Musings of an Idiot

Long Update

Over the past 4 days I have tried getting onto blogger but it has been annoying as hell not being able to access the blog to post. It almost seems that their servers are overloaded ever since they put up the option of logging in either with your blogger username or gmail username...what a silly idea - especially if the servers are not capable of handling that much load. Or does Pluto being stripped of it's planetary staus have anything to do with this whole thing? We now live in a solar system with 8 planets and not 9. So as it stands I am seriously contemplating retiring blogger as my blogging tool and move onto wordpress to do all my blogging. It is free and is not owned by a company and it runs on your own server...so every reason to shift to it - especially after the past 4 days.

Friday was a fun day at school as there was the South Seas version of Dragon's Den and the school was buzzing with nervous excitement since the panel invited for it were top industry people: John Barnett (CEO, South Pacific Pictures), Nick Ward (Top screen writer), Paul Swadel (EP,Headstrong),Stan Wolfgramme (Producer), Tim O'Brien (Development Executive, NZFC). Kathryn Burnett arranged for all of them to spare 2 hours of their time to listen to the story idea pitches from 13 student directors and decide if they liked them or not and then give additional NZ$ 500 prize money to go into the production of that short film towards the end of the year.

The event itself was a real learning curve - just watching from the sidelines but even more exciting was the whole initiative taken by the students to setup a temporary 4 camera studio setup in the lecture theatre. James Brookes was the mastermind and the geek team setup a fantastic production. Here are some of the pics from that event.


Over the past 4 days I have watched 3 good movies, 1 average one and a really bad one: 'Eight Below'; 'Inside Deep Throat' and 'Moolaade' were good. 'Darwin's Nightmare' was average while 'Bloodrayne' was bad. Eight Below was surprisingly refreshing and I really enjoyed it. And the best thing was not seeing CGI animals but real animals go through the whole story - which makes it even more compelling. The 'Behind the Scenes' was decent and gives a quick overview of how they managed to pull it off. 'Inside Deep Throat' was an interesting movie and it succeeds as it is more interested in explaining the mechanics as to why an adult movie with the title 'Deep Throat' made for US$ 25k went onto gross US$ 600 million and why it has always been surrounded by controversy {no - not that kind of controversy - more like freedom of speech; censorship; moral policing and feminism} and how it started a revolution of sorts. 'Moolaade' was a Senegal/French movie set in a small tribal African village. It was gently paced and was a bit long for it's 120 minute run length but it was a great watch - it had a warmth and genuity about it. The story was powerful and it shaped out to be harrowing and uplifting at the same time. Definitely a good watch. 'Darwin's Nightmare' was a bit long and did not really need it's full running time to make it's point. There were some bits which dragged on and on but still an awesome doco subject. 'Bloodrayne' - I won't even waste my time talking about it.

I went to the Takapuna library on Saturday after a couple of years and it felt great. I almost forgot the joy of searching for books and the surprises that lead you into a different train of thought while searching for them. So now I have 4 books on my desk, out of which I have already finished one of them {'Greek & Roman Mythology'}. The tramp which was scheduled for sunday has been postponed till next weekend because of unavoidable reasons, so hoping that the weather holds up next weekend. Another cast member has been added to 'Five'. The cast would have been complete but there is an outside possibility that we might have to recast one of the roles because of time commitments. But it is still an exciting development and leads us closer to the goal.

I will take leave for now.
Till later,
Amit

Labels: Books, Five, Movies, Pre-production, Random

posted by Amit @ 5:59 PM