So my room is pretty much set out. Desk. Bed. Computer. Stereo system. Super sweet leather chairs… all totally checked.

Still got to work out the internet connection as there is no easy way of connecting to my room at the moment, so for now I’m limited to using other flatmate’s computers which are all connected to the internet and running without hiccups. Reckon this is just a conspiricy of theirs to stop me using up all the bandwidth downloading emu porn or something. Cause that stuff is hot.

But yeah, the place is looking great and over time shall be even greater. Maybe a Chuck Norris level of great, but that’s a big stretch to be honest. But now I’m getting into a more settled lifestyle free of running around trying to remember where I live, I can finally get started on some editing of videos that have been in need of editing for sometime now.

But first… drinking. I’m just gonna keep writing it up everywhere because of the mega crushed phone incident, I have lost quite a few numbers and shall keep posting notes on here, myspace, bebo and public toilet walls of the flatwarming that shall be going on here this Saturday where there will be much drinking and… yeah, that’s it. Just the drinking. Email or txt me if you need details, but be sure to include who you are because I’m now sick of messaging people back “blah, blah, blah. Sorry, I lost my phone to a bear that mistoke it for a jar of honey and I’ve lost some numbers. Who is this?” Happens all the time. Damn grizzlys.

Still haven’t moved into new house yet. Everytime I go there, I’ve got more stuff and I throw that stuff into the room and sometimes organise it into tidy stuff, but I’ve still yet to sleep there. Flatmate figures that once I move my computer of awesome in there it’ll be a sign I’ve finally settled in. He’s probably right too. Problem is, I’m still waiting on a decently sized and reasonably priced desk to fall into my lap or into my room more preferably, but that will all come together soon. Very soon. Tomorrow a couple of trademe auctions shall finish and if the gods smile favourably, I shall emerge victorious of the bidders and with a sexy desk. The room is starting to take shape though, bed is in there and so is a shelf, but there are still many boxes of stuff around the place and lots of open floorspace going on still… as it’s so freaking huge, it’s awesome. Not to forget that there is a flatwarming this weekend for any and all that can make it. Saturday. Contact me for details. Did I mention earlier that I’ve broken my cellphone? Beat it up pretty bad and now it’s got a broken screen and walked out on me with some of my address book and the children. Since then, I’ve been getting txt messages from various ‘unknowns’ where I can either deduce through socratic logic of who it is, or sheepishly send a txt back saying sorry, I’ve come to depend on technology too much. But yeah, I have lost some numbers and that is why some are not hearing much from me. Which also reminds me… Marama, I don’t have yours or Joe’s number, so I didn’t get to send you a birthday greeting, but you’re hearing it here on the blog, Happy birthday! As a cheap present of some sort, here is the trailer to 30 Days of Night. Yeah That’s right, I’ve put together a trailer of the film you worked on as a birthday present for you. How magic am I? Seriously, it looks pretty cool though and I’m seeing quite a bit of the comic coming through. Yay!

Flash Sanders: Funk Detective recieved the following wins: Best Costume, Best Editing and City Runner Up Award. It also received nominations for Best Art Direction, Best Score, Best Actor and V Most Manic Performance.

I was so sure that either I’ll Die Before I Go Back or Shiseido and Jerry were going to win best and runner up for the region, but it was instead taken by The Playground which was alright, but yeah… what a surprise.

But this now means we’re not completely out of the competition and our film will now be sent down to Peter Jackson to check out and be screened with all the other tops and runner ups to be possibly selected as a wild card and added in with the national competitors. Not bagging on that happening, but I am just stoked enough with how we did last night. Only thing, I really wish Sash got something for his performance, he was great as Flash. Overall it was a good night (drinking and hangover now) and I’m slowly getting into the grove of wanting to do it again next year.

Oh yeah, it also means I still can’t post the short up on youtube until I get word back on how we do as a wildcard selectee. But we’ll get there. Eventually.

So the top 12 list has been announced and it looks like our short Flash Sanders: Funk Detective is among them, which I’m totally stoked about as it means we’re on the DVD and that’s all I need really. This Thursday will be the finals and I’ve got my bet on at least two films that are pretty top marked contenders to take away the region’s best award. Actually, one in particular I think is pretty damn awesome in everything it did, from the story structure to the acting to the very excellent intergration of the three required elements of a rope, the line “what do you call that” and a character named Jerry/Geri Reed/Reid, hypochondriac.

Still in the slow process of moving house… it’s slow.

And meanwhile Terry Gilliam is going to direct an Opera Andrea Chénier and has made the best casting choice ever for his new film The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus… bad ass mother Tom Waits.

And here’s a trailer for John Dahl’s new movie called You Kill Me, which stars Ben Kingsley as an alcoholic hit man and the trailer looks alright, but I’ve got a feeling it’s hiding stuff that’s cooler. Download it here.

Holy crap, been both busy and lazy in a wonderful combination.

Just recently I’ve had piles of tapes to review, CDs to listen to, assignments to mark and just DVDs to watch and in my current tiny room it’s all be piling up in a rather impressive mess. My windows desktop is also pretty cluttered and there are windows, each filled with tabs of stuff I’ve been meaning to post, including a blog entry from a couple of days ago which was half finished and totally scrapped in the end. But its almost all gone now. Almost…

So to recap recent events… the 48 Hour Competition film screenings have been going on this week. Monday was a horrible start, but since then the quality of the films have been phenomenal. Tonight is the last screening and the finalists get announced on Monday, I’m not too fussed how ours will fare, but it sure as hell has been fun.

Moving into a new empty and totally awesome house. Slowly bit by bit I’m moving more and more stuff into my large, but still empty room. Next week will see a bed and shelves and drawers making their way in, but there are still some bits of furniture and stuff that I’ve got to track down somewhere in this country.

