More DVD goodness, this time in the form of Last Life In the Universe. One of my favourites from last year, I’m gonna be flaunting this onto people to watch and bask in it’s glory. There’s not much features on this region 1 disc, but I’m currently in the middle of listening to the Christopher Doyle commentary track and it’s like the vestal virgins making love in my ears. The man is a genius with a camera and this is such an invaluable track to be listening to I’m digging it. Totally digging it.

It looks like I’ve got the consumer whore bug again. Starting to float around more and more online stores everyday and at this rate, I’m quite possibly gonna hit 400 titles by the middle of the year, but that also has to take into account the several dozen DVDs of my own that are being borrowed and floating around the country somewhere… actually, come to think of it, one of my DVDs is in Japan… that Naoki bastard. Where the hell is he these days anyway?

Anyway… here’s Osama Team Hunger Force… have I posted this before? I can’t remember.

Finally caught 300 and The Illusionist last night and they were most awesome. 300 was just so cool and full of gusto in its action and style, I wet myself many times in delight watching it. And The Illusionist so brilliantly captured an atmosphere and mystery of the period. Both highly recommended to all to go see.

It was originally planned to spend the whole day at the movies, but Pan’s Labyrinth isn’t on yet due to not enough prints nationwide (which sucks) and missed out on the time for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which would have been some plain good fun.

I amusingly got related to a story of how someone met me at uni during a marketing the arts class, where during a break in a lecture, I stumbled into the room drunk off my nut on red wine, declared myself so, had a cigarette with some others and then skipped out on the rest of the class to go drink some more. This apparently fact. I don’t even remember this.

Have spent the last two days in a semi state of exhausted no sleep, with a little pick me up of alcohol.

Sunday was the worst, I was barely anywhere and was like a walking zombie from the lack of sleep. Made worse by the fact that it was Easter and all the liquor stores were closed. Drove me nuts all day, until I unearthed some hidden booze late at night and all was well in the cosmos.

Today wasn’t so different. Must have still been tired and it very much resembled a Dead Chris Day, causing me to miss out on some wakeboarding. But there was poker and there was a good amount of drinking instead. Yayness.

Malcolm flew off for Germany today. The bastard. Hope to hear from him soon and must make a note to work on my jedi mind tricks in the meantime so I can convince him better to stick around next time, if there is one.

And the other night, I started writing a new feature film which will be quite interesting, as I’ve never thought of stories in the dimensions of feature length before. The idea of this one has been gestating around in my head for at least six months or more and it’s a sorta/kinda ensemble of stories and stuff. The basis of its is party aspects of myself (though not fucking literally, as those introspective semi-autobiographical stories are usually boring self indulgent wank fests) and the idea is to create a view of the world that closely resembles the way I see things. It’s based mostly on people and situations I know and have seen and it has all the intentions of being made by those people, but we’ll see really… It’ll probably fall flat on its arse and never properly see the light of day, but at least I can get onto thinking up other stuff for a change.

I’m sitting here at six in the morning, bored and broken after a long haul of a graveyard shift. There is still an hour to go and it feel like an eternity away. So to whittle away the minutes and to make myself feel better, I’m putting a perspective on the week for this post…

Monday was a good start where I had coffee with a lady named Michelle who is interested in getting me on board as DP for her Wintec masters short film, yet to be titled. Very much enjoyed our discussion and I’ll probably take up her offer as we seem to get along well, which seems to be my deciding factor in a lot of things, don’t matter what quality the production is or will be, if the people are cool and fun enough, I’m in.

Tuesday was mad rush day as we prepped footage from Pictures of you to be taken by Paul the Producer down to Wellington. Almost all color correction I did to enhance the images was pretty nef and took too long to tinker with and render at that point, so I just left the colors as they are on the raw footage and they looked fine enough as they were.

Wednesday was just lots of running around and getting shit sorted for Auckland, where I met and chatted with a super cool lady who worked in many high ranking jobs for various companies and produced serveral albums, artists and music videos. I was there to discuss a small filming job coming up in a few weeks, but the cool factor came in when she saw some previous film stuff of mine and totally dug it, much to my suprise. She’ll be going to Australia in a couple of weeks to meet up with some pretty cool unnamable directors looking for young talent to work with and help launch and she wants to push for me to be one of them… awesome.

