Yes, Skyrim has lately taken up quite the few hours… wait days? Already? Well, it’s been occupying some free time, but the rest has been overshadowed with work which thankfully is finally winding down some. So back to blog and many other neglected activities.
Appropriate thinking the more I figure it in regards to this video and its affiliated the beauty of a second challenge by luxury line Montblanc.
190 years ago, Nicolas Rieussec recorded time to an accuracy of a fifth second for the first time – the chronograph was born. To celebrate this unique invention, Montblanc is announcing the one-of-a-kind “The Beauty of a Second” short-film contest presented by the famous film director Wim Wenders.
The idea is to record just a single second of something and upload it. Simple. Awesome. And hey, Wim Wenders!
This is a series of animations created by Levni Yilmaz, where the drawings aren’t so much amazing, but the execution and method of an almost stream of conscious narrative makes for some both funny and insightful videos.
Have picked out a few charmers, but check out his Youtube channel for a whole lot more.
Okay, I’m not exactly sure what the whole context is around the making of this animation, but this animation is just mental.Β Created by what I assume is all hand drawn, this short somehow manages to reference quite the number of anime and pop culture films and does it quite impressively.
“Bob tells the story of a little hamster that tries to follow his true love around the globe. Can he catch up? We all hope you fun watching it! Enjoy!”[website]
Been meaning to post in the last few days that I’ve been working on this bastard for many late nights tapping keys like a drone, banging my head through the online rendering and trying to get a proper decent quality online.
Well its now done and after so long working at it, I have no idea if its any good and without even testing it before release, I give you the long overdue… Spit-Takes: A Mouthful of Comedy. Be gentle internet.
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.
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.
Spent the most of Saturday lying in bed, trying not to think about wanting to film stuff and just trying to enjoy the fact that its a day off. Then I realised that I’ve actually got nearly a week off and that started to get to me.
So finally, I’m back in contact with Sash and got Ross to come around too and it’s decided we’ll be starting on a new short film, yet to be titled, but it’ll be an action short and hopefully… funny.
Sash is actually going away for the next week and Ross will be away for the week after that. But we wanna do it, we like it and it’ll be done, just a matter of how, considering our different schedules and my personal conflict of what I’m really gonna be doing after Pictures of You is properly wrapped, which will be very soon actually.
In the meantime, I’ve been also planning on finishing up ‘Spit Takes‘ which did start filming last year, but due to a severe lack of people available at the time, never got completed. But there are more people available down here at the moment, so that’ll also probably get done whilst Ross and Sash are away.
Didn’t get any ‘2nd unit’ shoot stuff done, nor have I bothered to get any more screen caps made. But that’ll be done sometime later in the next few days. Waking up today, I actually got into the groove of enjoying a weekend off and really, properly stayed in bed for the most of the day watching the rest of Green Wing and such. Great stuff. I’m in love with Sue White.