And we shall be having a flat warming on the 16th this month, hopefully once we have stuff and furniture and everything else sorted and in there. Cause at the moment its really bare and empty, but totally awesome, cause its like something should be filmed in there.

And to be able to close some tabs, here are some stuff from the web…

Trailers for Michael Moore’s new film Sicko viewable here and a sneak peak here.

And just the coolest thing ever, if anyone is familar with Boston Legal and there was that really irritating newsreporter woman. Well, that’s Nancy Grace and what her producer does to her on her show in this clip is pure awesome. You could cut glass with just how awesome she is.

Plus friend Sean’s entry into the Auckland 48 Hour film competition. Goddamnit they were 30 seconds late in, but this is one damn good short.

Not much going on. Just posting a few pages so I can close some tabs and windows…

Passive Aggressive notes… very amusing, not that many so far, but some of them are pure gold. And by gold, I mean hookers.

More images from Stardust are online here and on the official website that has been updated some. Very pretty, so can’t wait.

Geekwise, Starcraft 2 has been announced and there are videos and trailers and such on the website that make me wish I was wearing a diaper at the time I visited it. So looks great.

And finally, some vids from japan, cause they’re all insane and awesome at the same time…

Another one of them game show clips where its all bullet-time on stage, this time as a food fight…

And the worlds fastests secretary or evil robot. You decide…

Ah the Japanese… I miss that Naoki bastard. Where the hell are you man?

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.

And so the 48 Hour Film Competition has ended and this weekend, has made it onto one of the top spots in my ever so hard to remember list of really perceptively long periods of time. And thus, I will hold off a much needed shower to post a blog to try to recap the events…

7pm Friday, I’m at the museum a few beers down and pulling out the Genre… Grindhouse. Although I was personally hoping for Unnecessary Sequel or Based On True Story, we had a very fun idea for Grindhouse and got to writing it.

By about 11pm, we’d gotten pretty much a decent script, made with the attitude of Blaxploitation films entitled “Flash Sanders: Funk Detective”.

At around midnight or just after, we were at our first location, which was the Chartwell mall’s new carpark, which I have always made a note that it’s lights were always on. So we go to filming and very pretty filming it was, but with about two more shots left to shoot for the opening, we got an overzealous janitor or employee of some kind kicking us out and vowing for revenge.

New location and we shoot the next scene somewhere else on the streets instead. Nice and brief and then its off to another location: an underpass in Hillcrest which probably holds the title of most overused location in a low budget student level production. But the shots look good and by the time we were done it was 5 in the morning.

Got back to Sash’s house which fronted as our base of operations and I got onto capturing our footage and cutting some of it. Sleep eventually came after that.

About 10 in the morning, I’m awake and editing again. Midday we discover that our very cool and very pretty opening we shot, we couldn’t get permission to use as a location. Trying not to think about it, we started shooting at the Academy at 3pm, which took a bit longer than expected and by the time we were outside and shooting the ending, we were losing light fast and with some rapid filming, got it done and cut together, the scene amusingly goes from day to night rather fast. But it still worked and that’s okay.

Shot a few more bits in the night and the back to base for more editing for me and food mostly for others. At this point we’d not really assessed the situation of our unusable opening, but problem solving eventually came in the end, I’ll associate the idea coming mostly with the music we eventually got and listening to it over and over again I just couldn’t shake the idea of a tv movie like opening, and so off to uni at about midnight to film some crazy shots of all sorts, including a dummy being thrown off a building, which looked great.

Back again to base at 3 in the morning for some more inspired filming and then more editing for me. A little sleep and its onto more editing in the morning.

At this point, I’m hating editing.

The rest of Sunday was spent editing and waiting for stress and editing some more and waiting for more stress. But I got the edit together by 3pm and very tightly cut too. Spent the rest of the time fixing audio an adding foley and wishing I had more time to colour correct, which I didn’t even get to do to one frame of the film unfortunately. But the raw footage still looks good.

Our tape got handed in with ten minutes to go, but man… there were some really close entries going on. One guy made it with a few seconds to go, but he had no tape as the laptop and camera he was running and printing with at the same time had stopped printing. And another team turned up no more than twenty seconds after the deadline had closed. Total madness and there were actually quite a few teams that didn’t make it on time and a lot more horror stories of things being told.

Overall it was a helluva lot of fun. I pretty much hit a magic high of tiredness at some point on Saturday evening and have been riding it out all the way up til now (its almost two in the morning).

It was kinda dumb of me to be doing all the directing, filming, audio and editing of the film… Prior to the competition, I’d been prepping people and making sure I’d have lots and lots of people on hand all over the city for whatever situation and genre we’d get. In the end, I used none of the contacts and starting here, I must apologise to many and all for kinda losing contact with, not keeping up to date or just zoning out of reality during the competition. It was pretty insane and once caught up in it, really hard to focus on anything else in the world. But it worked itself out in the end and to most satisfying and amusing results. We’ve watched the film a couple of times since handing it in to put our minds to rest, but crazily enough we still found it funny even after the million time of watching it… probably cause we were so tired and strung out at that point. Or at least that’s how I see it.

This post is just phenominally huge. And its probably full of crazy jibber jabber and if you’ve actually read down this far, holy crap, congrats to you. Here are good looking images for you trouble.

*temporarily gone*

We’ve got our genre (Grindhouse) tonight and we’re happy. It’s at least not the genre we didn’t want.

On the road right now, we’ve just finished our script entitled Flash Sanders, Funk Detective and we’re about to head out to our first shoot.

Gonna try and keep updating this as we go, but can’t garuantee its consistency. Couldn’t get the TXT to blog thing to work on time, so whatever.

Off we go.

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.