Updates, Updates, Blah, Blah, Blah…

Christ it’s easy to slack off on posting blogs sometimes… So what’s happened since the last time?

Went to The Kills concert which was awesome. They were, the venue was total crap and packed full of ‘hip indie’ kids which annoyed me to no end and the place was too small for the size of the crowd, but The Kills themselves were fantastic and thanks to some inside sources, we got to go to the gigs after party. Also got to exchange a hello with Jamie and snap a picture with Alison Mosshart who’s nothing but retardedly hot both on and off stage. But apart from that, was too much of a chicken shit pussy to talk to them in depth or anything.

Settled into new flat and it hasn’t been as insane as previously… hoped for or hoped against? I’m not quite sure at this point. But its good, but I’ll still be looking for work in Auckland, which at this point I should really gear up a notch or two on doing.

Had several setbacks last week, most prominently my current phone which has come to be my favourite phone of all the phones I’ve owned so far, started gargling death rattles and has pretty much up and died on me. New phone has been ordered and hopefully will arrive by the end of the week. Great timing on that one as I’ve actually got a need to establish quite a few contacts and phone calls with it.

And in the other more blog worthy news is that registrations for the 48 Hours Filmmaking competition opened last week and since then I’ve been asked on a daily basis if I’m entering again this year and the answer is yes. I’ll be entering in the Hamilton regions one final time, at least in a competitive level with the intention of winning. Of course, that’s not my main intention, but that’ll be a drive for doing it this year. If I enter in further years, in the Hamilton section at least, I’ll be doing it just for pure, retarded, fun reasons (ie filming myself naked for seven minutes singing the theme songs to 70s TV programs while churning a barrel of butter)… actually, screw it, that’s a great idea and it’s going on the ideas pile for this year.

My Weekend of Happy Fun Times

So it turns out I own a lot more stuff that I had originally thought I did. At first, packing up books, CDs and comics, you know, stuff that’s on shelves, was simple and made moving look like it was going to be relatively easy. Well this facade didn’t last long…

Example… Clothes? No problem, I don’t really own that many. Oh wait, jackets? I have quite a few of those. Packed. Done. Oh hey, there’s some more jackets in here, better pack those into some more boxes. Next up… oh wait, there’s more coats in this closet. Better get out another box…

Now repeat this process but each time with a different set of objects like: camera equipment, lighting equipment, computer components, cables, files and folders, scripts, musical instruments, toys, knick-knacks, kitchen stuff, photos and general tiny doo hickey things that I have a tenancy to hold onto for posterity reasons and mix it all up in a building rush of growing haste, panic and the fact that you’re not doing it in any order and you just keep discovering stuff you completely forgot you own and that’s at least a brief description of the moving process I went through this weekend.

Actually, don’t get me started on the packing of the DVDs either. I thought I’d have enough boxes to hold all of them… totally didn’t. In fact, the volume ratio of DVDs was well more than all my books, comics, cds and clothes combined.

Moving is not fun and in fact, I haven’t even moved yet, I’ve moved my furniture (half of it) into my new temporary room, but the room isn’t actually free yet as the guy still hasn’t moved out and wont be for a few days. So all the stuff that required a trailer is packed into the corner, but all the crap that’s in boxes is currently stored at a friends until the room frees up and even then, I don’t think I’ll fit everything into the room.

So it’s safe to say that this whole moving experience has developed a new found appreciation for the lifestyle of hobos and I’m pretty much close to denouncing my worship of consumerism. Well, not quite. But I think I’m going to start selling off a lot of the things I own just so that the next move, whenever that will be, will involve a lot less stuff needing packing and moving… hopefully.

It’s been a long weekend and aside from the packing and moving, there was also a lot of house cleaning involved and by the end of it all, I was dead on my feet, but still managed to go out for some drinks and work a full shift. Actually, I’m still tired as hell because I haven’t had enough catch up sleep, but at this point, I’m used to it. It’s just hard to write anything right now and feel its something actually readable. Like that last line, pretty sure it doesn’t make much sense.

Anyway, a super massive huge big thanks to everyone who helped in some way from helping transport stuff to putting me up for a night (or both). You all know you are. And now I shall enjoy a few days of homelessness until I get to do some proper moving into my new place.

Strangest Theft Ever

So it takes an out of the blue, crippling flu to get me to finally update this blog. Plenty has gone on in the last two weeks, but I’ll just detail one thing for this post.

First off my wallet was stolen one night in the most bizzare of circumstances. One night, alone in my house, I was preparing to head into town for some drinks when I realised I’d need money for a taxi, so I pulled some notes out of my drawer and put it in my wallet and left it on my desk. I left the room for a few minutes to call a cab, grab another beer and then waited for the taxi for about ten minutes.

