So we won the Hamilton 48 Hours again. Never thought it’d happen two years in a row and am still a little amazed and befuddled that it’s happened.

There were some bloody fantastic films at the finals and several I thought were top contenders for first place. When the runner up, Speed Date, was announced, I had figured that was the end of it and this other film Puddle Finishing School, had taken the top spot and rightly deserved it too. I never heard Paul the Organiser announcing us as the winner and thought it was really odd that my team was getting up on front stage.

Big ups to everyone involved and I’ve got my fingers crossed for some Hamilton teams, especially Puddle Finishing School to get picked as a wildcard and rock the nation.

Meanwhile, last year’s Auckland winners Fractured Radius posted a fantastic video on taking advantage of the Apee award statue. Totally worth a watch and it should remind me to pick up ours sometime along with last years one which I’ve still not gone to get.

Happy third Birthday Blog. Lost an ipod today but as compensation, here’s a 48 Hours regional winner prize instead.

…the hell?

Totally cool, this is a time-lapse video of the centre of the Milky Way Galaxy rising over Texas from 9:20 PM to 6:43 AM on April 21-22, 2009. Totally awesome.

So the list of 48 Hours Finalists came out this morning and we made it into the Hamilton finals. Boosh! Not something I was going to blog about immediately, but then the list of nominations is out and well… something is definitely wrong… We got ten award nominations.

Ten.

Like, what the hell? I was not expecting that at all, especially after a rather strange period of self doubt and loathing. Thats more than any other team and its out of sixteen possible awards. Of the others, two they don’t reveal the nominations for, one is for best teen team and another for animated film which which we don’t even qualify for either, no primary actresses for the best actress award and we miss out on the ‘best use of the line of dialogue’ award cause our film is probably more deserving of the ‘worst use of the line of dialogue’ award.

So anyway, these are the awards we’re up for…

Best Makeup
Best Costume Design
Best Sound Design
Best Score
Best Script
Best Actor – Ross MacLeod
Best use of Prop
Best use of Alex Puddle
Best Cinematography
Best Film

The full list can be check out the Film Waikato site here.

It’s pretty cool to have nominations back. They didn’t do this process last year in Hamilton, but they did do it the year before when I did my first 48 Hours competition and its a lot more fun this way. In all seriousness, I’m not expecting to win best film, but I’m definitely keen to get Best Cinematography. Won it last year and got a fairly okay camera out of it from the regional prize, but missed out on winning the national prize instead. This years national prize is a totally awesome Panasonic AG-HPX302 camera and me like. Like last year, I hardly even know what the prizes are for winning best film regionally and nationally, but I know I want that camera… It’s like a shoulder mounted sex machine or something.

Anyway, Christ I get long winded for putting up a list. Eventually I’ll sleep tonight and we’ll see how it goes at the Hamilton finals tomorrow night.

Just got a call from from the same good people who filmed us for the televised broadcast of last years 48 Hours finals. This year they’re doing things different and showing a whole bunch of films on a ongoing TV series that will lead up to the televised finals. I have no idea how the finals are being done this year, but either way, they want to put our short on TV with the others and will be doing the whole video introduction thing on TV again and I guess that’s pretty exciting. For me it at least says the organisers think pretty well of our short. Better than how I’ve been feeling the last week or so of “what the hell did we make?” and “good god, seriously… what the hell did we make?”. Self doubt, loathing and paranoia is great in this competition.

Tomorrow morning the regional finalists are announced and the Hamilton finals will be held on Wednesday at Chartwell cinemas. I’ll be sure to blog on the announcement tomorrow and hopfully soon draw a close to so many 48 Hours posts.

Bizarre animals that are new to science
About 15,000 new species are still discovered every year, from psychedelic fish to pink millipedes, and from lungless frogs to the Dracula fish. Take our tour of some of the strangest species to be discovered in recent years. [full article]

Possible site of free will found in brain
Free will, or at least the place where we decide to act, is sited in a part of the brain called the parietal cortex, new research suggests.

