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WoWing it up.

Not a VERY fruitful day.

I played World of Warcraft (not on my netbook) and exercised. I was going to read one of my books on screenwriting, but kind of never got to it. I also forgot to go to my counselling session, which annoys the fuck out of me.

For a while, I’ve wanted a Macbook Pro. Since I bought my netbook, however, I don’t feel that same need. I would actually rather have a new iMac when the time comes to upgrade. That means I’ll get generally higher specifications on the hardware, I won’t have to buy an external screen for video editing (And the iMac’s screen is huge at 27″), and I’ll pay less even if I get the best of all the iMacs. Bonus: By the time I can afford to buy one (best case scenario: 8-9 months) they might come with USB 3.0 (You know the USB you have? 3.0 is coming, and it’s going to be hella faster.) and Blu-Ray (I hate backing up to DVDs. Can hardly fit anything on one DVD) and possibly even 8 gigs of RAM as standard. Who knows? I certainly don’t. But I can dream!

Me and some friends from the Whitechapel community are considering the prospects of real-sex pornography sites. Don’t know if we’ll be seriously discussing creating a site ourselves or what, but it’s certainly an interesting prospect. Pornography is usually such a taudry affair, particularly if you take into account how abusive and unfeeling the porn industry is. Something like Beautiful Agony, only with professional photographers and full-on, real sex between real couples could help to give that industry a boot up its arse and to make people realise that there doesn’t have to be a dirty feeling attached to pornography. For a good write-up on it (with a NOT-Safe-For-Work picture) click here.

2010 01 23 admin Journal Comments (0) Permalink

Lectures and Meetings

I had my first lecture in the theory module today, which was interesting. It’s about dreams as they relate to the moving image. It’s an interesting topic, and what’s more, I got a presentation topic that actually specifically calls for a study of the Doctor Who episode “Blink”, which it has to be said is my favourite Doctor Who episode ever. Its notions of time travel are a bit iffy, but that’s not really what it’s about, anyway.

Later in the day, I had a meeting with Edgar, Dave and Andy. Andy will be playing in our little tracking project, so we’ve set up some dates for rehearsing and stuff. I think it could be pretty good.

I also had brioche today. Mmm. AND I made a nice spaghetti dinner. No sauce, just spaghetti, steamed broccoli, fried chestnut mushrooms (with salt and pepper) and fried onion and courgette (aka. Squash, aka. zucchini) with salt and savoury spices. Delicious stuff. The mushrooms were just right. The key is fairly high heat and short frying time.

2010 01 21 admin Journal Comments (0) Permalink

Applying myself

I was up early today. We had to measure up a “studio” (they call it a studio, but it’s more a teaching room with loads of sockets.) for an assessment two weeks from now. To get out of there before classes (for other people) were due to start, we had to be there at nine. I was there at nine. Dave and Edgar weren’t. That’s all right, though, I managed to get out the tracks we were measuring and stuff while I waited. It’s incredibly tempting to make this shoot very complicated, but we should probably be pretty careful not to overload ourselves with ideas. We’ll have some blocking and rehearsals to do on monday, so that’s all right.

After this, I borrowed like six books on scriptwriting from the library at uni. One of my major problems in previous years has been that I haven’t done much self-directed study, so I’m trying to fix that now. I’ve also pretty much decided not to direct my own film but rather have my semester be assessed on the script I’m writing and sound design for one of the other groups. I did promise myself I’d get in on some craft roles, so it’s time to make good on that.

I was going to go scouting for locations today, but since I’m not DIRECTING, I didn’t have to! Instead, I spent some time not getting Giants: Citizen Kabuto to work, which was pretty shitty, and I also applied to a couple of jobs! One, I didn’t get because they were looking for someone who could work more, and one I don’t know. The former was for an Apple Premium Reseller in Edinburgh and the other was for the Edinburgh Dungeons, which is like a ghost tour thing. It’s supposed to be quite good, and I have a good friend from drama who works there. (Hello, Lauren!)

Oh yes, and I had a pretty good work-out today, except I ran past the point at which I had planned to turn without noticing, so I ended up running for a quarter of an hour longer than I meant to. My knee (the one I fucked last summer) was not particularly happy about this. Hopefully, it’ll clear up by tomorrow. Whether it does or not, I’m going to try to get out on my bike for a ride tomorrow anyway. I’m very determined to get in PROPER shape this half a year, see. I’m tired of making progress for a month or two and then falling off again.

Tomorrow is the first theory lecture, and various other stuff.