The cab arrives and as I was leaving, I realised I didn’t have my wallet and looking where I knew I last put it, it wasn’t there. Several minutes of frantically looking, I resorted to telling the driver to just go without me.

After turning my room inside out for an hour, I thought a bit on it. I knew the window by my desk was open at the time, so looking outside, I found a few other items that were in the grass, still dry (as it had been raining all night).

So the conclusion was that after seeing me put money in my wallet, it had been taken from my window. In all the time I’ve lived at this house, there’s never been a burglary or anything like this happening. Especially considering the place is down a long driveway and my room is not visible to anyone on the road.

The usual calling of cops and cancelling of cards happened pretty soon afterwards. But what was even more bizzare was several days later, my wallet turned up again in my car. Empty of money, but the cards were still inside. Strange? Very.

Now this no doubt made me paranoid of my own sense of time and space, but fact is I checked the car several times of the night of the theft. Even had a friend looking through the car a seperate time and finding nothing. So the theif must have taken the wallet and returned it several days later.

Certainly was one of the more stranger experiences I’ve had in a while. And I’m simply gonna assume the wallet was returned after the thief realized who they had stolen from and quaked in fear at the repercussions of what they had done and tried to make nice before Batman opened a can of whoop ass on them.

Catch Up Post

Well its been one long week of all sorts of crazies. Completed the short film “Spit-Takes” and while I’m happy with the final result, there’s some effects thats taking its time being rendered before I’ll put it online for all to see.

Its been submitted to be screened along with some other local shorts for a touring festival in order to showcase the Waikato’s budding filmmaking community… or something along those lines. I even managed to squeeze in my good friend Sash’s Dark Priest short that he made several years ago and I still consider it one of, if not the best student/low budget short to have come out of the Waikato in recent years and its always needed a wider audience and this certainly is one of the platforms for it. I should be an agent. Ari Gold would be proud.

Other things that have happened this week include getting my car tested for a Warrant of Fitness and passing with absolutely no faults, not even minor ones to keep an eye out for. Impossible? Probably, I must have left a 20 note or something in the seat, that’s never happened to me before.

I also broke another expensive pair of headphones, and buying a replacement, thats probably my third $100 pair this year. Spending money is just awesome. I also completed building shelves for my DVDs so now they don’t just lie around in excess across the floors and now just need to track down where the hell all my borrowed ones are. As there are just so many missing its mental.

Also tried some painting this weekend and failed so instead took up drinking as a past time. That was excellent, but suffered one hellish hangover thats been haunting me all day today. Thats what I get for mixing my many drinks.

The plan for this week is to start putting together the next short film exclusive for the net, finish writing of script thats needed finishing for many many many months now and probably get around to invoicing and getting paid.

There’s an interview with Charlie Kaufman here in mp3 format and it runs for over two hours. He talks about all sorts of things an its great as you’d expect it to be.

The trailer for his upcoming film Synecdoche…

An interview with the creator of No Heroics which I caught the first episode of and now think is great. Check it out if you can, I mean there’s a guy called Thunder Monkey and he summons monkeys. I know I’ve mentioned that before but… monkeys!

And finally, here’s Well Ferrell answering some questions from the internet. Hilarious.

See more Will Ferrell videos at Funny or Die

Whoops…

Posting to this blog is sometimes like showering and eating and sleeping for me, I keep forgetting when the last time was and when I should be doing the next one. Actually, add laundry, haircuts, bill payments, rent payments and the expiry dates on bought foods. Ah well.

Anyway, I’ve been busy obviously. The last of the film festival was great catching two out of three planned films plus the IMAX of Dark Knight, which was just as awesome on the second viewing and I could honestly go a third time and not care of the cost or anything else. It’s that awesome.

But the crazy storm season of the last week is starting to go away, Dr. Ezy is having his birthday bash tonight, I’m coming up two weeks of not smoking (bar a couple I had last week while playing poker) and generally, everything is alright.

Oh, one suck incident is that I found out at the last minute and missed out on attending a Mark Kozelek (of Red House Painters and Sun Kil Moon) concert at the King’s Arms in Auckland. First the Mountain Goats cancel and then God tricks me into setting up an awesome gig the first weekend I’m not in Auckland after being up a retarded monkey’s nosepicking number of times. Thanks God. I’m gonna crank call you later.

Oh, but here’s a video to cheer anyone up. Plus this, or this, or this, or this.

Kick-ass.

48 Hours Recap

Funny, I can’t think of anything to post tonight, either I’ve been working too hard recently and just can’t think straight anymore, or I’ve suddenly become so delusional that all the stuff I wanted to post about while this blog was down are just downright boring. I blame our robot overlords.

