Computer is in the middle of an upgrade to make editing Spit Takes a lot more easier. Actually, prior to upgrade, computer is running pretty sweet, but the option of more flashy bits and bobs going on inside is always a good choice.
Latest episode of House is finally out after much waiting and it is awesome. Best one in a long time and good one to watch after waiting so long for it to come out. The wait for the next episode of Heroes better be just as good in comparison to the wait… oh it better.
Anyway, trailer for 28 Weeks Later is up and I must say I am most intrigued to see it. Though Danny Boyle and Cillian Murphy did Sunshine instead, which is looking more and more awesome, this sequel actually looks half decent enough to go see. Plus zombies. Everyone loves zombies. Just like how everyone loves wild flowers and mutant hamsters.
Much tiredness going on for the last few days that’s affected my regular blog updating skills, but increased my catatonic movie watching skills. But stuff has been happening…
Professional help of awesome was given to the editing of Pictures of You over the weekend. My role in its post production is to go round to Ben’s house, watch him edit for a minute or two, start playing his xBox for an hour or two, look back to see he’s still editing and then play some more. By Friday the cutting was looking alright, but, after an actual professional editor had herself come and had some fun on it, I returned on Sunday to find a rather different looking film, many time better. Heidi (editor extraordinaire) has proposed to keep helping out on the cut of the film and I think Ben secretly breathed himself on huge sigh of relief. Just as long as evidence of some pretty bad camera work is still kept left out. She’s pretty damn awesome editor too if I haven’t mentioned it yet.
Capturing of footage on Spit-Takes is next to done. Still one scene left to film and tomorrow will be the recording of the voice-over track and a rough cut should be done by Saturday, just in time for mega drinking… hopefully.
Jon’s operation has been totally successful and there have been only minor complications at worst. Awesomeness as he’ll just be recovering now and we’re all breathing sighs of relief and joy.
To add to the joy, Dylan Moran is back for another performance and this time, this year, I shall have money to go. Plus in June, Mike Patton and Peeping Tom are playing at the St James and I’m even more in for that. Amusing as it’s only being out of Auckland, do I go to more shows there. Just got an announcement for the Mountain Goats to come up and my jar of happy-joy will burst with happy-joy delight.
And the upcoming coolness that will be Stardust finally has a trailer out and it looks awesome. You can check out the youtube clip…
Te he, got called into an emergency relief tutoring of VP2 this morning. Ended up rushing to the class and warping their fragile little minds with lots of mindless theoretical mumbo jumbo and crazy hand gestures, all to hide the fact that I was a little confused with the notes I was given and was pretty much improvising a great deal of the workshop.
But in the end I think (I hope) they got the general idea of what the point of the lesson is supposed to be… The camera being the audience’s eye and the world and verisimilitude created with the frame, along with the world outside of the frame to visually convey plot, character and emotion… blah, blah, blah, blah, blah…
At least, that’s what I think I meant. There were a few blank faces and I think one guy evaporated into dust, but that could have been from the heat too. Or he was a vampire. All the best to Marama in teaching them for the rest of the semester.
Also got another message at midnight from a friend about Jon, who has finally gotten his lung transplant operation approved and is probably undergoing surgery as of writing this. Its been a long wait and I’ve always hoped that this day would come and I hope he pulls through and in true Jon fashion. I know all us guys from high school are rooting for him and it’ll be an anxious wait for the results.
Now off to sleep for a bit, start a ten hour shift in less than five hours. Fun times.
So today was my first day as a tutor, which I still find hilariously ironic considering my past transgressions as a former student.
A little nervous at first with mild clouds of self doubt, but by the end of the class it was overcast with disappointment at only half the class turning up and blown away by the lacking empathy and response of students toward the wonderful medium of media.
But the chuckles are still there from being a tutor. I even prepared lots of stuff for viewing from really awesome music videos, to mock trailers, to really smart advertisements. Plus I finally get to utilise my Criterion copy of Brazil, all to show how the magical world of editing can be used to enhance, enrich, or totally screw up the intended meaning of a scene/film.
On other fronts, not a helluva lot going on. Been a little apathetic on things that I should really be doing and mixed in with working the mega-uber-dumb number of hours at the video whore, achievement points are at an all time low for the first time in a while.
Realising to myself I haven’t updated the blog in several days, which is pretty slack by recent standards, but I have been a tad busy lately… And its starting to get very cold around now, really quickly…
Picked up a ridiculous amount of video store hours this week which is almost killing my social life if I actually had one. Though there are some small drinks planned this weekend, which will no doubt feel very deserved.
Editing on Pictures of You continues and starting to take shape and form more and more. A minor set back of hard drive space happening when it was realised the external purchased by Ben was a USB and not firewire… silly, silly man.
Spit-Takes: A Mouthful of Comedy is almost done shooting! After much shooting over each other’s clashing schedules, there just remains voice overs, a cafe scene and miscellaneous montage shots to be done. It’s good considering daylight savings has kicked in and that leaves a lot less time to shoot during the day by our timing of things. Editing commencing soon too.
In negotiations for a job for the museum, but that’s at a really early process and not much can be said about so.
