Musings of an Idiot

The Plug

OK...This post is mainly for 2 things - one is to try and raise some more awareness about Earthrace (and their need for support at this stage) and second is try and convince you to support local theatre instead of spending that amount on some Hollywood blockbuster (you can do that too if you like but who would you rather have your money - some struggling but talented local artists or some moneymakers across the shores)

Earthrace - in it's bid to raise some money to keep the ground crew moving from port to port has started a promotion raffle with some pretty wicked prizes and top the deal off there are only 3000 tickets available, so the chances of winning something increases to 1 in 700. You should check out the SALES PROMOTION RAFFLE DETAILS HERE. And do it quick as they are bound to go quick.

I am planning on checking out a play titled 'Hushabye Mountain' this weekend and I am excited as one of my classmates from the acting class is in it. And again, the play has only 9 shows left {1 show a day}, so I would suggest that if you get a chance and are keen to check out some local theatre - the artists will definitely appreciate your support.

Yesterday was my day off work but it disappeared into encoding the movie into various formats for further work - a quicktime file with dialogue only, a quicktime file with everything, an MPEG file with NTSC encoding, an MPEG file with PAL encoding. Plus uploading the quicktime files so that the music composer can download the files and authoring an NTSC DVD of the movie to send to film festivals for selection purposes. So yeah - long and short of it is that the day off was a day off from nothing at all. It is good to be busy.

A couple of days ago I did manage to watch 'No. 2' - a NZ movie which was adapted from a very successful kiwi play of the same name. It was a mixed bag - there was some stuff which was delightful while there was also a lot of missed opportunities. The movie says that it is a big hearted and exuberant story but somehow the heart is missing in a few places. It makes me sad because it was definitely trying to be different but the warmth and the exuberance just does not come across on-screen. And the other thing which annoyed me was the 'sanitized' shooting to the point where it was driving me nuts - when you go out on the streets - you don't find them empty - you always find it full of cars and people etc and when you remove those elements while filming it just feels artificial and a big setup. I wish NZ dramas didn't do that - I know it is hard and all with permissions and all but where there is a will there is a way.

There was another interesting meeting I had last week that I completely forgot to mention. It was with the director of a 'bollywood' movie that is shooting here in NZ. It stars Celina Jaitley and Ben Mitchell {a local TV star} among other known indian actors. Hmmmm.....i will leave that experience for a later post when I am a bit more fresh.

Till later,
Amit

Labels: Cause, Movies, Theatre

posted by Amit @ 9:17 PM