So I’ll just do a recap of our 48 activity…

This year we once again entered into and competed in the V 48 Hour Filmmaking Competition where we drew horror as our genre and from what I gathered from the screening is that people generally liked it and were both disguisted, horrified and laughing at the same time, which is great, cause that was exactly our intention with the short.

Initially, I hated it upon submittal and thought we’d done a poor effort, or, I should really correct myself as everyone involved were awesome above and beyond the call of awesome duty. But at that point, I felt I had done a poor effort and not spent enough time editing the film together and getting the pacing just right and all sorts of blah, blah, blah, that was capped off with having only 25 minutes to go and our first few go’s of capturing the film back to tape were resulting in no sound (and lots of cursing from me). We only just barely made it in with roughly four minutes to the deadline and at that point, we had not watched the film in whole and only seen it in bits and pieces as there just wasn’t enough time during editing to watch it right through. So it was actually the heats screening where I got to watch it as a whole (due to a new rule of not being allowed to watch it at all by anyone after submittal) and with the bonus of having a full audience there as well, where we got the satisfaction of an audience ‘getting it’, or about as close to getting it, as it’s quite a dipolar film in its shock horror and comedy.

The thing I’m most proud of “Sum of All Parts” (films title) is the music by the good Ben Woollen and apart from caring if we make it to the city finals (just to be on the DVD, fingers crossed), is that he gets some recognition or something for the totally awesome music he contributed to the film, which truly made the bastard work. But we’ll see as there’s still five days to go till the city finalists are announced and a further nine days after that till the actual finals. Time be a bitch.

Anyway, the best part about doing the 48, apart from having done it, is that my energy and enthusiasm levels have once again come back up and I’m back in the routine of doing things to get things done. Or at least I’d like to think that’s the case. It’s part of why I’ve fasttracked this site back up and I’m back to planning a whole bunch of projects to be done which will be announced in due time. It’s good to be busy again. Thanks Chuck Norris.

Oh, one video/song I love and remembered to post… Cup of Brown Joy by Elemental. I have no idea who he is, but this video is great.

Voodoo Robot Power

Oh yeah, lots of time has gone since the last post. Since then, I’ve opened and closed my blogger window with a lot of half written entries that I just kept thinking weren’t worth blogging about at the time. But now that time has gone by, this is just gonna be a post about a whole bunch of things that’ll take me some time to remember about…

Over one weekend I was in Auckland to film a fashion show. Interesting new experience and topped off with shooting an impromptu music video and seeing a whole bunch of people from South Seas I’d not seen since leaving last year.

Since then, I’ve been resting, drinking, working and sleeping back in Hamilton. Caught up with some more people I’d not seen in a while. Watched a few movies too. Just had a screening of the wintec shorts I’d helped out on this year, although the one I had served as DOP on was half over by the time I’d gotten there… whoops. Guess I’ll have to wait for the DVD.

Another day I was woken up by a phone call from a friend in need. Now I’ve been woken up for many reasons, ranging from suicides to emergency pickups and they can all quite exciting, cause… well, they can and I find it amusing sometime to be woken up by a phone call in the middle of the night. But never have I been called up and out of bed to play in a game of cricket. That was just random and definitely a first for me.

Acting in a short film in a few weeks and I’ve not really organised or prepared myself as much for it yet, which I should. Actually, I should also contact the director about all of that too. Been a while since I’ve been organised about anything really, but reckon he’d like to know sometime. Actually, he’ll probably read it here first as I’m currently at work and without email at the moment.

Party coming up this Saturday, stag do to be attended sometime soon as well… Hrmmm… that’s all I can recall now. Been feeling pretty tired today and for the last few weeks, been having the urge to quit my job, find some film work up in Auckland while still living in Hamilton, which is a good feeling and something I should actually act on sooner rather than later.

Also been thinking of shaving, but that’s still a half thought.

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…

…out.

Doot Doot Doot

Yeah, its been nearly a week, but I’ve been busy being lazy.

Over the weekend, I worked and finally finished my role on Michelle’s Wintec short that again, the actual title eludes me, but I’ll find out again soon enough. Was a fun shoot, back to the old minimal crew, maximus workload approach of fimmaking which I always enjoy immensely, and find utterly tiring at the same time. But don’t get me wrong, its been a really good shoot and I constantly cross my fingers that she’s happy with the results. Half the time I was really unsure about myself, the other half I just kept thinking she’s not throwing anything at you, it must be okay so far… Cause, you know, thats what girls do all the time with me. Throw things. Like clothes…

Anyway, the big surprise of this post to everyone will really be the fact that this is my second day not smoking (well, half of one shouldn’t really count), but yeah, I had a long overdue appointment with the dentist the other day and part of the things I’m to keep up with afterwards include… (a) no smoking, (b) no drinking, (c) no hot drinks and (d) rest.

