So today was my first day as a tutor, which I still find hilariously ironic considering my past transgressions as a former student.

A little nervous at first with mild clouds of self doubt, but by the end of the class it was overcast with disappointment at only half the class turning up and blown away by the lacking empathy and response of students toward the wonderful medium of media.

But the chuckles are still there from being a tutor. I even prepared lots of stuff for viewing from really awesome music videos, to mock trailers, to really smart advertisements. Plus I finally get to utilise my Criterion copy of Brazil, all to show how the magical world of editing can be used to enhance, enrich, or totally screw up the intended meaning of a scene/film.

On other fronts, not a helluva lot going on. Been a little apathetic on things that I should really be doing and mixed in with working the mega-uber-dumb number of hours at the video whore, achievement points are at an all time low for the first time in a while.

Realising to myself I haven’t updated the blog in several days, which is pretty slack by recent standards, but I have been a tad busy lately… And its starting to get very cold around now, really quickly…

Picked up a ridiculous amount of video store hours this week which is almost killing my social life if I actually had one. Though there are some small drinks planned this weekend, which will no doubt feel very deserved.

Editing on Pictures of You continues and starting to take shape and form more and more. A minor set back of hard drive space happening when it was realised the external purchased by Ben was a USB and not firewire… silly, silly man.

Spit-Takes: A Mouthful of Comedy is almost done shooting! After much shooting over each other’s clashing schedules, there just remains voice overs, a cafe scene and miscellaneous montage shots to be done. It’s good considering daylight savings has kicked in and that leaves a lot less time to shoot during the day by our timing of things. Editing commencing soon too.

In negotiations for a job for the museum, but that’s at a really early process and not much can be said about so.

Oh, and I’m now a paid tutor at Uni starting Thursday. Which just gets the mega lolz from people considering I dropped out of that place years ago. It’ll be interesting to see how this situation will turn out. No doubt it’ll involve masses of students, things on fire, a small child saying “don’t drink the water” and me riding a rhino into battle… Awesome.

But not quite as awesome as blowing up super-huge sand sculptures and playing them backwards, in reverse…

There was also a really cool Stardust trailer-of-sorts up on Youtube over the weekend, but it looks like that’s been taken down. It was very loose in how it was put together and obviously not the proper final trailer (much like the first 300 one), but the film looks really good and with such an awesome cast and being based on one of my (if not the) favourite books, it’s gonna be great. I always dreamed I’d adapt or be involved in adapting it into a film, but it looks like they’ve done it right with this one and besides, I’ve still got my plans for that Tolkien rings thing book and that one about that English boy and magic school… Oh… wait…

Watched today. Brilliant.

Got back today from a rather brief visit to Auckland. Took a semi-impromptu trip up Sunday night and drank somewhat and got to finally catch up with a lot of friends I had not seen a long time (and film them spitting like crazy). There were also many I’d not managed to catch up with, but that’ll have to be for the next time, which will hopefully be not as long of a period as the last one.

Had quite a few things to mention and talk about, but its been a rather long day, and my mind is currently drawing a blank on a lot of things. Tomorrow I’ll be making the first (and with luck not the last) trip to Uni to give a helping hand and special guest tutoring a Screen and Media class. Thoughts of totally screwing with first year students are currently revolving around my head and I like it.

If I’ll have time tomorrow, I’ll be starting the capturing and editing of footage for Spit-Takes too. Gonna fast track its production and hopefully have a decent cut set and ready by next week. Of course, there is a lot of work and things like saving people from burning buildings to be done this week, so it’ll be a little small mission to get done. After defeating the Martian-Walrus-People that is.

And now… here’s a silly fun office related ad that I really liked…

A fucking short version of the Departed…

And finally, another 300 trailer, this time its extended, uncut and probably uncensored. Plus, if you pause it at the 1:52 mark, there is a flash frame of a test shot from Watchmen… Frank Miller, Alan Moore, lots of blood and nipples, what more can you ask for?

Oh yeah… Hot Fuzz coming out Thursday, I’m so freaking turned on now.

Update on Pictures of You… All 30-something hours of footage is currently being captured to Ben’s mac. Editing is slowly underway as its always a juggling act to do that and work and socialise and so on and so forth. But the footage is looking good and an idea of the pace of the film and its editing is slowly revealing itself. This weekend we plan to do some pick-up shots of around the city for various cutaways and stuff we never bothered doing during the production.

There was actually a really crazy cool sunset yesterday with dark clouds all around and through a small gap on the horizon, the sun was shining through and it golden light created this eerie spot like effect on the trees I was driving past. Upon seeing this, I stopped, spun my car the hell around and raced to Ben’s to pick up the camera to shoot this awesomeness, but by the time I was there, the clouds had moved on too fast and the lighting was lost. Real shame as it was pretty spectacular.

Also more shooting of Spit-Takes this weekend. With some luck, the rest of the bulk of the footage will be done and I’ll start on the editing next week (once I clear out my hard drive as well), with just the odd pickup for The Montage here and there. Kinda curious if the sound is going to be a problem as audio is only being captured in camera, as after the “bus incident”, there is no connection for the shotgun mic to the camera itself. Hooray for post sound!

Long day of work tomorrow and hopefully some wake boarding and/or at least some live music. Gonna be a good one.

Here’s a flute/beat boxer and zombie jesus.