2010 01 21 admin Journal Comments (0) Permalink

Workin’ It

Busy day today, even though I don’t feel like I’ve done much. I think it has partly to do with the fact that I was “late” out of bed, so I didn’t have my usual leisurely morning before uni, and also the fact that I didn’t do MANY things.

Had a dolly workshop (A dolly is a big heavy motherfucker of a thing you use in film making whenever you want to move the camera around, but you don’t want to do handheld. All major productions use them. Mostly, they’re on a track) all day from 10 ’till 5, after which I had a meeting with Liam, Dave (aka. Daffy, just so you know… though he doesn’t like it and no one else uses it but me) and Edgar to discuss the dolly project we have to do on the second of february. We have some far-out ideas, but we’ll see if we can’t get it to work. I’m meeting Edgar early tomorrow morning to measure the tracks and stuff so we can be as prepared as possible.

After this, I went straight home, made dinner, and was picked up by Andy Cameron two minutes after I’d finished eating. I’d promised to help him film a basketball match. Now, as you know, I’m more or less straight. Happily married to a curvy, delicious women. However, one of the guys we were to film today… was fucking beautiful. I cannot remember his name, but he was very very pretty. Dark chocolate skin and a slight but defined frame. I know we say these things about male celebrities because they’re kind of not “human”, if you know what I mean, but I will say it now: I would go to bed with this man.

LUCKILY, he’ll never read this and I’ll never meet him again, so I don’t mind saying it. If you are reading this, though, basketball boy I can’t remember the name of: Hello! Take it as a compliment. A creepy compliment, but a compliment.

Came home and watched two episodes of the new Being Human series. Great show. Supernatural drama done right… And that’s a fucking hard thing to do.

My wife is biting my arm, I better put away the laptop and get to sleep. Night night, whoever’s out there! (or my future self!)

2010 01 20 admin Journal Comments (0) Permalink

Keeping my Grade

I got some writing done in the morning, so I’m very happy about that. I’ve almost finished the first draft by now, after which I will location scout a bit on Wednesday (looking for willing coffee booth owners in Edinburgh, etc) and do some analysing of my own script (along with others) to see if I’m hitting the right notes and such.

I’ve been hurting like hell since Tae Kwon Do on saturday. Bouncing on the balls of my feet has fucked the entire backside of my legs, from my arsecheeks down to my calves. Subsiding slightly by now, so maybe a run tomorrow would be good.

Lectures today were good. Had Paul Holmes on script development. He’s the resident writing and directing guru. Cool dude, good lecturer. He’s always wearing those red “sunglasses” of his, which I’m sure would make most other people look like utter pillocks. The wild locks of dark brownish hair that surrounds them kind of makes it work on him, however. Then we were taught about script breakdowns by a guest lecturer called Susie Brown. I’m not going into project management or anything like that, but everything she had to say was both important and interesting.

I did indeed manage to get an appeal through to get my full grade for the theory module last year, which was just an incredibly huge relief to me. I know my essay was a B+ and my presentation a B-, so now we’ll just have to wait and see if I actually managed to eek out a Merit pass for that module or not. If I can help it, I want to have all merits on my BA, but we’ll see. Only three of the third year’s six grades go on to my BA. Still a chance!

Watched Some Like It Hot today. It’s incredible what they could get away with in those days. Fun and zany movie, but PC-freaks (not ‘puters, silly) beware! This is rocky territory!

Planned on doing some workouts, but my friend Atle invited me to play some Mercenaries 2 instead. Mercenaries 2 has a lot of issues with the gameplay, but it’s actually quite a lot of fun, especially when you’re playing with a friend. It’s sort of GTA-like in its setup, which works oddly well when you’re in Cooperative mode and driving around between missions (Which generally just involve blowing things up).

Good day, all in all. The week has started out as friends, I’ll do my best to keep it that way.

PS: Feel free to comment on these posts if you feel you have anything to say, whether it be to show support, criticise something (I take fair critique pretty well), or just to say hello. I do like being reminded every now and then that I’m not the only one seeing these posts, even though I am writing them mostly for myself.

2010 01 19 admin Journal Comments (1) Permalink

Getting back on the horse

Derek Zoolander may have declined to get back on the horse on account of not being a gymnast, but In an attempt not to be quite as dimwitted, I’m going to attempt to get back on it… Legolas style.

November went, december – including deadlines and christmas – came and went. January is here. I managed to miss my essay deadline, but finished within a week after, so I MIGHT be able to put an appeal into effect that will give me my full grade. I’m also going to a counsellor at uni to help me get over some of my self-esteem issues and my debilitating fear of essays. I seem to talk a lot of shit, and I’m not sure where I’m going with it, but we’ll see.

