Rockin' the Dolly

Oh yeah... 

Darkplace on SciFi.com

The first episode of Darkplace (probably the best of the series) is available to watch for free from scifi.com at the moment! http://www.scifi.com/darkplace/  Such a good show :)

I heart Dolly

Man, playing with a film dolly is excellent fun. Saturday's shooting was great - beautiful sunshine, some meaty emotional acting, and apocalyptic levels of wind, occasionally at thematically appropriate moments. I am very keen to see how the dolly shots turned out. They were sure fun to shoot. Debbie, Jenni and I shared the camera-person duties, which was cool. I also got to drive the dolly for a shot or two, which was also fun. We got a good amount done, and stayed nicely on task and upbeat over the course of the shoot, which is always a bonus. Shooting (for a Pink Ladies short) on Sunday was also good, less intense and more bubbly-wine fueled, which was nice :) Lastly, I am thinking about growing a full beard for a role in yet another short film. The only down side would be that I'd need beard continuity for all shooting, so might be forced to keep it for longer than I'd like. Hmmm, I will ponder...

Many goals achieved

Ahhh, that feels better. Of the previous list, I have completed all but two things - the GM emails and the tidied up documentation. I'm going to grab the up-to-date list of games before I email potential GMs, and the documentation is no rush at all - I have all the notes I made last year, which are fairly comprehensive. I think it would be fantastic to have a Kapcon Organiser's Manual, but there's not too much of a rush to get it assembled. We had a visit from Travelling Jon yesterday, and went over to L&S's to hang out and play a board game. It was a great mid-week break, lots of fun - although Mall of Horror is not a game that fosters high levels of smurfiness :) Today actually feels like a slightly light day in terms of workload - huzzah! I have to supervise a 2 hour exam this afternoon, and a detention at lunch time, but I have a bit of free time today. *Bliss*

Kapcon Jobs to Do

Right, with senior prizegiving out of the way, and ridiculous amounts of work due to start next week, I figure I have a 5 - 7 day window of opportunity to get some stuff done for Kapcon. So I thought I'd make myself a list: - get orders for t-shirts, confirm orders with Muzzy. They will be able to get the t-shirts made before Christmas if they get the order this week. - contact WHS and arrange to drop off/transfer $ for venue - contact Syn bar and make sure it's OK if we gather there on the Friday - Finish my SDC entry (it's more than half done, so I should hopefully be able to manage this by Friday) - Get up-to-date list of games, send personal emails to people who haven't submitted their game details yet. - send personal emails to people who might enter the SDC, to see how many entries we're likely to get - check with Dale that he's still OK to judge the SDC this year - ask people to comment here with jobs etc that I've missed - tidy up documentation to pass on to Paul, so he's ready to do all this next year Hmm, most of that looks like little stuff to me, in terms of time it will take. Shouldn't prove too difficult :)

Costumes and LARPs

This week was costume week for the Y13 students at my school. They gave themselves a theme each day, then a sampling of students came dressed in theme. It was Emo Monday, Hippy Tuesday, Old Person Wednesday, Pirates versus Super Heroes Thursday, and then Occupation Friday. Friday had all kinds of career based costumes, like builders, police officers, fire fighters, all sorts. The LARP that Morgue and Frank ran last night (for 9 players) was excellent - a spooky Halloween relationangst web of intrigue. Excellent.

Nervous

 We are doing a test reading of the play we (Matt, myself and a fellow teacher) wrote with the intention of producing at the school next year. We are getting a bunch of the drama/film students in at lunchtime to read through the first draft and give us some feedback on whether they would want to do it a) at all b) as a play c) as a film d) as both.

I actually feel quite nervous about it. I’m not sure if students have the give diplomatic* feedback skills. I may be quite crushed by a negative or indifferent response.

It is hard when you’ve written something that contains elements of humour. I’m not sure if the jokes we will be appreciated. It is hard to judge if you are actually funny or not. I find I’m able to reasonably accurately judge whether I’m created something that is scary/interesting/moving etc but humour is always less certain.

I hope they like it. I hope they get enthusiastic about the story. I hope they don’t feel like they have to do it if they don’t like it.

* Diplomatic for me just tend to mean overwhelming positive and encouraging with constructive criticism sugar-coated and wrapped in soft and squishy marshmallow.

Ephemeral

Debbie and I have now captured to our computer the footage that will one day be Jenni's Angels Presents: ePHeMeRaL It's a pretentious art film that we shot on Saturday. It is themed around humanity's struggle against time, nature, my little ponies and explosions. It's a scathing attack on commercialism, conventional logic, and the island of Bermuda. We didn't hold anything back in our scathingness. We scathed like crazy. I think I will have to take my laptop home tonight, so that Debbie and I can both create our own versions of the film. I think there's deep meaning to be plumbed there, more than any single version of the film could manage. Ephemeral. Explosions.

Bustin' out the Eeeeee

Man I'm tired. I was all intently looking at classroom manager and *expletive*, then the *expletive* computer crashed. I was like, eeeeee? What a bad buzz. It totally killed my nearly-finished, get to go home buzz, bro. What a sad *expletive*. It's the end of the week, and I'm achey tired. The kind of tired where I've been wanting to fall over since lunch time. I have just a little more work to do, then I gets to go home. So I should log back in to classroom manager (student admin software thingy) and get these grades loaded, so's I can go home and get loaded myself. See, work is making my language skills go crazy. Crazy I tells ya!

Mid-week bleargh

My brain hurts. It's Wednesday, and I am very, very tired. I am not without the occasional upbeat thought, but my general mode is one of ugh. Things that I have watched this week that were cool: * The Haunting (black and white fillum). Some great camera work, very extreme in the angles, with some interesting camera movement too. A nice insane character, with prominent voice over (Extreme Voice Over most of the time), and a great dollop of exposition at the start. Neat Halloween viewing. * Season Two, Episode One Hex. I was not terribly impressed by the first season of Hex - clunky writing, both in meandering storylines and bad dialogue, a woefully underused set of neat premises, and a general sense that the show didn't really know what it wanted to be. Episode one of Season Two was awesome - really good use made of all the set-up in season one, with a much more coherent purpose and sense that it is going somewhere. We're going to watch the next episode later tonight - hopefully it will continue in this vein. * The first half hour of Lord of War. I was totally hooked, and hated to have to turn it off to go out. And it was due back today, so we didn't get to see the end. We will definitely be either hiring it again, or buying a copy for ourselves. * A student who is a right pain in the ass to teach completing his leaving form. A nice enough kid as far as teenagers go, but with no desire to be at school or cooperate with the system. Life will be much quiter and simpler for both of us now that he's making his way into paid employment. * Sunshine. I likes to see it, and will like tomorrow even more, as I may have a few minutes of free time to go outside and enjoy it. Now, to go eat me some ibuprofen and watch Hex. Coming soon: Matt writes about his amazingly corrupted speech patterns. Seriously, it's wack, Gee. I've been busting out the slang mad-stylz for several days, yo. It's all goods, but da students, dey been noticin' and shit, and I's gots myself some criticisms an'at from the li'l chilluns.