Suspicious elastic bands

Sometimes I worry that my mail is being stolen. Gradually, more and more elastic bands have accumalated next to my mailbox. But if some bugger was swiping my mail, they wouldn't be likely to leave the rubber bands, now would they? Some things are just inexplicable.

Iron Chef

New Zune ad - WTF?!

Seriously. I mean, damn. I just don't know what market they want to appeal to with this.


But now you've watched it, you can't unwatch it. This is what my nightmares look like now.

The Better Thing

After copping a hell of a lot of flack for "letting everyone down" last year and not throwing my usual new year's eve party, this year I intend to make amends.

The party is back on!

I don't yet know what the line up of DJs will be, or if there will be any live music action, but I'll update that information on here fairly regularly.

For now, all you need to know is this: you won't need to worry that you are not at the better party - this one will be it. There will be cocktails, lights, couches, quiet nooks, great music and a whole bunch of good people.

Any people with good vibes and a party attitude are welcome, so long as they bring a bottle of liquor for the making of cocktails. We've had nothing but lovely people in past and I trust we will again this year.

If you haven't got an invite yet, email me and I'll sort you out.

Miss South Carolina and the Map Question

I know I'm waaaay late to this particular party, but this video has done my head in. Forget Sarah Palin getting herself ever more tangled in her answers to Katie Couric, this girl had only one question to answer and gets far more lost than I ever would have thought possible. And apparently she still came third in the pageant!

This pair of jeans has let me down for the last time.

I'm at Sydney Airport and this shit pair of Syke jeans have torn completely. I've only owned them a couple of months and only washed them a few times. Quality, you have eluded me again.

Opeth

I went to see Opeth a couple of weeks ago. It was pretty awesome. I would have posted this "live", but I've been a really bad blogger of late. Sorry.

007

This is very cool. A proposed theme for the new Bond film... one that actually uses the title for the title.
Check it out...

This is just amazing...

I was just sent this. I think it's fantastic.

Done.

It's over. The first AD's attitude seems about right.

Final shot

The film's final shot is now about to be filmed. Final camera rehearsal is happening.

Last day of principal photography.

Not much left to shoot, and the fact the campsite is looking vaguely dry at last makes me confident this thing will actually wrap tonight.

Trouble.

Overnight rain has left our principal set completely drenched. We have puddles pretty much everywhere we need to put actors. I think some cunning is going to be required.

Axe wound

The flash on my camera makes this look really fake, but in the movie this is only seen for a split second and looks pretty convincing.

What is wrong with this picture?

About to go for the axe shot. One of these hands is latex.

Rigging Dual Cameras

Going for our key effects shot, so we've decided to run two cameras at once.

Stunt Double!

Can you spot the difference between our leading lady and our stunt driver?
I thought not. Ah, the magic of the movies!

Adorable and dead.

Jade is the first character we have killed this evening. Doesn't she look cute? Now I must get back up the tree to direct the discovery of her exquisite corpse.

Directing from in a tree.

Yeah, I'm twelve feet up a tree, trying to direct the actors while staying out of shot.

Day Five.

Waiting on set for the actors to be sent down to begin rehearsal. We plan to rehearse and block all afternoon and shoot through the night. We have an ambitious amount to get in the can tonight, but with this approach, we have a good chance of achieving this goal.

Shooting our last daylight material.

Late afternoon on day four and we have our last daylight shot in the can. Barring reshoots, from here on in it's all running and screaming in the dark for the remainder of the shoot.

Start of Day Four

Beautiful weather in the forest (perhaps a little too nice, continuity-wise) and fewer pages to get shot, means for a quiet sense of confidence. Here's hoping it is warranted.

Set dressing.

This is a bit of set that we'll be shooting on tomorrow. The dressers have done an awesome job. Come dusk, this will look really spooky.

Arriving at our principal location.

Day two of directing this film and we have reached our principal location. The rest of the shoot will be here... In the rain.

I promise I will post again soon (Part 2)

I'm still very busy, but this is worth sharing anyway:


http://view.break.com/527110 - Watch more free videos

I promise I will post again soon.

