I picked up a copy of George MacDonald Fraser’s “The Light’s on at Signpost” on Sunday, only to return it after about ten minutes. It’s a curmudgeonly - *very* curmudgeonly - attack on political correctness, kids nowadays, and how everything’s gone downhill and was so much better in his day.
When he suggested that PC idiots put the book down immediately, I took him up on his suggestion and returned it, swapping it for “The Princess Bride” instead. I’ve never owned a copy of the book before. I quite like Fraser’s writing, but prefer his rants to come through the mouthpiece of Harry Flashman, somehow. What is perfectly OK for an 18th Century villain and blaggard to say, is somewhat embarassing in a 20th Century writer who’s point of view I’ve mostly enjoyed. Oh well.

Christmas Shopping

Christmas Shopping
The horror… the horror… shopping mall christmas music is a bit like tinnitus; I don’t notice it most of the time, but when I do, it drives me crazy. Anna and I went shopping on the weekend for various Christmas stuff, and in the spirit of consumerism, ended up buying just as much stuff for ourselves as for other people. So I now have “Final Fantasy Tactics: Advance”, the DVDs of T2 and Fight Club and the complete Fawlty Towers and The Office, not to mention Mr Bowie’s new album “Reality”, which is rather good.
We watched the first episodes of Fawlty Towers and The Office, probably the two most cringe-creating TV series in existance. I’m viewing this as a kind of innoculation-by-massive-dose; perhaps I’ll be able to sit through embarassing comedy when I’m finished with this lot. I had to watch some of season 2 of Twin Peaks to recover. So far, two episodes in, I’m enjoying it a lot.

Channel the anger…
Jon urgently needed some footage for the short film he’s editing so Anna and I went over on Saturday (unfortunately missing roleplaying, as neither rp nor Jon could go to Sunday) and I went mad in front of the camera. It was quite a bit of fun. The film itself is terrible, but I was pretty pleased with my effort - I played a motorist who gets out of the car and goes nuts. I kicked a bunch of stuff, head-butted the car, and locked myself in the boot. Very cathartic.

Then we did some more moaning and wailing for some audio bits, and finally watched some pickup shots the main crew had sent to Jon to edit. Oooohboy they were bad. Really, really awful: the plot was screamingly feeble, consisting of people-running-away-and-tripping-over-and-being-killed again and again and again. Jon’s done some terrific work in making it atmospheric with creative editing and sound design, but there’s only so much polishing you can do.

Film watching
Then we went out and bought fish & chips for dinner and watched “Travelling Birds” and “Solaris”, all of which were great. Solaris, especially, surprised me in what it chose to emphasise of the story - in some senses, it resembled Memento, in that it really honed in on what it means to remember someone. The planet Solaris reconstructs the main character’s dead wife from his memories - and she becomes aware of this (she isn’t an agent of Solaris, as far as we know), that she is actually a thin facet, a perception of the original that overlaps but is not even necessarily a subset, ’cause perceptions are like that… anyway, it was quite provocative and it chose an interesting focus from the novel and I liked it a lot.

I’m going to go back and read the novel again - I think the last time I read it was in University, and it was a really lousy translation. I wander if they’ve got a better one now - the one I read was a translation from Polish via German…

Andrew moves his car

Andrew moves his car
I had my car parked out in the open, so I took the opportunity to move it, after reading about the severe storm warnings for Sydney half an hour ago. And waddaya know: about fifteen minutes later, the storm front arrived, there was lightning, stupidly strong wind, sideways rain that was ripped into fog by the wind, and just a touch of hail. Seems to have settled down a bit now, but it was spectacular for about ten minutes.

Igby Goes Down
What a pleasantly nasty little film this was. Just as I discovered that one of the early scenes wasn’t quite as evil as it initially appeared, they trumped it with a series of phone calls from the main character that made me laugh out loud and made up for all the disillusioned-youth cliches that preceded it (which, to be fair, were made quite convincing by excellent acting from Kieran Culkin). Not really, really nasty, but quite a nice cynical mouthwash to follow Matrix: Revolutions.

Revolutionary

Revolutionary
I’m not really sure how much I want to talk about The Matrix: Revolutions, which Anna and I saw last night. I’d been putting it off partly due to the novel and partly because I was dreading that it would be like Reloaded.

Happily, with reduced expectations I didn’t come out of the film spitting mad, but I had an even worse sense of opportunity squandered. All throughout the film they seemed on the verge of doing something interesting, only to choose something bafflingly incomprehensible and yet uninteresting instead. Most of my frustrations were plot related again - characters behaving in ways that suggest their only motivation was to get to the next set-piece, beautiful bits of world building that made no sense when you thought about them for even a minute, that kind of thing (what the hell were those squillions of flying robots in Zion actually *doing*?) - but when Anna got the giggles at one particularly protracted, significance-laden conversation between Neo and Trinity (”Trin”?!) I had to admit that it was the infodumps that killed it for me.

On the bright side, this has made me feel a lot better about the infodumps I’ve got in “Fork”. At least my ones mostly make sense. I think.

Geetar
Having learned some Bluesy licks in the minor pentatonic scale, my tutor has sicced me onto the major pentatonic with a distinctly Country riff. Yee-haw!

Monsterous Regiment
I finished it last night at about 2:30am. It was good. I am tired.

Aahhh

Aahhh
What a pleasantly relaxing evening. I played Warioware, which I’d just bought, and it was brain-fryinging intense. Each game goes for three seconds or less, is incredibly simple, and come at you faster and faster. Wonderfully bizarre.
Anna had rented out some DVDs. I refused to watch “Heartbreakers” and “Bruce Almighty”, but sat down for “Benny & Joon”, which was alright, though predictable. When I first saw the posters (not terribly close up), I was under the impression that Mary Stuart Masterson had dark hair and dressed like Charlie Chaplin. It was only a year or so later that I realised it was Johnny Depp. He really does look like a girly girl in that film. I was amused to note that his clowning routine, which he does about half-way through the film, was a very standard one. I had done many of the elements of it myself, when I did clowning gigs back at University.

But! My evening of simple amusements was not yet ended. I read Monsterous Regiment until midnight and declared myself happily lazy.

Even so, I managed 500 words of Fork. Anna suggested I sit down for half an hour and have at it while she went to the shops, and I did, and it was easy and stress-free, because I didn’t feel like I had to do it. I think I’ll just commit to writing when I’ve got spare moments and am not doing anything in particular, and see how that works out for me.