It may have been delayed til April (and fingers crossed the new date will stick), but for now there’s this clip of ultimate awesomeness from 300 with a bit of a douchey intro and outro from the director and star, but the clip itself made me drool my brain into my cereal bowl.

They’re still Hot Fuzz to look forward to this month (along with half a dozen films I’ve still yet to see), plus next month has Pan’s Labyrinth, The Illusionist and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, cause ninjas are cool and by cool, I mean totally sweet.

After hours of encoding after work this evening, setting up a new template and creating new sub sections for the film and photo pages, staring at the screen, listening to Tom Waits albums, I hit the upload button and find that I’m unable to make a connection. Hopefully the account hasn’t been screwed around again, cause the last time this happened, there was a week of downtime and that sucked. Hopefully one will be able to read this within a day or two after saving this post to blogger.

But yeah, at this point a new Pictures of You, Spit-Takes and Wholesale subsection has been created and a photo gallery will soon be filled up with lots of behind the scenes photos from Pictures of You once I’ve decided on an appropriate image gallery viewing system. The one at the moment is just a test and images selected are just displayed in full as they are without text or anything else and that’s just boring. Just learning some new java and CSS codes that’ll hopefully make things prettier.

I’m writing all this dull webbuilding jibberish cause I know by the time things go back to normal, this post will probably be way old and something to just skim past…

Actually… I just gave it another shot and I’m now logged in. Hooray! Would delete this post and start again, but screw it, let the uploading begin.

Just to make this not all about boring HTML and stuff, here’s an interesting article on a most interesting concept… eco-capitalism.

Got some filming of Spit-Takes done yesterday evening and photography is now about 45% complete. Tried to do a few more shots today or at least some for The Montage, but no one was available at any point for some strange reason. Stupid guerrilla film making.

But with some luck, the majority of filming will be done by the end of this week with just the montage to finish off. Editing shall be started soon, with hopefully not much disorganised footage to plough through. I’m quite happy with how its turning out so far and if done in time, it’ll be most worthy of submitting into film festivals around the place.

Here’s just how classy we are…

On another note, big congrats to Joe and Marama on their recent betrothal. I’ve had a long day of not doing much and things not all going to plan, but coming home to read this news of theirs made me warm and fuzzy inside.

And I was gonna write up some other stuff, but I just got a phone call from Director Ben and a rather big problem in the Pictures of You editing has just occurred and I must be off.

Some issues with blogger and little bits of apathy prevented any posts from happening this week. Plus there was actually a lot of working during the day and editing during the night that kept this site at bay.

We had our Pictures of You wrap party on Friday which was a nice affair to see people again, catch up, drink and look totally ridiculous. A big happy birthday to Old Friend Scott for yesterday… I spent Saturday well and truely hungover all day and sleeping and eating a lot and the recovery was just in time for me to work a graveyard shift where once again, I watched movies, read comics and abused drunk customers (orientation week man…). Just about to head out to film some more of Spit-Takes and knowing that I’m not gonna watch enough on a cheap Tuesday, thinking of going to a film tonight… Oscar season, always too many to go to.

Quickies… Proof that the universe’s karma is against me, Penn Radio which I’ve recently been listening a lot, had its last show on Friday. Which is a shame but I think its missing out on the rest of a Moon Landing conspiracy thread you can download the casts here and here. Which is facinating stuff, but we’ll probably never hear the conclusion to it.

The new trailer for Paprika is out and just simply look amazing. Satoshi Kon is one of my favourite directors and everything he makes and touches turns to edible gold. Watch any or all of his previous works and you won’t be disappointed, my personal favourite is either Perfect Blue or Millennium Actress… Actually I really love the series Paranoia Agent, which would just leave out Tokyo Godfathers, but I loved that film too… screw it, trailers here.

Because I never bothered to do this before and because the oscars are going on very soon, but mostly because I’m bored, I’m gonna write up my predictions…

Actor in a Leading Role
Winner: Forest Whitaker (Last King of Scotland)

Actor in a Supporting Role
Winner: Alan Arkin (Little Miss Sunshine) (Though a Mark Wahlberg win would be awesome)

Actress in a Supporting Role
Winner: Helen Mirren (The Queen) (duh)

Actress in a Supporting Role
Winner: Jennifer Hudson (Dreamgirls)

Animated Feature Film
Winner: Cars

Art Direction
Winner: Pan’s Labyrinth

Cinematography
Winner: Children of Men (better be mo-fo)

Costume Design
Winner: Curse of the Golden Flower

Directing
Winner: Martin Scorsese (if not, there will be a riot)

Documentary Feature
Winner: An Inconvenient Truth (watch this film)

Documentary Short
Winner: Um… Rehearsing a Dream… yeah.

Film Editing
Winner: Babel (most likely)

Foreign Language Film
Winner: Pan’s Labyrinth

Makeup
Winner: Pan’s Labyrinth

Music (Score)
Winner: Gustavo Santaolalla (I think)

Music (Song)
Winner: who cares

Best Picture
Winner: Babel (although Little Miss Sunshine is a possibility too)

Short Film (animated)
Winner: Lifted

Short Film (live)
Winner: Helmer & Son (totally guessing this one)

Sound Editing
Winner: Letters From Iwo Jima

Sound Mixing
Winner: Flags of Our Fathers

Visual Effects
Winner: Superman Returns

Writing (Adapted Screenplay)
Winner: Dunno… but I’d love Children of Men to win

Writing (Original Screenplay)
Winner: Little Miss Sunshine