And you know what? I’ve been doing all of those things. Kinda normal things that most people do. And yet, I’ve been surrounded by tobacco and alcohol and a recently bought batch of coffee that’s not being touched… plus going to sleep and stuff… it’s like my personal hell come to life.

Seriously, how do people function on these ‘no’ principles?!

Well, this weekend will have some long overdue drinking going on, coffee I’ll be touching pretty soon, sleep… yeah, this post isn’t coming too late yet and the smoking… Well so far, its actually not been too bad. I’ve been using nicotine patches which pretty much supply that need, but its just the whole routine of having a cigarette that is making me feel funny at times and jonesig for a smoke, but fuck it, I like smoking, I hate the side effects that come from it, of course, I’m not an idiot, and yeah, my chances of finding a nice girl go down, but its not like I’m looking for anyone anymore, but its a deliciously fun vice to have.

In saying that though, I’m actually gonna see how long I can last with this no smoking thing. I can see myself quitting and really, so far, its not that hard. But I’ve got no real drive yet to quit and no, I’m not waiting for a last minute sign like shitting a lung out on my next bowel movement, but I still enjoy the process and quitting has been on its way, but it can still take its time just a little longer.

Longest Weekend Nominee

Friday was a false start to the weekend, where there was no work, not much that needed doing and just a lot of general creative activities including mask making (which was fun and involved working with paper mache, which I haven’t done in a long time).

Saturday I woke up at seven in the morning after very little sleep, even though I knew I should have and filmed on this yet to be titled wintec project all day until five-ish, six. Had about a half hour to prepare and shot straight out again for more filming, this time at the Great Race masquerade ball. This time with an even heavier camera and a lot more people to dodge.

Eventually finishing up at three in the morning, I got myself a bit more sleep for more filming at eight, which was interrupted a few hours into it by having to rush home and move in a piano. Rush back for more filming and I finish up about four to come home for some rest, catch up with Ross (back from a most envious time in Wellington) and then out to work again for the night, where I was nearly dead on my feet and screwing up an unbelievable amount of amusing times.

Still awake for some reason, I’ve now hit that plateau of so little sleep and exhaustion, I’m not really tired any more and nothing can touch me.

But yeah, the masquerade ball was a very pretty event as always. Being in with the organisers, its actually much more interesting on the behind the scenes of things, than it is as a patron. Mind you, in saying that, next year I’ll just go as a patron, rather than a worker. Its much easier that way.

Meanwhile, there’s now a piano in my room. And a big one at that, it’s actually slightly bigger than most pianos I’ve been around and a bit more than I was expecting. But yeah, it’s in my room. I’ve always been amused by some stories or jokes where someone comes out of something (most often a crazy night out) and some action has come back to haunt them. Out of boredom, exhaustion and being underwhelmed, I bought a piano. And it’s in my room.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the piano. But it’s like this thing I remember from somewhere in family guy (I’m guessing) and they’re saying “if you just ignore it, it’ll go away” and pull out and theres a cow (or something) right there in the room with them… yeah, for me its a big ass piano. I’m gonna have to try and convince the flatmates that it’s a good idea to move the bastard into the lounge instead. The out of placeness and monstrosity of this piano is freaking me out a bit.

Meanwhile Ross had a great time in Wellington being accepted as a shortlister for First Writer’s Initiative (remembered the name this time) and I finally got around to reading his accepted script and it’s got potential to be good. Really good. So all the best as he keeps using that alien brain of his to write stuff (which I’m starting to not do very well anymore).

Actually, the tiredness is coming back to me now. After this weekend and all previous shoots for that matter, I’m now formulating a general set of rules for myself on how I’m approaching anymore filmwork…

No free corporate/wedding/etc work.
Read the script before committing to anything.
Plan the hell out of everything.
Don’t say yes so quick, just because she’s hot.
Don’t compromise so much other regular activities to work on a project.
Don’t buy pianos on a whim.

Actually, it sounds like I’m complaining about working on this wintec shoot, but I’m not. I’m actually really enjoying myself. I’m just so exhausted from doing all the work on my own, which I always seem to get myself into doing and unfortunately prefer it that way. And yeah, people are right, I should take a break for a while, but… actually, there is no excuse, I just should. But I’m a film whore like that I guess. Got another short film coming up, possibly acting in another, possible music video to do too, wanna get onto writing and rewriting some stuff and oh yeah, lots of footage sitting around that needs editing. After those, I’ll take a break. Actually, I’ll probably be accepting more stuff again in no time soon just because I like the person offering. But one things is for sure, I will not to go out buying pianos at the drop of a hat next time.