So I’ve had this blog entry window open for several days now with half an entry filled in, but just haven’t gotten around to finishing it or posting anything throughout the whole week. Been busy with work and more work and all sorts and only now I’m starting to get some down time, so this is now a quick recap post instead.
Went to the Down by the Riverside premiere screening on the Friday which was very good and a nice audience to watch a premiere with. Funny seeing a feature made by friends in the same cinema we watched each other’s uni projects in several years earlier.
Caught the cast and crew screening of Pictures of You which was also an interesting experience to see it put together, but I’ve still got notes on certain aspects that still need tinkering and fixing up.
The rest of the time since then, I’ve been working every night and then working some more on an editing job, which hopefully, will come to a close today and thus leaving me the weekend to get very, very drunk indeed.
But anyway, that’s probably the quickest weekly recap post ever, here are some youtube videos of awesome…
Funny Cat Animation
Proof that Americans are NOT stupid…
…and the coolest of the cool, 100 numbers from 100 movies…
So where the hell have I been? Everytime I wake up in the morning, I ask myself that same question. Usually followed by what the hell is a traffic cone, orange wig, empty cases of import beer and one pissed off monkey doing in my room? But enough about how I cured cancer, on with the update…
The deadly life threatening flu that I contracted has all but gone and has dropped down to orange alert, annoying tickling cough. Would have been over it faster, but have been keeping myself way too busy, mostly with video store work and helping out on a wintec short film, which has been interesting to say the least. Lots of very cool gear being used and at one point, there was a 30 ft crane on set that had me changing my pants several times from pure delight. But the set is on a farm that was at first stinking to high heaven of sheep shit and now after some wonderful winter weather, reduced to a mud field of very squishy proportions. Its not so bad, but for some reason, walking around the dark at night, the constant squishing sounds of the mud just gets to me, even though no said liquids are in contact with my person. Washing machine is getting its run for its money though.
Best part about this is the fact that to both of our surprises, my friend Rob who disappeared from my life years ago to Wellington, turned up out of the blue for this film and he’s awesome and reads this blog. But yeah, its an interesting shoot and only being a helping hand on this one, it’s always still facinating to me to watch how other people’s productions run. Especially the other low budget stuff, its almost overkill how professional this shoot is, there are a couple of industry professionals here and the set ups are being rigged in a very industry professional manner and that on the level of this kind of production is making for facinating sideline viewing for me. Details another time no doubt.
At the same time, I’ve been juggling my work and pulled off the ridiculous amount of hours at the video store this weekend (28ish in 48 hours), but meh I say. Worst off is the fact I have a couple of corporate videos that need cutting and the deadline is only a few days away and the time to do so is getting tight. Oh and forgot to mention earlier, but the damn computer with Pictures of You on it is now sitting in my room waiting for me to start chopping into it as well, that’s my job on it now, but that’ll have to wait just a bit longer as I vainly attempt to clear up my workload.
Also to mention, I finally got myself a copy of Auckland’s international film festival booklet and as thought, the list is sweet. Already planned several times to just go up and watch as much cool stuff as possible. One particular weekend has about nine films pencilled in as “yeah, I’d really like to go to this one and that one and oh, this one will be cool” blah, blah, blah. Fact that I’m working this year will probably mean I’ll be seening more festival films in Auckland than I did last year when I was living there. Go figure.
Oh yeah, and the national winner of the 48 Hour competition was announced tonight. Hamilton’s entry didn’t win and to my disappointment, Lemonade Coup didn’t get Cinematography (though they still get a nice panasonic dvx102… dastards), but it was a very interesting line-up of finalists. Auckland’s finalist was a surprising winner and it’ll be interesting to see how it actually compares to their finalists. My bet was on the Christchurch entry that come in second and was just great, but in the end, Lease, one of Peter Jackon’s wild card entries took the top spot.
Now its off to some much needed sleep, been getting so little in the past week, and that’s not gonna let up for a few more days, so here is two highly amusing videos of street magic and stuff.
Spent the good portion of today catching up on some really awesome sleep. In fact the shower I eventually had last night was quite possibly one of the best showers I’ve had. Filming and editing like crazy the whole weekend can really take it out of you. Next week the heats are being screened at uni, mine is during the second heat on Wednesday night, and I’m looking forward to it along with a whole lot of others. Would love to go to all four of them, but I think I might be missing out on one.
After the competition, I’d vowed to stay away from filmmaking and films in general for a while. And then this evening was reminded I was to attend a student shoot to supervise and took off not long after checking that all was well to watch a movie. Now I’ve got a copy of Tideland sitting in front of me, that I’ve been meaning to watch and return to its rightful owner for sometime now. Zodiac tomorrow night and some teaching at the end of the week. There is also an upcoming short film at wintec I should get onto helping prep for, editing on Pictures of You which I should get back into and a footage for a musician’s promo I should really start cutting together. I’m not complaining, I just wanted at least a week or so to break away from it all.
Also it’s been pointed out to me that this website and this blog is coming up on one year since being created. Checking in on the first post, I started blogging this site just after last year’s 48 Hour film competition where I was taken advantage of while drunk and forced into a polar bear costume for a friend that morning and eventually got more drunk by the end of the day to most recieve a most amusing of injuries… happy birthday website.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
Got some filming of Spit-Takes done yesterday evening and photography is now about 45% complete. Tried to do a few more shots today or at least some for The Montage, but no one was available at any point for some strange reason. Stupid guerrilla film making.
But with some luck, the majority of filming will be done by the end of this week with just the montage to finish off. Editing shall be started soon, with hopefully not much disorganised footage to plough through. I’m quite happy with how its turning out so far and if done in time, it’ll be most worthy of submitting into film festivals around the place.
Here’s just how classy we are…
On another note, big congrats to Joe and Marama on their recent betrothal. I’ve had a long day of not doing much and things not all going to plan, but coming home to read this news of theirs made me warm and fuzzy inside.
And I was gonna write up some other stuff, but I just got a phone call from Director Ben and a rather big problem in the Pictures of You editing has just occurred and I must be off.