Stuff'n'nonsense #4

I'm going to kick today's S&N off with a real blast from my past. I thought this had disappeared from the Internet for ever, but I should know better. Nothing vanishes from the Internet. This is a movie I made 11 years ago with Robert Llewellyn (Kryten from Red Dwarf). Okay, so that's the hype. The reality is that it was a short promo movie for a mobile phone game I designed at nGame. It was written and created by Charlie Dancey and Pavel Douglas (whose main claim to fame, in my eyes at least, is that he was in a Bond movie), and I had a small bit part, doing an off-screen voice. Music was by Manny Elias from Tears for Fears.

Anyway, without further ado, I present to you... Alien Fish Exchange: The Movie.

I'm actually really proud of that game. People loved it, even though it was a silly little WAP game which eventually made it onto interactive TV in several countries. In fact, one person loved it so much that he recreated the entire game, and you can go right ahead and download it. (Disclaimer:I haven't played it, so I have no idea whether it's at all faithful to the original or whether it'll turn your computer into a pile of steaming slime.)

Right, that's enough of the shameless self-promotion. On with the random bits and pieces.

• Film news: it looks like there's finally going to be a film version of Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern. I'm not sure how I feel about that, but mostly I'm thinking that's good, because I wanted to like the books, but found them totally unreadable. My dad loved them, and tried to get me to read them, but I just couldn't get through them.
  Mind you, he also had a complete collection of Gor books. I did read those. Several times. I preferred them to Anne McCaffrey.
  Errr, moving swiftly on...
• Ah, Dita von Teese in a Wonderbra. Much better.
  Now click on through to watch the new Wonderbra TV advert for their strapless bras. It's a great advert. And, as one commenter said, if this really works on my DDs, then I want two in every colour they do. So, whether you're a lady or a gentleman, click on through and enjoy.
• So you want to make a movie. How hard can it be? Check out this wonderful flowchart from Canal+. It's pretty much spot on, and very funny. And click around to find a bunch of similar ones from the same designer.
• And more silly infographics (who the hell invented that word anyway?). How men and women perceive colour. Guilty as charged, m'lud.
• Tonight's cooking has turned into something of an extravaganza. Singaporean fish curry for tonight, then I'm starting a tapas frenzy ready for lunch tomorrow. Chorizo & chickpea salad, red peppers with capers, chorizo in red wine, aubergine dip, mixed bean dip, and tuna, egg & potato salad. At least I won't have to cook for the next two days, apart from the bread. Well, that's the theory, anyway.

OK, that's it. Back to the kitchen. But let me leave you with a Gorean slave girl, in memory of my adolescence.

FML Film Club - Films Zero and One

At the start of this year, I joined a local film club. I wrote a bit about it over on the Moviestorm blog. In short, the idea is that every member has to make a short film every month, based on stories from fmylife.com. It's to get us all making movies instead of just talking about making movies, which is what I've done for the last three years.

The first meeting was on January 4th. The morning of the meeting, I decided to make a movie and take it with me. It's still rough in places. I thought about tidying it up before posting it here, but decided to show it exactly as it stands. Here it is. The Table (based on an allegedly true story). Enjoy.

So there we have it. My first actual movie in I don't know how long. Not a tech demo, not a tutorial, just a little story for the hell of it. It's not great, but at least I made it. Showing it to people was scary, but they seemed to like it.

Anyway, a few hours later, I found myself part of a movie crew by the simple expedient of sitting at a table with a bunch of random people. We had Zak (director), Paul (audio & lights), Dan (editing) and Steve (cameras), which pretty much covers all the necessary bases. Since I have absolutely no experience with live action film, I volunteered to write the script.

We volunteered Paul as producer, and fairly soon worked out that because of our schedules, we needed to shoot the movie on the weekend of 15/16 Jan, which would give Dan a week for editing & post-production to have it ready for the start of February. That meant I needed to get the script out by Jan 9 in order to give everyone else a week for pre-production. Since we had a Friday Ferox show on Jan 7, the pressure was on from day one.

We thought about filming my movie as live action, but decided against it, partly because we weren't sure we could find enough actors in time, and partly because I got all shy and suggested we chose another story. Everyone except me got their iPhones out. Within about 10 minutes we'd found our plot, about a guy proposing to his girlfriend.

(On a side note, there was one story I really liked, but the rest of the team vetoed it. The denouement called for a bus, and that added a whole level of complication that we weren't ready for. Ah, the world of live action filming. So different to animation.)

As luck would have it, that weekend we lost our Internet, so I ended up sitting at my brother-in-law's house writing the script on Celtx and frantically trying to get it out to the team before the Sunday evening production meeting on Skype. However, in the end, everything went off pretty smoothly, and we assigned people to find cast, props, and equipment, and planned for the shoot at my house on the afternoon of Sunday 16th.

As always, it's gone down to the wire. By mid-afternoon today, we still didn't have our cast, but with a bit of last-minute scrambling around, we finally found a couple of people willing to step forward. So it looks like we're good to go. Let's just hope the weather holds.

I'm really looking forward to this. I haven't been on a film set since I went to one of Phil South's shoots at the Bristol Old Vic. I'm not sure exactly what I'll be doing, but hey - someone's got to handle the catering. I can do that.

In closing, there's one thing that makes me smile. We haven't even started production yet, and already The Proposal has taken considerably more time than The Table. Next month, hopefully things won't be so rushed, and I'll have time to do an animatic. It'll be interesting to see what difference that makes to the way we work.

Crowdsourcing movies

Amplified09
Originally uploaded by Documentally

In a darkened room in London, a group of shady individuals discuss the future of movies, and whether it's possible to make movies without the backing of a movie studio.

The answer, of course, was yes. Provided, of course, you're not expecting to see multi-million dollar blockbusters coming out of it. By using the power of social media, people from round the world can hook up and contribute to large-scale productions. You still need a guiding mind - crowd-sourcing doesn't mean a free-for-all, where everyone gets to do what they want. But if you're prepared to take people's ideas, and accept the help they can give, you can suddenly find yourself with a huge resource at your disposal.

Photo by Documentally (aka Christian Payne).

Amplified09 was a social media networking event that took place in London on the 24th February 2009 at Tiger Tiger in Haymarket.