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.