Okay, so that’s all a little shitty, but what does that have to do with all these equine metaphores? (Okay, there’s only one that I kept using, and I just wanted to use “equine” in a sentence)

Well, I spent all of today not doing anything. I made some coffee, I played World of Warcraft, and I faffed about online. Oh, I also failed to make whipped cream (You suck, UK. Your “whipping” cream sucks) and I cleaned the floors. WHAT A DAY!!!

I should have been writing. I should have been preparing for the next week. To avoid digging myself into a pit and drowning myself in self-loathing and regret, I’ll stop talking about all i didn’t do and say that I will from now on DO things! And write! And I’ll even try to keep it up, too!

2010 01 18 admin Journal Comments (0) Permalink

Non-editing Day and Weekend

Went to uni to capture all the footage from the docu shoot last weekend. Forgot the tapes at home, had to get them again. D’OH! Because of this, we were so late to start that we hardly got anything done. We were going to bring interviews home over weekend to transcribe, but didn’t get diddly-squat.

Took out equipment to shoot some inserts of Edinburgh. The metal case for the shotgun microphone weighs 16 kgs… 3.2 kgs of which were the actual contents. It weighs more than all the other equipment (with cases!) together. I bet they’re doing this just to spite us.

Finished Resident Evil 5 in Coop with Atle in Norway. What a bland game. Tentacles and boobified women, but no tentacle porn?! What the hell is that all about?! The boobified woman even turned into a testicle monster, and there was still no sex. Would probably never have finished it if I didn’t have Atle to play with. Coop is a lot of fun!

Have decided I will hold off buying a new TV (current one is a bit small and a bit crap) until we have more money and LED-backlit TVs are cheaper. Why not just get a bigger, better regular LCD? Because LED backlit TVs have better contrast, better blacks (my TV is a definite pastel black), lower power consumption (My 26″ TV: 110 kWh. A 40″ LED TV: 80-100 kWh) and much thinner and nicer. Problem is they’re still double the price of an okay LCD screen of same size. Wait a year or so, maybe. Get job this summer, I hope.

Saturday is usually day off. Were going to film the town today, but it was raining and we don’t like to jeopardise expensive equipment we’d have to pay for, so we’re hoping for better times tomorrow.

Played more Dead Space. Still freaking me the fuck out.

2009 11 15 admin Journal Comments (0) Permalink

A Day Off

This blog is turning out to be a lot more personal than I anticipated, though I suppose I should have expected it, considering the purpose of this “project”. Not that anyone is actually reading, but if you are and you’d rather not read stuff when I’m being personal, just ignore the posts that are marked “Journal” on the left here. Also, I try not to self-edit myself too much, but I’ll stop short of actively insulting anyone. I don’t speak or think much ill of other people anyway, so that’s not a huge issue.

Now that’s out of the way, let’s move on:
I couldn’t face the lecture today, so I didn’t go. Didn’t help that I was also a bit late out of bed. After some coffee, I followed Marit to the train station as she was going to St Andrews today. I brought my DSLR so I could take pictures of likely subjects. At the train station, I was happily snapping away at some pigeons bathing in a puddle when I thought “Hey wait, did I put my memory card back in?” and sure enough, I hadn’t remembered to. Yay! I had £800 ballast with me!

I was primarily out for three reasons: To get coffee at Artisan Roast, to get my Dead Space disc, and to buy some new trousers.

I went to Gap, because I’ve never been there and didn’t know what kind of stuff they had. I know American shows like to rag on it, but I found some all right stuff there. Spent some time trying to find the right pair, but it was all good. As I arrived at the counter, the guy mumbles something about VIP, discounts and spending a lot of time trying stuff on. All told, he gave me 30% off on my purchase for no proper reason (no signs or anything in the store). Liam thinks he was flirting, but I couldn’t feel a flirty vibe. Usually when boys flirt, they’re a lot more… Explicit about it. I dunno. If I did get hot-guy discounts, it’ll be the first time in my life, and I’m very flattered. If it wasn’t flirting, I’ll still assume it was, because it helps support my crumbling self-confidence. How’s THAT for living a lie?!

Dead Space box was empty. I showed the guys at HMV the box, but had no receipt. Dude ran around checking stocks against registered stock. Asked me who served me, as if I would be able to remember. A good rule about me: It’ll take me about the time I’ve known someone to forget them again. Generally. If I meet you for five minutes and then go to the toilet for a massive shit, I’ll have forgotten what you look like when I get back. I’ll have forgotten your name by the time I let go of your hand when we’re introduced. It’s a genuine problem for me, and one I’ve had since I was a kid. It’s not to do with sleeping or diet, because both those things have fluctuated throughout my life but my memory’s stayed reliably terrible.