Oh, and I’m now a paid tutor at Uni starting Thursday. Which just gets the mega lolz from people considering I dropped out of that place years ago. It’ll be interesting to see how this situation will turn out. No doubt it’ll involve masses of students, things on fire, a small child saying “don’t drink the water” and me riding a rhino into battle… Awesome.
But not quite as awesome as blowing up super-huge sand sculptures and playing them backwards, in reverse…
There was also a really cool Stardust trailer-of-sorts up on Youtube over the weekend, but it looks like that’s been taken down. It was very loose in how it was put together and obviously not the proper final trailer (much like the first 300 one), but the film looks really good and with such an awesome cast and being based on one of my (if not the) favourite books, it’s gonna be great. I always dreamed I’d adapt or be involved in adapting it into a film, but it looks like they’ve done it right with this one and besides, I’ve still got my plans for that Tolkien rings thing book and that one about that English boy and magic school… Oh… wait…
Got back today from a rather brief visit to Auckland. Took a semi-impromptu trip up Sunday night and drank somewhat and got to finally catch up with a lot of friends I had not seen a long time (and film them spitting like crazy). There were also many I’d not managed to catch up with, but that’ll have to be for the next time, which will hopefully be not as long of a period as the last one.
Had quite a few things to mention and talk about, but its been a rather long day, and my mind is currently drawing a blank on a lot of things. Tomorrow I’ll be making the first (and with luck not the last) trip to Uni to give a helping hand and special guest tutoring a Screen and Media class. Thoughts of totally screwing with first year students are currently revolving around my head and I like it.
If I’ll have time tomorrow, I’ll be starting the capturing and editing of footage for Spit-Takes too. Gonna fast track its production and hopefully have a decent cut set and ready by next week. Of course, there is a lot of work and things like saving people from burning buildings to be done this week, so it’ll be a little small mission to get done. After defeating the Martian-Walrus-People that is.
And now… here’s a silly fun office related ad that I really liked…
A fucking short version of the Departed…
And finally, another 300 trailer, this time its extended, uncut and probably uncensored. Plus, if you pause it at the 1:52 mark, there is a flash frame of a test shot from Watchmen… Frank Miller, Alan Moore, lots of blood and nipples, what more can you ask for?
Oh yeah… Hot Fuzz coming out Thursday, I’m so freaking turned on now.
Update on Pictures of You… All 30-something hours of footage is currently being captured to Ben’s mac. Editing is slowly underway as its always a juggling act to do that and work and socialise and so on and so forth. But the footage is looking good and an idea of the pace of the film and its editing is slowly revealing itself. This weekend we plan to do some pick-up shots of around the city for various cutaways and stuff we never bothered doing during the production.
There was actually a really crazy cool sunset yesterday with dark clouds all around and through a small gap on the horizon, the sun was shining through and it golden light created this eerie spot like effect on the trees I was driving past. Upon seeing this, I stopped, spun my car the hell around and raced to Ben’s to pick up the camera to shoot this awesomeness, but by the time I was there, the clouds had moved on too fast and the lighting was lost. Real shame as it was pretty spectacular.
Also more shooting of Spit-Takes this weekend. With some luck, the rest of the bulk of the footage will be done and I’ll start on the editing next week (once I clear out my hard drive as well), with just the odd pickup for The Montage here and there. Kinda curious if the sound is going to be a problem as audio is only being captured in camera, as after the “bus incident”, there is no connection for the shotgun mic to the camera itself. Hooray for post sound!
Long day of work tomorrow and hopefully some wake boarding and/or at least some live music. Gonna be a good one.
It may have been delayed til April (and fingers crossed the new date will stick), but for now there’s this clip of ultimate awesomeness from 300 with a bit of a douchey intro and outro from the director and star, but the clip itself made me drool my brain into my cereal bowl.
They’re still Hot Fuzz to look forward to this month (along with half a dozen films I’ve still yet to see), plus next month has Pan’s Labyrinth, The Illusionist and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, cause ninjas are cool and by cool, I mean totally sweet.
After hours of encoding after work this evening, setting up a new template and creating new sub sections for the film and photo pages, staring at the screen, listening to Tom Waits albums, I hit the upload button and find that I’m unable to make a connection. Hopefully the account hasn’t been screwed around again, cause the last time this happened, there was a week of downtime and that sucked. Hopefully one will be able to read this within a day or two after saving this post to blogger.
But yeah, at this point a new Pictures of You, Spit-Takes and Wholesale subsection has been created and a photo gallery will soon be filled up with lots of behind the scenes photos from Pictures of You once I’ve decided on an appropriate image gallery viewing system. The one at the moment is just a test and images selected are just displayed in full as they are without text or anything else and that’s just boring. Just learning some new java and CSS codes that’ll hopefully make things prettier.
I’m writing all this dull webbuilding jibberish cause I know by the time things go back to normal, this post will probably be way old and something to just skim past…
Actually… I just gave it another shot and I’m now logged in. Hooray! Would delete this post and start again, but screw it, let the uploading begin.
Just to make this not all about boring HTML and stuff, here’s an interesting article on a most interesting concept… eco-capitalism.