The weekend turned out to be a bit of madness for me. Madness in the sense that I went to bed on the Saturday night (technically Sunday morning, but time is irrelevant in my world) and almost like a drunken bender came out of it on the Monday afternoon wondering where my day had gone. I must have been in and out of slumber over a twenty something period, catching up on all the late nights and little sleep I’d been getting for the past couple of weeks. It was very weird and disorientating and really, it wasn’t until the Tuesday morning that I felt more proper and right for the world.

Since then, there has been some more prepping for the 48. Turns out that our team is in the same heat as some other friendly competition (yeah, you know who you are) and last years winner of the cinematography prize. I myself am quite conflicted in which I want to compete for. By far, the best cinematography win will come out with a much better prize and something I’d totally laud over and rub all over my body with (a camera just to clear up), but winning overall for the region is just as good. Secretly I want to win something, but overall I just want to have a lot of fun doing this. As its been a crazy amount of work recently, but after this it’ll be some down time with just the editing of Pictures of You to concentrate on and to do the 48 hour competition and just have fun with it will be a great transition between the two.

Other than that, the only other thing that’s been really making me feel all so sexily giddy inside is the growing coverage of Wong Kar Wai’s new film My Blueberry Nights, which features the always hot Norah Jones and in WKW’s hands, super-hot. Witness the Cannes poster of awesome here, the stills of sexy here, here and here and the first trailer of pure p0wnage here.

Have spent the last two days in a semi state of exhausted no sleep, with a little pick me up of alcohol.

Sunday was the worst, I was barely anywhere and was like a walking zombie from the lack of sleep. Made worse by the fact that it was Easter and all the liquor stores were closed. Drove me nuts all day, until I unearthed some hidden booze late at night and all was well in the cosmos.

Today wasn’t so different. Must have still been tired and it very much resembled a Dead Chris Day, causing me to miss out on some wakeboarding. But there was poker and there was a good amount of drinking instead. Yayness.

Malcolm flew off for Germany today. The bastard. Hope to hear from him soon and must make a note to work on my jedi mind tricks in the meantime so I can convince him better to stick around next time, if there is one.

And the other night, I started writing a new feature film which will be quite interesting, as I’ve never thought of stories in the dimensions of feature length before. The idea of this one has been gestating around in my head for at least six months or more and it’s a sorta/kinda ensemble of stories and stuff. The basis of its is party aspects of myself (though not fucking literally, as those introspective semi-autobiographical stories are usually boring self indulgent wank fests) and the idea is to create a view of the world that closely resembles the way I see things. It’s based mostly on people and situations I know and have seen and it has all the intentions of being made by those people, but we’ll see really… It’ll probably fall flat on its arse and never properly see the light of day, but at least I can get onto thinking up other stuff for a change.

I’m sitting here at six in the morning, bored and broken after a long haul of a graveyard shift. There is still an hour to go and it feel like an eternity away. So to whittle away the minutes and to make myself feel better, I’m putting a perspective on the week for this post…

Monday was a good start where I had coffee with a lady named Michelle who is interested in getting me on board as DP for her Wintec masters short film, yet to be titled. Very much enjoyed our discussion and I’ll probably take up her offer as we seem to get along well, which seems to be my deciding factor in a lot of things, don’t matter what quality the production is or will be, if the people are cool and fun enough, I’m in.

Tuesday was mad rush day as we prepped footage from Pictures of you to be taken by Paul the Producer down to Wellington. Almost all color correction I did to enhance the images was pretty nef and took too long to tinker with and render at that point, so I just left the colors as they are on the raw footage and they looked fine enough as they were.

Wednesday was just lots of running around and getting shit sorted for Auckland, where I met and chatted with a super cool lady who worked in many high ranking jobs for various companies and produced serveral albums, artists and music videos. I was there to discuss a small filming job coming up in a few weeks, but the cool factor came in when she saw some previous film stuff of mine and totally dug it, much to my suprise. She’ll be going to Australia in a couple of weeks to meet up with some pretty cool unnamable directors looking for young talent to work with and help launch and she wants to push for me to be one of them… awesome.

Also got word that day that Peter Jackson was now interested in seeing some footage from Pictures of You in a couple of weeks.

Thursday, Paul heads down to Wellington and I rush back to Hamilton to make it to the VP1 class and then work and then some editing. Very tired that day.

Friday was pretty much a Dead Chris Day filled with drinking and sleeping, until having to work a graveyard shift, which wasn’t so bad compared to tonight as Saturday was spent doing much more drinking and parties and hooray, engagement party of Joe and Marama where there was lots of happy in the air and pretty half arsed speeches were given. Well… from Joe anyway. But many people not seen for a while were seen again and that was cool. Plus word finally coming in from Paul the Producer in Wellington that people are digging the Pictures of You footage and the biggest compliment I’ve gotten yet of the fact that it was filmed on digital and not film as that’s what it looks like to many. Which is just too cool.

But now… now I’m at work, totally not wanting to be here and started the shift with one really nasty waking hangover… but then again, this particular shift pays really well and on nights like this where there are no customers all night, there is much lazing and relaxing to be done. I just finished watching Art School Confidential which I quite liked, but its so not as good as Bad Santa or the greatness that is Ghost World.

Sigh… One thing I noted at Joe and Marama’s was that constantly writing stuff to this blog for people to read is cool, but quite often now when I talk to friends and try to tell them stuff and news, they’ve already read about it and I’m left with not much else to say, which is sad when you think about it. My internet life is getting to be far more interesting than my real life.

Holy crap this is one long post and looking at the clock, I think I just got paid $10 sitting here and writing it. Life ain’t so bad sometimes.

