So where the hell have I been? Everytime I wake up in the morning, I ask myself that same question. Usually followed by what the hell is a traffic cone, orange wig, empty cases of import beer and one pissed off monkey doing in my room? But enough about how I cured cancer, on with the update…

The deadly life threatening flu that I contracted has all but gone and has dropped down to orange alert, annoying tickling cough. Would have been over it faster, but have been keeping myself way too busy, mostly with video store work and helping out on a wintec short film, which has been interesting to say the least. Lots of very cool gear being used and at one point, there was a 30 ft crane on set that had me changing my pants several times from pure delight. But the set is on a farm that was at first stinking to high heaven of sheep shit and now after some wonderful winter weather, reduced to a mud field of very squishy proportions. Its not so bad, but for some reason, walking around the dark at night, the constant squishing sounds of the mud just gets to me, even though no said liquids are in contact with my person. Washing machine is getting its run for its money though.

Best part about this is the fact that to both of our surprises, my friend Rob who disappeared from my life years ago to Wellington, turned up out of the blue for this film and he’s awesome and reads this blog. But yeah, its an interesting shoot and only being a helping hand on this one, it’s always still facinating to me to watch how other people’s productions run. Especially the other low budget stuff, its almost overkill how professional this shoot is, there are a couple of industry professionals here and the set ups are being rigged in a very industry professional manner and that on the level of this kind of production is making for facinating sideline viewing for me. Details another time no doubt.

At the same time, I’ve been juggling my work and pulled off the ridiculous amount of hours at the video store this weekend (28ish in 48 hours), but meh I say. Worst off is the fact I have a couple of corporate videos that need cutting and the deadline is only a few days away and the time to do so is getting tight. Oh and forgot to mention earlier, but the damn computer with Pictures of You on it is now sitting in my room waiting for me to start chopping into it as well, that’s my job on it now, but that’ll have to wait just a bit longer as I vainly attempt to clear up my workload.

Also to mention, I finally got myself a copy of Auckland’s international film festival booklet and as thought, the list is sweet. Already planned several times to just go up and watch as much cool stuff as possible. One particular weekend has about nine films pencilled in as “yeah, I’d really like to go to this one and that one and oh, this one will be cool” blah, blah, blah. Fact that I’m working this year will probably mean I’ll be seening more festival films in Auckland than I did last year when I was living there. Go figure.

Oh yeah, and the national winner of the 48 Hour competition was announced tonight. Hamilton’s entry didn’t win and to my disappointment, Lemonade Coup didn’t get Cinematography (though they still get a nice panasonic dvx102… dastards), but it was a very interesting line-up of finalists. Auckland’s finalist was a surprising winner and it’ll be interesting to see how it actually compares to their finalists. My bet was on the Christchurch entry that come in second and was just great, but in the end, Lease, one of Peter Jackon’s wild card entries took the top spot.

Now its off to some much needed sleep, been getting so little in the past week, and that’s not gonna let up for a few more days, so here is two highly amusing videos of street magic and stuff.

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.

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*

And thus I return to the warm glow of the internet.

Got a phone call on Tuesday that I was needed in Auckland on that day as opposed to the late evening Wednesday as originally planned and thus, moving with lightning speed to organise my stuff and things in my absence, I shot up to a swanky hotel room with my computer in tow and got nice and drunk.

Unfortunately I was kept nicely busy working, but also had very limited internet access and no time to catch up with friends as originally planned. Also wanted to finally watch Sunshine while up there, but everytime, there was something else that needed to be done.

The show itself went really well and it was a little tense at first during the pack in where it seemed like everyone was going mental and at their breaking points and there was very little sleep to be gotten at 2 o’clock in the morning the night before, with a 6am wake up call time in the morning, but everything pulled itself through on the day and there was much less stress during the show from what I observed and a very well rewarded beer at the end.

And it’s all good as I’ll be getting quite a nice paycheck from it, and the mad rush back this morning got me home just in time to tutor another class, which turned out pretty cool. It was hot and indoors and stuff in the classroom, so we went outside instead to learn and plan their short films which are starting to shape up better as things have been a little disorganised over the past few weeks for them.

But onto getting some rest now as I’m working the late shifts this weekend and I’ve still got a few emails to send out, overdue stuff to mark and some sleep to be gotten.

Come Monday I’m looking forward to a little bit of time off, though not much really. Got to supervise some shoots and make sure students aren’t doing too much of what we used to do back then and I’m also very privilaged to tinker around at Wintec and demonstrate and play with their new High Definition camera, which ironically, is exactly the same one I was pushing to get for the Pictures of You set, which by the way, is still being edited, with some rather dramatic cuts being made and all going well.

Right, onto more work before work. Shall post silly stuff soon.

Since the last post I shot off to Te Aroha to check out/hang out/help out on Marama’s new film being shot with a whole bunch of kids with a very sexy camera. It was a fun random spur of the moment action and more so when I woke up in the morning in an old country style hotel room in a sleepy quiet town and Tanya knocking on the door outside slowly saying coffee. It was so Twin Peaks I loved it. Good fun hanging out on their film too. Though location shooting and tracking so much equipment and props and stuff over a 10 minute reserve walk wasn’t as much fun.

But then, the next day, it was a shoot off to Auckland where there was much hanging out with old friends and drinking and talks, till Tuesday where I was privy to watch/film a rehearsal session of this upcoming singer/songwriter artist named Gin. Totally cool fun just to watch a whole bunch of really talented musicians in a garage playing and occasionally improvising music to her songs and just sitting there in total awe of how brilliant and precise they are with their craft. They recorded songs for the EP later on this week and if they are even anything like what I heard in that tiny garage, it’ll be a great listen. Something to look forward to.

Oh and then the night was topped off by going to finally see Pan’s Labyrinth, which totally kicked arse and is now one of my all time favourites, and even blowing nearly all other favourites of last year away. Watch it. Everyone.

Wednesday was also most amusing when I visited some friends working at ALT TV and suddenly found myself standing in front of the camera on this really weird show with this insane, uber femme Asian guy whom I couldn’t understand a word he was saying and had to role-play as a director film-maker guy and him being some girl wanting the lead role and totally acting up the femme persona to get it. Totally weird and random. Felt like Bill Murray in Lost in Translation, except for the giggles and laughter I think I could hear coming from my friends in the studio booth.

And then the night was topped off with being at a New Zealand on Air conference thingee, where there were lots of high-ups and producers and suits and stuff, plus free food and free booze which I took full advantage of. Got to rub some shoulders when I wasn’t stuffing my face, but didn’t really try much. Cool people though. I could really get into that scene of eating free food and drinking wine and talking a lot of shit for a living.

Meanwhile, plans for the 48 hour film competition is getting underway. Soon enough my dream team is gonna be assembled for it and we are so gonna win. By skills of course, not because I rigged everyone else’s toilet seats to explode.

And since coming back, haven’t been up to much. Long post again. Here is an amusing self defence video.

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.