Archive for May, 2007

A big job

Published
by
Robyn
on May 23, 2007
in Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

It’s that time of year again. The time where I spend a perfectly good weekend running around making a short film with the Fractured Radius team for the 48Hours film competition.

Director/producer/editor/all-round awesome dude Dylan has a timeline of what we did. The bit where it claims “everyone sleeps” on Saturday night is slightly a lie. I only got about four hours sleep that night, which made Saturday a challenge. But I guess that’s why one of the competition’s sponsors is an energy drink.

While sitting around, waiting for stuff to happen, I started to make up (unnecessary) back stories for characters in the film, like this one:

A corrupt scientist was working for a criminal genius, contracted to clone the criminal genius’ favourite thug. Unfortunately the cloning process was a little impure, meaning that each clone had something slightly wrong with him. One had no hand, one had a permanently clenched fist, and one had something odd growing inside his mouth. Never mind - they could still all be put to work…

We had various industry pros working in post-production - a composer of the musical score (every main character had his or her own theme tune); a graphics guy; a pyrotechnician (but you’ve noted this refers to post-production and are perhaps pondering what a pyrotechnician would be doing in an edit suite - exactly); and a sound mixer.

While these dudes added truly professional-looking and -sounding touches, we kind of worried if the slickness of these effects would make the rest of the film look rubbish in comparison.

But in the end, the usual quality of Fractured Radius’ writing and act0ring skillz shone through. Uh, well, something like that.

I had heaps of fun. In previous years there has always been the thought in the back of my mind, “Oh, wouldn’t it be nice to win,” but this year I don’t really care all that much. While it would be nice to win, I don’t think winning would be as cool as the experience of making the film.

Interested parties can see Fractured Radius’ crime flick, “The Big Job”, on Tuesday May 29, 7.30 at the mighty Civic.

Meanwhile, here’s a photo of The Tree Guy in the scene where… Oh, if you want to know what happens, you’ll have to see the film.

The Tree Guy

CSU

Published
by
Robyn
on May 18, 2007
in Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

So, wasn’t the 2007 Budget, like, really awesome? I find myself rather excited about the bonus money going into KiwiSaver (which I’m going to spend on a plasma TV I’ve carefully disguised as a humble suburban house).

But what got me the most excited was news of the establishment of the news Coronial Services Unit. This is cool for three reasons.

a) Coronial sounds like “colonial” pronounced by someone whose native tongue has no separate sounds for R and L. This in turn brings up the idea of a “colonial services unit”, which sounds like something that would be in existence if the British Empire was still mighty and powerful today. The Colonial Services Unit would ensure there was enough tea in the empire.

b) Coronial Services Unit can be shorted to CSU, which makes it sound like an elite crime-fighting unit that could (should?) have an action/drama series made about the hard-working men and women behind CSU. Then there could be a spin-off called CSU: Auckland. Oh no - a man fell off a boat and drowned… or did he? It’s time for the team at CSU to hold an inquest and issue a decision! Then a rogue coroner can be called into the Chief Coroner’s office. It’ll be like Quincy, only better, cos it will be called CSU.

c) The example of the Los Angeles Country Coroner could be followed, with a range of Coronial Services Unit/CSU merchandise. Think how awesome you would look in an pre-shrunk, 100% cotton CSU T-shirt!

All this from one budget! Those people who complain about petrol tax and threaten to move to dry old Australia, they just don’t know how good they’ve got it.

T.H.A.T. is what I’m talking about

Published
by
Robyn
on May 12, 2007
in Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

So, about a year after it was made, team Fractured Radius’ 48Hours film is finally available on YouChoob.

It’s called T.H.A.T: Three Heroes Against Terror, and has possibly stood the test of time.

We’re doing it again next weekend. Yay!

Ring-a-ding-ding

Published
by
Robyn
on May 8, 2007
in Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

Today at work I had to search for two things on Google that would, in most workplaces, trigger various alarms and may even require a sit-down meeting with management to discuss inappropriate interweb use.

First, I had to figure out how to spell cockring. Now, if you look up cockring in the Shorter Oxford Dictionary, you won’t find it, so this requires heading to the internet to figure out how it’s generally spelt by the people who do use it.

So I Googled cockring, cock-ring and cock ring. In the end I settled for cockring, although I didn’t feel wholly comfortable with that and perhaps I should have gone for cock ring.

Then later I needed to check the spelling of Robert Mapplethorpe’s name. I Googled it, and along the top of the results page were three images from Google Images, including one called “Lou, N.Y.C”- a Mappelthorpe photo. It depicts a bloke - Lou presumedly - with his little fingertip inserted in his urethra. Eeeeeeeee!

Because both these searches were totally work-related, it’s OK for me to do it, but I wonder if somewhere there’s some silent interweb alarm that has been triggered, profiling me as a gay man who is abusing his internet privileges.