When a neurosurgeon electrically jolted this region in patients undergoing surgery, they felt a desire to, say, wiggle their finger, roll their tongue or move a limb. Stronger electrical pulses convinced patients they had actually performed these movements, although their bodies remained motionless. [full article]

MI6 urged Churchill to nuke Berlin
The diaries of Guy Liddell, the head of the espionage “B” Branch of MI5 between 1939-1945, reveal that concern about the Nazis’ V2 programme was so great that the possibility of using the nuclear bomb as a deterrent was discussed with Winston Churchill. [full article]

13 things that do not make sense
No quotes or anything from this one. Just read the whole damn thing and go… the fuck? [full article]

Lots of tabs left open, better blog a few of them…

Flat universe may be the new flat Earth
When it comes to the universe, “flatness” refers to the fate of light beams travelling large distances parallel to each other. If the universe is “flat”, the beams will always remain parallel. Matter, energy and dark energy all produce curvature in space-time, however. If the universe’s space-time is positively curved, like the surface of a sphere, parallel beams would come together. In a negatively curved, saddle-shaped universe, parallel beams would diverge. [full article]

Telescopes poised to spot air-breathing aliens
The Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes have both detected gases such as carbon dioxide and water vapour in the atmospheres of a handful of gas-giant exoplanets as they pass in front of their parent stars. The gas molecules absorb light at characteristic wavelengths, and this shows up as dark lines in the spectrum of the starlight which has been filtered through the planet’s atmosphere. [full article]

Women’s menstruation genes found
A UK-led team located two genes on chromosomes six and nine that appear to strongly influence the age at which menstruation starts [full article]

Scientists hail stunning fossil
The fossil, nicknamed Ida, is claimed to be a “missing link” between today’s higher primates – monkeys, apes and humans – and more distant relatives.
In addition, Ida bears “a close resemblance to ourselves” he said, with nails instead of claws, a grasping hand and an opposable thumb – like humans and some other primates. But he said some aspects of the teeth indicate she is not a direct ancestor – more of an “aunt” than a “grandmother”. [full article]

The last article is pretty amazing stuff and there’s a few interesting videos to supplement it. Another recent surge in topic is the moon which BBC is doing a thematic cover over over the weeks. The lastest is on Lunar Orbital Rendezvous. Still have a soft spot for the moon and having recently reread the facinating book Moondust I’m still giddy all moon related stuff.

The theme question of the last week has been “how’d your 48 go?”. I might as well rehearse that answer here as well.

So the Hamilton 48 screenings went well from what I’ve heard. There were five screenings of six heats, I could only attend one heat thanks to the time-eater that is my job.

How’d our film fare? Well, there were speeches before the films. I didn’t know this and it certainly threw me off. A lot. I made some half arsed comments here and there, while the voice in the back of my head was screaming “the hell are you talking about?”. Horrible speech over, the tape rolls and then there’s a delay because I never rewound the tape so there’s this awkward wait as the tape rewinds. Oh and we went on first. I can’t write up enough about how much I hate going on first. The audience is still getting situated and its not until halfway through the film that people are in the right frame of mind to just go along with the ridiculousness of the story and the jokes. Or at least thats how I’d like to look at it. Seriously hate going on first.

So anyway, it played, I don’t remember much of the reactions like a suppressed bad memory and we’ll see how it goes from here. Judges came together over the weekend and made a list of their top 12 finalists. I don’t know any details on this, but I do know they’ve picked a winner and that it all wont be announced til next week. I thought the finalists would at least be announced this week, but nope. Next Tuesday we’ll find out who’s in the top 12 (and on the DVD) and the very next day will be the finals screening where the winners in whatever categories will be announced. But here’s hoping. I just hope we don’t go on first again.

12 oz. Mouse. That’s whats awesome.