You hear that, Mr Andersen?

48, Chris Walken/Chris Kringle, LJ

So, the 48 Hour film competition finished yesterday. Very interesting. We were about two and a half minutes too late when we handed it in, which meant that we aren't in the running for any of the prizes (apart from some separate "red scarf" prize, which we're apparently still in the draw for), but it was mostly interesting to me as a demonstration of what is possible.

The answer seems to be - a heck of a lot more than you'd think.

What do I think I've learned from the weekend? Explicit delegation of tasks is dang useful, collapsing the pipeline as much as possible is essential (and may involve training people), and both 48 hours and seven minutes are a lot shorter than you might think. :) Also, I'm not as good at dealing with lack of sleep as I used to be, either; I suspect I haven't been building up any reserves for the last few years. Finally, making movies is moderately expensive, but I suspect that I had an inkling of that already. ;)

(Oo, which reminds me - we've been assured that Weta is likely to continue at about the same size after Kong finishes. This is a mix of reassuring and worrying - I was hoping to be able to do some major changes, and it'll be harder to convince them to let me do that if we're in the middle of production.)

You know that state you get into at conventions when you're in a room with bunkbeds and a tonne of your friends, where you've been doing stuff that's kind of fun and exciting all day, and you're stupidly tired but enjoying the company of the people you're hanging out with? That's a good feeling. Being tired enough that you find yourself doing things repeatedly, not so much. :)

What am I disappointed with myself about? Well, there's the fact that I was pretty much always tardy (apart from the writing meetings, where I was on time for the practice, and early for the real deal - this was probably a good thing, since it was held at my house). I should have realised that I should give all the props that I managed to find/buy to our Prop Master, rather than trying to keep track of them myself, and when Mundens mentioned early on that he didn't know what props went with what scenes, I should have written him a list (with notes on why things where in shots, so he could try to substitute if necessary). I should have seen that they needed a music/incidental sound guy early on, asked whether they wanted me to do it, picked out possibilities for music from the LOOP stuff for the people making creative calls to choose from, and got releases for the music as I found stuff that looked like possibilities. (I should also have finished reading the copyright legislation, so I could work out whether I had any useful Public Domain stuff already, and listened through the PD CDs that people managed to find. And worked out how to properly credit PD stuff, and stuff newly recorded for us.) And when it was apparent well before the shoot that Norman was going to be tied up with filming (and so wouldn't be able to do editing as filming was going on), I should have tried to learn enough about the equipment and software to download it into his laptop and do basic editing - cutting the clips into separate files, listening to the audio and making sure to note any problems to be fixed in post, stuff like that - since I work at the same facility as Norman. Oh, and tried to organize the credits earlier, and maybe even get Norman to show me how to do them while they were doing more important stuff.

I'm glad we managed to find a possible replacement to the track that we were having problems getting released. (That was kinda frustrating - thinking that there would be no hassle using the track in question, then being told that LOOP would call me back in five minutes... and eventually not being able to resolve it to our satisfaction, and having to find an alternate. It's a good thing I'd bought the Green Room 3 the previous weekend, or we might have had Seraph breaking in to the sound of brushed snare-drums a la Svend on the mic - and I don't think anyone wanted that. On the main soundtrack, anyway. :)

So - I'll give myself a solid "Could Do Better". At least I retained enough common sense to avoid an acting role; while I've grown less cripplingly self-conscious as I've gotten older, I still don't particularly like pictures of myself (though I try not to make a big deal of it), which would make it tricky. Plus Matt was an excellent, excellent selection, totally owning the Bodil role - I'm not sure who's idea it was to have the tiger swim downstream during Bodil's soliliquy, but he totally sold me. :) (All the actors were good, but I don't believe I was ever considered for the Faerie King, Evil Developer, or Librarian Love Interest. ;)

Just by the by, there's MovieFest, though the fact that they claim they'll be launching for 2005 on the 9th of May and they still don't appear to have done anything makes me... dubious. :) Plus it looks like a decidedly more amateur affair than the 48 Hour guys.

***

Maybe more people should write to Christopher Walken for Christmas.

Which reminds me - congratulations to those involved with the Fairytale LARP. (I was reminded because I played St Nicolas.) I thought it went very well, and was a cool break from filming; and the fact that so many people chose to stay on and be extras was awesome. Norman as Prince Charming was definitely one of the highlights - especially his glamour shots!

***

To all those reading via the LiveJournal feed, I thought you might be interested in this - a website that culls the last 200 pictures posted to LJ at the time you look. Some of these suckers are huge, so I wouldn't recommend checking it out over a phone connection, and as Shaw Island pointed out, the most common picture is probably of girls - either inversed in a mirror, or at arm's length. I would have guessed that pictures with the words "You are a [obj] - [listing of vague traits]" would be a strong contender, but apparently not. And you get occasional gems, like the one on the right.

Ball/prom photos seem really popular at the moment, as well.

I think it would be interesting to try and make up some sort of narrative from these pictures - you know, you're constrained to the pictures that you get when you first load the page, kind of thing.

Oh, Shaw also points at the LiveJournals Latest Posts feed - which is also strangely compelling. I mean, you stumble across things like someone complaining about the Gamer Nuremberg defence (basically, that it's okay to make it a worse game for others to be true to your character, rather than tweaking your character to make the game more fun for everyone).

So - if you're bored, or have work that you should really be getting on with, that should distract you for a good long while. :)

Posted by svend at May 16, 2005 12:33 PM