Also got word that day that Peter Jackson was now interested in seeing some footage from Pictures of You in a couple of weeks.

Thursday, Paul heads down to Wellington and I rush back to Hamilton to make it to the VP1 class and then work and then some editing. Very tired that day.

Friday was pretty much a Dead Chris Day filled with drinking and sleeping, until having to work a graveyard shift, which wasn’t so bad compared to tonight as Saturday was spent doing much more drinking and parties and hooray, engagement party of Joe and Marama where there was lots of happy in the air and pretty half arsed speeches were given. Well… from Joe anyway. But many people not seen for a while were seen again and that was cool. Plus word finally coming in from Paul the Producer in Wellington that people are digging the Pictures of You footage and the biggest compliment I’ve gotten yet of the fact that it was filmed on digital and not film as that’s what it looks like to many. Which is just too cool.

But now… now I’m at work, totally not wanting to be here and started the shift with one really nasty waking hangover… but then again, this particular shift pays really well and on nights like this where there are no customers all night, there is much lazing and relaxing to be done. I just finished watching Art School Confidential which I quite liked, but its so not as good as Bad Santa or the greatness that is Ghost World.

Sigh… One thing I noted at Joe and Marama’s was that constantly writing stuff to this blog for people to read is cool, but quite often now when I talk to friends and try to tell them stuff and news, they’ve already read about it and I’m left with not much else to say, which is sad when you think about it. My internet life is getting to be far more interesting than my real life.

Holy crap this is one long post and looking at the clock, I think I just got paid $10 sitting here and writing it. Life ain’t so bad sometimes.

Twas a very brief excursion into Auckland the other night. Less than 24 hour stay and though some effort was made, only a handful of people were seen and caught up with. But I’ll be back next week, so no big loss really.

Forgot to mention earlier, but an elite team of super ninjas have been entered into the 48 Hour Film Competition. Our team rivals others in both factors of coolness and manpower of bazooka monkey jetpack fighters. Stay tuned as world domination gets added to our ‘to do’ list.

If others want to join in on our group, they must prove their worthiness and justify what level of coolness and monkey power they can bring to the collective.

Won auction for DVD rack for $2. Stoked.

Will be going to Auckland for the night to meet people, see people and hopefully watch 300 at a midnight screening or some other time asap.

There just seems to be an abundance of youtube videos being watched today, so I figured I’d post all about those for tonight. So without further ado…

Here is quite possibly, one of the coolest, sexiest short films ever called Tyger which just looks amazing…

A really twisted animated short called Rabbit that made me both smile, feel disturbed and still not so hungry for jam.

A really strange video of… I dunno what, but it’s a liquid metal fountaing thingee of some sort and it looks freaking cool and I want one.

A rather short short film by Dave McKean about… I dunno what, but the surreal images are very pretty.

And finally… um… Alanis Morissette covering “My Humps”…. yeah…

Again, posts getting infrequent. But then again, not much going on.

Some lovely bouts of drinking over the weekend. Had some ‘last’ drinks with some uni folks and got nicely drunk with Malcolm, who flies out next Monday, for quite an indefinite time. He shall be missed.

But the hangover was awesome and today is my third day off work and not much has been achieved. Editing on Spit-Takes became quite a scary task and though there is probably enough footage, at this point it’ll be debatable if anything worthwhile will be usable for Paul to take down on to Wellington. But in saying that, the current edit of Pictures of You is looking quite nice. I’ll be doing some basic colour corrections on the footage before its taken down tomorrow and hopefully be able to make it to a cheap Tuesday viewing of Black Sheep afterwards.

