on the train

Ok. How cool is this: on the train sending this to the blog from my phone. Love it. I also love the phone: nokia n-gage QD. For so long i listened to my friends & avoided getting one but i love it! The games are great; i have about 10, i use the pda functions, its got great batt life. They took the mp3 player out of this model & made it smaller & lighter & there's really no comparison to the old one, but i dwnloaded a lil app to play my mp3's & it's my walkman as well. Might have to start writing some reviews for this site to give it some content because as far as i know no one ever reads any of this.

The new firm

Interesting working in the funky see funky doo world of advertising.
It's sort of like this Company absorbs everything that's "best
practice" with regards to making a better workplace for employees and
the Company. For example if you get in before 9am there's a girl making
espresso on a nice big machine. And there's subsidised beer on Fridays.
And air hockey and more. But it's sort of soulessly applied to the work
place. Someone "upstairs" read; if you want your employees to get in
early without demanding it - give em some motivation like coffee or
raisen toast.

working for two weeks

working for an advertising agency for two weeks. Interesting. Not the place I'd like to spend heaps of time as it's kinda funky see funky do if you know what I mean.

continued...

offering bullshit gap financing type options to films that already had
pre-sales. If you already had the stuff in place that they were
requiring then you wouldnt need their funding. They were supposed to be
set up to fund new production and they dig squat. Useless government
and banks getting into bed to fund tax dodges for large investors.
Total Joke!

Heard about the flicks

Film Licensed Investment Company Scheme: well the minister who approved
them last time was certainly in bed with someone because they were a
joke. I got all the application forms and it stated you had to list all
the projects you were going to invest in up front. And then when the
two companys that were approved released their prospectus' - guess
what? Neither of them listed any productions. They had not even looked
at any, and why? because the bullshit companies weren't even really
funding films. They were set up as dodges. They were

Seek totally sucks

So does commuting but more about that later. The jobs website
(www.seek.com.au) which recently floated on the ASX and made the
founders multi millionaires, sucks badly.
I have sent off into the ether via their crappy website about 10 job
applications in the last fortnight, and I've heard zip back. You hit
the apply now button, send off your CV and a well crafted cover letter
and it just dissappears. I'd love to even get back a rejection letter
rather than the stony silence that comes out of that crappy site. I'm
not going to apply for any more jobs online there unless they list a
phone number and then I'll call up and get a direct email address or
better yet a real address and post it.

No bargain Macs

Oh yeah. The auction was a total blow out. Some graphic design looking
tweaker was there and bid heaps on the dual G4's. Way outta my price
range. Picked up a couple of Dell P-III's; one of which I am going to
use as the basis of a Home Theatre PC I am setting up. Using a software
package (open source) called Media Portal which rocks BTW to setup a
Home Theatre Server for all my pics, movies and music. Stay tuned for a
tutorial on how I go about it.

Starting work on the Sports Show

Had a first discussion with my co producer about the sports show. It's
a concept sports show for community access TV. We want high production
values with low cost and high audience. Can we do it?! I think the
show's going to be a hit. I think we'll look at doing a pilot next
month.

Effects are letting me down

Did a bit more on the effects tests for "Desert Bride", the dance film.
Not happy with the effects that I was thinking would work out. Mind's
eye and reality are pretty different things. Back to the drawing board.
Might have to try some compositing, I thought (hoped) I might have been
able to do it all in Final Cut Pro and not have to go to After Effects
but that might not be realistic anymore.

Going hunting for a bargain Mac tomorrow

Off to bed now. Getting up early to attend an auction. They have a
couple of G4 dual processor machines there and since I do all my
editing on a single proc G4 I am keen to upgrade if I can get one
cheap, cause as you know...us low budget filmakers don't have any cash.
Which is actually true cause I don't at the moment. I am applying for a
few jobs for a couple of months to get some ready's in the bank so I
can continue to work on the films. Yesterday was a low point as the
current state of the bank account got down to less than you could take
out of an autoteller and so it was off to the supermarket for some
eftpos. I honestly thought a weeping might be imminent but got home had
a cuppa and started sorting the Adelaide footage and that sorted that
out. Anyway my secret plan is to pick up both of the G4's real cheap
because the windows people there won't know how damn hot the macs are
and I can sell the other one online and make enough to pay for mine.
That's the theory; let you know how I go.

Starting the edit

Just started digitising tonight. I have to take in the footage from a
shoot we did in Feb. Spent a couple of days in Mannum, a one road, two
pub town in South Australia. This should be a cool little film since I
can really go to town on it, be creative. I have a big vision for it,
based on the title sequence to an old formula one car racing flick i
saw years ago. Should be an interesting take on a dance film. Yes
that's right; a dance film.

Using Konfabulator

Right. Just got this cool new tool called Konfabulator which allows you
to use Widgets (little applications that sit on the desktop). Only
works for Mac's ;) and this little widget allows me to type text
straight into the box and post to the blog with ease. So they will be
lots of posts. That's the theory anyway.

Twisted tales mostly suck, what about Two Twisted?

OK, going to have a rant because i got rejected from two twisted.

Firstly I watched the re-run of the first series; twisted tales, which they were saying was being brought back by popular demand but it was on at 1.30am on saturday night so go figure.

I submitted a short script of mine for the proposed new series. This same script had been doing the rounds via my agent in the States for a new series called new masters of horror but they didn't take it in the end; i think the whole series over there will be written by the new masters of horror i.e. sam raimi or clive barker etc.

Anyway I watched twisted tales and they sucked: Big Time! All but one out of the four i saw was complete shit.

There was one featuring Bruce Spence and it was pretty cool, mainly due to the awesome acting by Bruce. The other three were soooo bad. Script, Direction, everything. Couldn't believe it. One wasn't even anywhere near a horror/thriller or even had a twist worth standing up for.

My question is; will the second series suck as much as the episodes i saw of the first?
God I hope not. They apparentkly went through 3000 scripts so they better get something good on the reel. Mind you, in the first series they used the same crew for all the files. And you could tell. Now nothing against the crew as they were obviously very capable dudes. But you can't really use the same cinematographer for all of them and exoect them to look visually different. Not with the obviuos time constraints.

So what if you are using a different director, allow them to use their own cameraman and you'd get a better result.

That's my tweo cents. And if even one of them sucks I'll scream because of course my script rocked.