Musings of an Idiot

Premiere

It has almost been a week since i wrote anything here -reason hectic times at South Seas Film School combined with the total exhaustion at the end of each day. School is going on fine and also had the Head of Network Operations at SKY TV come over for a guest lecture for the editors -it was a good one and hopefully it will kick the levels up a notch.

Couple more articles appeared in the newspapers - one was an article on Lance and the other one was about Auckland Film industry {had a couple of quotes from me} - both of which I have still to get permission to reproduce here. A lot of time also went into preparing cast and crew contracts which obviously is painful once the work is aggregated but it is great to get on top of it and sort out the paperwork. The whole movie has been a good learning curve and there is no other way I could have learnt so much otherwise.

'Memories' had its world premiere yesterday at Academy Cinema and it was a great experience. The movie definitely looks good on the big screen and the 5.1 mix which Benji did was great because in the theatre there was such a nice sound seperation and i loved the shootout in the woods because you could hear each twig snap or a crackle there...thanks Benji for spending more time in getting the 5.1 mix done. - i will probably write the details about it later tonight because i am currently rushing off to catch 'Revenge of the Sith' on the megascreen.

Bye for now...
Will keep you posted.
Cheerio
Amit

UPDATE:
'Revenge of the Sith' - would probably rate 3 out of 5 if I was to review it - visually stunning and some jaw dropping moments but overall the core of the story sometimes gets lost in its grandeur..The cool thing was seeing the reactions of a bunch of kids' when Anakin turns to the dark side-they could not believe it and really seemed upset. But for me - the reasons for turning weren't strong enough and the sudden change of mind during the 'turning point' felt really odd and out of place. The movie does tie upto the original trilogy nicely. I would take the pacing and mood of 'Clone Wars' cartoons anyday than the live action 1,2&3..Anyway enough about star wars - i am sure that there are people aplenty who can discuss the nuances in more detail.

With yesterday evening - we had a turn out of 40% {optimistically - numbers not available but based on what we saw}at the premiere, which was really cool considering that we had a 5.30 time slot on a friday evening and is possibly one of the toughest times for a movie to open and it did not help that the festival organizers held a launch party for the festival at a different venue at the same time as the movie was screening{you learn something new everyday}.. But it was cool that atleast some people turned up to see the movie and the overall reaction was really positive and buzzy. The audience did not move or twitch or talk during the movie - everyone totally got into the movie while I was cringing in my seat. The sound quality definitely held the movie together and the DVD held up well on the big screen {we are talking regular cinema screen} except for aa couple odd places where you could see the compression - but hey thats not bad at all for a single sided 4.7GB DVD video. I would like to thank Mark Croft and John at Academy Cinema for going out of their way to check the sound quality and picture quality for the movie the day before. The best thing after the screening was getting the reactions from some of the audience personally and all the comments were buzzy and good....so I am hoping that the positive word of mouth spreads and we get a better audience on the next Sunday slot which should be a more viable alternative to those having interest in seeing it {atleast I am hoping for it}. The other interesting thing was bumping into one of the local distributors I was talking to earlier and it was interesting seeing his reaction - I will probably talk to him sometime next week and see if things have changed at all. Still waiting to hear back from the american distributors to whom i put some queries which I had in my mind.

After the screening we went to a Japanese restraunt, booked our seats and went to a pub to catch the semi-finals between Crusaders and Hurricanes. It was great meeting Rachel's 2 brothers, her cousin and also met her brother's friend. The eight of us {all the mentioned plus rachel, rebecca, lance and me} later went to the Japanese restraunt and had some lovely food...i never imagined that different kinds of fish tasted so different {they are served raw with rice} -the food was yummy and took long between the courses. The only problem I have with Japanese food is that they serve too little and you got to eat it with chopsticks which is usually a struggle for me. :-) We spent almost till 12.30 there and the night did end on a bad note that Rachel's cousin's car was broken into and someone stole her bag -which contained nothing except her paper presentation which she had been working on for 4 months and was to deliver on Monday...all of us felt violated. There were cops nearby and they tried helping out but there was nothing much they could do about it.

So whats happening now? Well - i think I am taking it easy for the weekend - got a netball game tomorrow and also have to watch the other rugby semi-finals. And try and sleep through my headache by tomorrow morning. Otherwise not much - will let you know in the next update on what happens with the netball game.

Anyway -bye for now.
Amit

posted by Amit @ 8:54 AM