Also got caught with the consumerism whore bug and bought my first DVDs in a long time… actually, seven movies… Children of Men, Desperado, El Mariachi, Jarhead, Once Upon a Time in Mexico, Sonatine and The Wild Bunch. Plus a random look on trademe and I’ve found an auction for a CD/DVD rack exactly like the ones I’m currently using. Which, like when the last one (the second) was purchased, it was due to a demand to get new shelf space for the huge overflow of guilty purchases. I’ve actually had this problem for about two years now and to actually find a third one is insanely good fortune (cause they were really cheap things to buy, but are reliably good for DVD storage) and by the looks of the pile that’s already built up, I’ll be need a fourth one really soon.

Who’s looking forward to 300, Pan’s Labyrinth and The Illusionist this week? The thought of all those movies has got me so turned on.

Computer is in the middle of an upgrade to make editing Spit Takes a lot more easier. Actually, prior to upgrade, computer is running pretty sweet, but the option of more flashy bits and bobs going on inside is always a good choice.

Latest episode of House is finally out after much waiting and it is awesome. Best one in a long time and good one to watch after waiting so long for it to come out. The wait for the next episode of Heroes better be just as good in comparison to the wait… oh it better.

Anyway, trailer for 28 Weeks Later is up and I must say I am most intrigued to see it. Though Danny Boyle and Cillian Murphy did Sunshine instead, which is looking more and more awesome, this sequel actually looks half decent enough to go see. Plus zombies. Everyone loves zombies. Just like how everyone loves wild flowers and mutant hamsters.

Much tiredness going on for the last few days that’s affected my regular blog updating skills, but increased my catatonic movie watching skills. But stuff has been happening…

Professional help of awesome was given to the editing of Pictures of You over the weekend. My role in its post production is to go round to Ben’s house, watch him edit for a minute or two, start playing his xBox for an hour or two, look back to see he’s still editing and then play some more. By Friday the cutting was looking alright, but, after an actual professional editor had herself come and had some fun on it, I returned on Sunday to find a rather different looking film, many time better. Heidi (editor extraordinaire) has proposed to keep helping out on the cut of the film and I think Ben secretly breathed himself on huge sigh of relief. Just as long as evidence of some pretty bad camera work is still kept left out. She’s pretty damn awesome editor too if I haven’t mentioned it yet.

Capturing of footage on Spit-Takes is next to done. Still one scene left to film and tomorrow will be the recording of the voice-over track and a rough cut should be done by Saturday, just in time for mega drinking… hopefully.

Jon’s operation has been totally successful and there have been only minor complications at worst. Awesomeness as he’ll just be recovering now and we’re all breathing sighs of relief and joy.

To add to the joy, Dylan Moran is back for another performance and this time, this year, I shall have money to go. Plus in June, Mike Patton and Peeping Tom are playing at the St James and I’m even more in for that. Amusing as it’s only being out of Auckland, do I go to more shows there. Just got an announcement for the Mountain Goats to come up and my jar of happy-joy will burst with happy-joy delight.

And the upcoming coolness that will be Stardust finally has a trailer out and it looks awesome. You can check out the youtube clip…

…or download a proper quality of it here.

For ultimate viewing, one should watch both at the same time while wearing 3-D glasses and getting a massage from midget monkeys… hot.

Te he, got called into an emergency relief tutoring of VP2 this morning. Ended up rushing to the class and warping their fragile little minds with lots of mindless theoretical mumbo jumbo and crazy hand gestures, all to hide the fact that I was a little confused with the notes I was given and was pretty much improvising a great deal of the workshop.

But in the end I think (I hope) they got the general idea of what the point of the lesson is supposed to be… The camera being the audience’s eye and the world and verisimilitude created with the frame, along with the world outside of the frame to visually convey plot, character and emotion… blah, blah, blah, blah, blah…

At least, that’s what I think I meant. There were a few blank faces and I think one guy evaporated into dust, but that could have been from the heat too. Or he was a vampire. All the best to Marama in teaching them for the rest of the semester.

Also got another message at midnight from a friend about Jon, who has finally gotten his lung transplant operation approved and is probably undergoing surgery as of writing this. Its been a long wait and I’ve always hoped that this day would come and I hope he pulls through and in true Jon fashion. I know all us guys from high school are rooting for him and it’ll be an anxious wait for the results.

Now off to sleep for a bit, start a ten hour shift in less than five hours. Fun times.