Why yes, it certainly has been quiet recently…

Tue, 14 Oct 2008

Time to step out of the shadows I suppose. Been doing stuff and mostly not achieving anything, but overall hanging out with mates.

There’s been more buying of stuff, which I believe is always good for the soul, though not for the wallet. But I must mention that a parcel of nine sweet Godard films is now five weeks overdue and I’ve come to the conclusion it’s probably not going to turn up anytime soon. That revelation is a bit of damper.

But overall, not a helluva lot has been going on. There’s been several birthdays which I’ve managed to almost forget all off. People have been coming and going and I can’t help but feel this is all just that calm before the storm. Hopefully by storm, I mean busload of strippers parks itself in my driveway, but we’ll see.

Stuff I should mention is that this week is the last week of Future Te Aroha’s production of Little Shop of Horrors. People I know are in it and made it so go check it out. Here’s the poster.

A video of a bar being served by a monkey. I don’t know what exactly this is, but it is quite possibly the greatest thing on the face of this earth ever ever.

Pictures of The Most Alien Looking Place on Earth. And I’d agree.

And the photo of the week that made me laugh…

Oh and I just noted that the counter is past 1000, but no one has claimed their prize yet. No rush either.

A Post Before Bed

Wed, 28 May 2008

Closing Tabs

Thu, 24 May 2007

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?

Its Only A Paper Moon

Wed, 9 May 2007

Tired. The last few weeks have been busy as hell. At the start of this weekend, I thought I’d do my shifts and finally have a day or two off, but straight into it afterwards, I’ve just been keeping myself busy with uni preps, student shoots, Pictures of You stuff and 48 Hour planning.

Of course, I’ve had quiet moments, but not moments where I’m just blobbing out and not really doing anything. Time for relaxation will come eventually. Friday I’m hoping. Until then there will be video store work, uni teachings, more student shoots and a lot more 48 Hour planning. Which I’m very much focusing and looking forward to.

Slowly, I’m assembling our team awesome for the 48 and with Ross, going through scripts to make sure that come the weekend of the competition, we can go “yep, we’ve got this genre covered, we can adapt this script with these required elements and yes, we’ve got these actors and props and locations and whatnots ready… lets shoot this fucker.”

No doubt, the actual weekend of the shoot won’t go exactly like that, but if we plan it well and truely enough, it won’t be as bad. Here’s hoping we’ll do well though. According to the 48 website, because of having too many entries in the Auckland region, some of their teams will be competing in the Hamilton heats and that’s unwanted competition. And competition is good (looking at you guys, you know who you are), but them Auckland people better watch themselves. But yeah, core team is in place. Assembling more stand-bys. Rock and Roll.

And now for something completely different… 18000 naked people in Mexico City.

Updating Updates and Zombie Jesus

Fri, 9 Mar 2007

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.

Out On The Weekend

Sun, 25 Feb 2007

Started out Friday with very little sleep, worked, rested, filmed a charity auction (with beer) and then played poker (with burbon), slept for two hours and then with a hangover in hand worked for just over eleven, then hung out with more people (more burbon and then rum), but not for too long as hangover was still hovering above my tired body at that point. Eventually slept for many many hours and woke up this afternoon not feeling very filmmaker like much to my disappointment (sorry Ross). Will have to reschedule Spit-Takes for another day (not too far away). Today was also friend Zoe’s birthday, where eating and drinking wine out of a jar (classy) took place and now I sit content to not be doing much.

Have started using tags for this website and have been attempting to tag previous posts, but there have now been over 100 made and that makes for a lot of clicking and tagging… ah well.

For coolness, here are a series of photos taken at just the right angle with just the right object, creating some of the coolest illusions around. Click on the sample photo for more.

And on my recent occasional visit to the Mountain Goats site where I wait with bated breath for their next New Zealand tour, I’ve noticed their website has had a new design. Do I mention how much I love the Mountain Goats enough here? Do you love the Mountain Goats? If you don’t, that makes you a communist. Forever I’ll have Rob to thank for introducing me to them on a fateful drive to Wellington, thus allowing me to pass the Mountain Goats love to a good portion of Hamilton. I wonder if he still reads this site… if you do… sup.

Here’s “No Children” live…

Gongxi Facai

Mon, 19 Feb 2007

A happy Chinese New year to all. I’ve been watching and catching up on movies all day. Video store love baby. Video store love.

In a quick swoop… Borat is funny, Slither is fun, Jarhead is great and everyone should watch Me and You and Everyone We Know cause if you do, your cool. It’s science.

From Daisy, this is the Brick Testament… which is just great fun to browse through and read. Plus its illustrated with lego and anything with lego is 150% cooler. Even the Bible.

Also something I want to do myself, are photos taken at just the right time to make it look like people are floating in mid-air. 200% cooler, even without the lego found here.

And finally, the latest (and wishfully not the last) Grindhouse trailer is out. Downloadable straight from here.

Pictures of You – Day 18 blog

Thu, 25 Jan 2007

Very productive day today. Shot off about two hours of footage and got off five scenes in one day today. We even had a decent turn out of extras to fill out a classroom.

As intended in an earlier post, here are some more pretty stills.

And hopefully by tomorrow, the showreel will be approved for digital distribution. Hooray.

Dead Chris Day 2

Sat, 20 Jan 2007

Woke up this morning with absolutely nothing to do. No filming. No work. Nothing. Just me, bored. Coffee, Green Wing and a lot of nothing much else.

So been trying to keep the energy levels up for tomorrow. More crowd coverage to prepare for and a little mischief on top of that. Stole some footage from Director Ben this afternoon and have been picking out certain shots and setups that I still like as screen caps.

Unfortunately, quite a bit of them are a tad plot spoilers, while others, though pretty, work better as moving shots as opposed to static stills, so I’ve had to restrain myself a bit in picking images, but here are some of the best of the rest of what I hove shot thats quite, quite satisfying. Some have been subjected to a little photoshop, just to enhance certain colours that didn’t initally come through, but overall, I’m quite happy with these in terms of composition and lighting and pretty.

I think my eyes are watering again and I need some rest. So here are pretty images. Let me know what you think, there’s still an arseload more that want to be uploaded and beg to be uploaded, but the powers of effort and criticism still hold them back.

Pictures of You – Day 13 blog

Wed, 17 Jan 2007

Good day. Exterior morning, interior afternoon. Once again, the happy gods of filming weather smile down on us and we were blessed with fandangly overcast weather and the interiors were most favourable towards flouro lighting and stuff. Shots looked like they were from a digital Michael Mann film or something.

Also, got bored and did this video in our down time…

The monkey holding the piece of paper is supposed to be holding up a sign that says “Chris Tan, Director of Photography” as a cheap subtitling gimick. The second piece was supposed to say “Pictures of You, Coming Soon”… but the damn exposure on that camera… tsk tsk…

And at the less-than-zero Pictures of You film website there are links to the photos that are supposed to be up on the less-than-zero website, but are instead hosted on a completely seperate server. But the photos that are recently up now are some stills taken from a hastily put together showreel we played back on Sunday you can view here. Unfortunately, the images are in the wrong aspect ratio, but at least for the most of them, being raw footage, they look pretty good.

Here are a couple of my favourites of the bunch, scaled properly and not color corrected in anyway. There are a lot more that I liked that haven’t been screen capped yet, but hopefully will soon… real soon.