Coffee at Artisan was good as always. Michael, the proprietor, was trying out a new brewing process which I’m very curious about. It’s similar to what they do to whiskey to avoid it going smoky when you add water, apparently, though he assured me he’d never put water in his whiskey (or whisky, or bourbon).

On my way home, I listened to my iPod for the first time in ages. the Prerecorded Friends are fucking legends. One of the best non-useful podcasts ever.

Watched Glee. It’s kind of a terrible, lazy, contrived and annoying show, but it’s also compelling. I blame the charming actors they have playing the “minor-major” characters. The character relationships are excruciating, I want to kill some of the characters for simply being annoying, and the auto-tuning (digitally correcting key in vocals. Read: T-Pain) is driving me nuts, as is the constantly hand-held camera movement, but I’m kind of enthralled all the same. I’m seriously happy they decided not to try to make their own songs. That could have proved disastrous.

Finally, Dead Space is fucking terrifying at times. I know I’m late to the party, and there is no such thing as “fashionably late” to a nerd-party, but at least I’m here now.

Things have been looking up today.
I’m curious to see what tomorrow brings.

2009 11 12 admin Journal Comments (0) Permalink

A little bit negative

Didn’t write yesterday. Plain forgot. Too busy feeling sorry for myself.

Had class at uni which went fairly well. I was feeling better about things, but was also sweaty and stinky. When I got home, I decided I wasn’t up for drama. I had a shower and was going to play Dead Space, but realised there was no disc in the fucking box.

How I Met Your Mother was good, though. Barney is back, baby! Suit up!

Spent this morning not finishing my research dossier for the documentary. I should have started work on it a week ago, but for some reason, I ended up starting at 1PM today. Obviously, I didn’t manage to finish it. I handed it in anyway. I keep telling myself that I’m going to do better next year, and the year after that, but I never do. I always make the same mistakes.

At the tutorial with our module leader, I said as truth was that I feel I’ve betrayed myself and the project and that, while we can probably find something within the three hours of footage to fill in a ten-minute documentary, the subject kind of ran away with us and we didn’t do as well as we could have. I also said I was fairly happy with the visual side of it. Sana (module leader) and Radim told me I was being all doom and gloom. Overly negative and all that. I kept to myself that I thought I was being positive compared to how I’m seeing things.

Played some more Fifa Street 3. Watched four fucking episodes of Glee. First few episodes were pretty gut-wrenching, but they’re getting slightly better, and it was a distraction from thinking about tomorrow morning, when I have another lecture I’m completely unprepared for… Bugger me, has it been a week already?

Sometimes, I want to kick myself in a teeth for even starting this course. I will probably not end up working in film anyway. I feel useless. I know I’ve learned from university over the years, but I feel just as stupid as I did when I joined, only now I also feel less confident because I don’t feel any more competent. How the fuck am I supposed to get through fourth year?

I’ll just start a kennel and make millions off puppy-videos on Youtube.

PS: I really do want a dog. A dog that could force me to go outside when I really just want to curl up in a corner and die. A dog that could force me out of bed in the mornings when I see no reason to get up.

2009 11 11 admin Journal Comments (0) Permalink

A Trustworthy Face?

Day started well enough as we looked out our window to see the season’s first frost-laden grass. I took a picture of it, look!

Marit helped me to carry the equipment back to university, me taking the heavy stuff, obviously. Once wegot to uni, she went off to get Dragon Age and I stayed behind. I edited the sound project for a few hours before I got unexplicably tired and heavy-headed and decided to give up. I tried calling Marit way too many times. I wanted to meet her in town and maybe get a coffee, but her phone was at home. She’s not that easy to get hold of, even for myself.

Saw Die Hard on Blu-Ray. Was good.

Went to town to look for some new trousers for me, but Marit wanted to finish the installation of Dragon Age first, so we ended up being too late to really get a good look anywhere. In one fitting room, I looked myself in the mirror and thought “I wouldn’t trust that man if he came into my store”. I had red rings around my eyes and I looked pale and drawn.

HMV was the only shop open in St James when we arrived there, so Marit insisted we get something to cheer me up. (I was feeling increasingly pissy and exhausted) We got Dead Space and Fifa Street 3 on sale. Wasn’t in the mood for horror gaming when we got back, so I tried Fifa Street, which was a lot of fun. It reminded me a bit of the Quidditch game for PS2, where it’s all about the tricks and flourishes.

I still feel like shit, though…

Tomorrow:

  1. Go to class
  2. Uh… Some… Stuff. Who knows?
2009 11 09 admin Journal Comments (0) Permalink