Again, posts getting infrequent. But then again, not much going on.

Some lovely bouts of drinking over the weekend. Had some ‘last’ drinks with some uni folks and got nicely drunk with Malcolm, who flies out next Monday, for quite an indefinite time. He shall be missed.

But the hangover was awesome and today is my third day off work and not much has been achieved. Editing on Spit-Takes became quite a scary task and though there is probably enough footage, at this point it’ll be debatable if anything worthwhile will be usable for Paul to take down on to Wellington. But in saying that, the current edit of Pictures of You is looking quite nice. I’ll be doing some basic colour corrections on the footage before its taken down tomorrow and hopefully be able to make it to a cheap Tuesday viewing of Black Sheep afterwards.

Also got caught with the consumerism whore bug and bought my first DVDs in a long time… actually, seven movies… Children of Men, Desperado, El Mariachi, Jarhead, Once Upon a Time in Mexico, Sonatine and The Wild Bunch. Plus a random look on trademe and I’ve found an auction for a CD/DVD rack exactly like the ones I’m currently using. Which, like when the last one (the second) was purchased, it was due to a demand to get new shelf space for the huge overflow of guilty purchases. I’ve actually had this problem for about two years now and to actually find a third one is insanely good fortune (cause they were really cheap things to buy, but are reliably good for DVD storage) and by the looks of the pile that’s already built up, I’ll be need a fourth one really soon.

Who’s looking forward to 300, Pan’s Labyrinth and The Illusionist this week? The thought of all those movies has got me so turned on.

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…

…or download a proper quality of it here.

For ultimate viewing, one should watch both at the same time while wearing 3-D glasses and getting a massage from midget monkeys… hot.

Days off…

When I moved back down to Hamilton, I simply pilled as much junk into a whole bunch of boxes and drove like crazy back down. Weeks down the track, and those boxes took up half the very little floorspace that I was sleeping in.

Room is now clean, gardens have been done, lawns mowed, cars washed, my car tidied… I’m either compensating for the lack of filming getting done or just avoiding some proper work that I haven’t done yet.

But filming is nearly over and I crave money. Talked to the old boss at the video store and it looks like I’ll be picking up a few shifts there, at least to get me a little income again.

Been going back over Slice of Life stuff again, and proposals are being drafted up for TVNZ so fingers crossed it’ll at least be a nice proposal.

Oh and if you’re not doing anything on any nights from tomorrow til Saturday night, go watch this year’s run of the Couch Soup play. Gets more funny and amusing every year and I highly recommend any and all to go watch. It’s at the meteor theatre um… I think… and… um… I’ll get back to you on that actually.

And a repost of DJ Shadow’s Six Days music video by Wong Kar Wai, only because I’ve had this damn song and video stuck in my head for the last few days and no matter what, I can’t seem to get it out… hot.

Spent the most of Saturday lying in bed, trying not to think about wanting to film stuff and just trying to enjoy the fact that its a day off. Then I realised that I’ve actually got nearly a week off and that started to get to me.

So finally, I’m back in contact with Sash and got Ross to come around too and it’s decided we’ll be starting on a new short film, yet to be titled, but it’ll be an action short and hopefully… funny.

Sash is actually going away for the next week and Ross will be away for the week after that. But we wanna do it, we like it and it’ll be done, just a matter of how, considering our different schedules and my personal conflict of what I’m really gonna be doing after Pictures of You is properly wrapped, which will be very soon actually.

In the meantime, I’ve been also planning on finishing up ‘Spit Takes‘ which did start filming last year, but due to a severe lack of people available at the time, never got completed. But there are more people available down here at the moment, so that’ll also probably get done whilst Ross and Sash are away.

Didn’t get any ‘2nd unit’ shoot stuff done, nor have I bothered to get any more screen caps made. But that’ll be done sometime later in the next few days. Waking up today, I actually got into the groove of enjoying a weekend off and really, properly stayed in bed for the most of the day watching the rest of Green Wing and such. Great stuff. I’m in love with Sue White.

Only the third day? That can’t be right.

Anyway, today was much sleeping and forgetting it was my birthday. And then I remembered it was my birthday and more sleeping ensued.

Tomorrow is a big long day of filming from eight at the museum to just past midnight at the University again… so more sleep is needed.

Discovered this which made me smile…

Have just finished an all nighter, cutting together a showreel for our media day today. Currently being burnt to DVD, lets hope it doesn’t somehow magically catch on fire. Hopefully the showreel is decent enough, I’ve not had enough time to fine cut some of the edits and even less time to properly go through colour correction. Here’s hoping its not going to be too bad for the press.

Right. Several more copies to make, a bajillion coffees (and some) and I’m off to shoot.

Woke up this morning with absolutely nothing to do. No filming. No work. Nothing. Just me, bored. Coffee, Green Wing and a lot of nothing much else.

So been trying to keep the energy levels up for tomorrow. More crowd coverage to prepare for and a little mischief on top of that. Stole some footage from Director Ben this afternoon and have been picking out certain shots and setups that I still like as screen caps.

Unfortunately, quite a bit of them are a tad plot spoilers, while others, though pretty, work better as moving shots as opposed to static stills, so I’ve had to restrain myself a bit in picking images, but here are some of the best of the rest of what I hove shot thats quite, quite satisfying. Some have been subjected to a little photoshop, just to enhance certain colours that didn’t initally come through, but overall, I’m quite happy with these in terms of composition and lighting and pretty.

I think my eyes are watering again and I need some rest. So here are pretty images. Let me know what you think, there’s still an arseload more that want to be uploaded and beg to be uploaded, but the powers of effort and criticism still hold them back.