I've been insanely busy these past couple of months, but I have photos and stories to share.
For now, please make do with this video:

Womadelaide 08 - The Rest

Okay, well here's the rest of the rather incredible Womadelaide weekend.
Please bear with me if there's any strange formatting, I'm using RapidWeaver for the first time to post this blog, as Blogger seemed to have trouble uploading my images.
Let me know if this post doesn't appear at all.



This was a French brass band type thing. To be honest, they gave me the shits. The seemed to be under the impression they were funny. Someone really should have broken the bad news to them - they weren't.
Also, they kept playing while quite acts were on at a nearby stage, drowning them out.



Last year, these trees were filled with lampshades.



Mavis Staples - Soul Legend. I was so far back in the crowd that I never had a chance of getting a decent picture.



Dr Natesan Ramani and his Indian flute orchestra - very cool. Very chilled out. These guys were genuinely transporting.



The Tibetan Buddhist sand mandala... in progress.



People thronging and camping around stage one.



Finished!



A very cool Tibetan folk singer. He didn't seem to be in the program, so I have no idea who he was. A shame really, as I would have bought a CD (if he had one).



Carnivale parade.



Carnivale parade... again.



I have no idea what this is about.



Mamadou Diabate, virtuoso kora player from Mali,

with his famous kora-playing cousin Toumani Diabate. They were very good. I bought both their albums.

Cliche? Yeah, perhaps. But I defy anyone to go to Womadelaide and not take at least one photo of the flags.



From what I understand, this man is trying to get his car keys back from his friend, who is dressed as an elephant.



This is me, watching "The Beautiful Girls" play at stage three. Yes, I know I'm looking in the wrong direction.



David D'or, proving that he really is Israel's answer to Ricky Martin.



Terem Quartet. Awesome as ever. At this point, they were actually playing the theme from "Mission: Impossible" as a Russian folk piece. Genius.



Mista Savona. A Melbourne/Kingston reggae fusion outfit.



As I left, I took a picture of the rubbish, to kind of symbolise the end of the weekend. More interesting, though, was the way all the dust in the air was illuminated by the flash.
All weekend, it had been extremely dusty, with the feet of the record crowds turning dry grass into clouds of dust in no time.
When I woke up on Monday, I was coughing like a three-pack-a-day smoker.
It was kinda worth it though.

Monks

I've just had an awesomely chill time, listening to these Tibetan monks. Fantastic stuff. John Butler, please note: there are four of these guys and at no time have they tried to call themselves a "trio". Smart fellas, these monks.

Womad time again.

I seem to be surrounded by dancing hippies. That's okay though. They come with the territory. I do wonder why there are four people in the John Butler Trio, though. Someone should have a word with him about that.

Scorsese's "Silence your cell phone" ad...

Okay, I admit, two youtube videos of famous filmmakers in a row is a little screen-geek of me... but seriously, who doesn't love Marty? His awesomeness knows no bounds.

David Lynch really is the man.

Okay, his films may be increasingly incomprehensible, but his comments on how he thinks Product Placement will effect the future of filmmaking are pretty clear...

Santana

Seems that Carlos Santana is coming to Adelaide to play a concert to all the bogans at the Clipsal 500 this year. To honour that event, I thought I'd post of this classic video of him and the band, cutting loose onstage.

What I've been up to over the past two months (Parts 1 through 12)

Dang. It's been quite a while since I last posted here. I've been, uh... doing stuff.

For a start, I hooked up with Gemma for some drinks...


Then there was Michael and Shelly's engagement party.
Which included girls...

Twister...

And girls again...

Oh, and a pair of friends of mine getting engaged... I just didn't get a photo of that. (My bad)

I continued to explore my romance with dumplings...


There was a drunken night out...




With some rather amazing cocktails...

Did I mention they were flaming cocktails?


There were Xmas parties...




More drunken carousing (it was the "silly season" after all)...


Then there was New Year's Eve, spent with the lads (quite an odd night, to say the least... nobody seemed to go into town except us and our house parties all fell through... we had fun anyway)...


...Joel, of course, found an excuse to take his shirt off.


Uh, another night out with my best girls...




Umm... and then there was Melanie's costume party...
(I'm the one who doesn't have a costume)


Joel kinda started acting a little spurious, but people seemed to like it...




There was other stuff, but I didn't take any photographs of that stuff so you'll just have to trust me on that.