Preparing for: Lights, Canberra, Action

Well, perhaps preparing is a bit of an exaggeration - at this point I don't have much of a clue what to do or how to do it. There are still 10 hours though so nothing to sweat about.

Lights, Canberra, Action is a short film competition run as part of the annual Celebrate Canberra festival - a 10 day extravaganza dedicated to showcasing the many interesting things about ONC (our nations capital).

The competition allows you 10 days to make a short film of up to 7 minutes and must include 10 items (generally locations) which are provided at the start of the competition. Extra points are given for working to the theme of the festival - this year it's "Canberra's best kept secrets".

I've entered this competition each time it's been held - in 2004, 2005 and 2006 - with varied results. (Unsuccesful finalist in 2004 & 2005 - though in my humble opinion criminally robbed of best screenplay in 2005)

The 2006 effort was a brave failure - far too ambitious for the time frame. I tried to incorporate machinima, sequences of still photos animated, relatively complicated commentary on the Cole (AWB scandal) inquiry and Flash animation into the one thing and just didn't get there. (As far as I'm concerned, it's still unfinished)

Some of the lessons I've learnt over the last three years - group scriptwriting generally doesn't work (someone has to take the lead), the more people relied upon the more difficult organisation is, Flash animation is a bastard to convert to video, a simple story well told is better than something with layers upon layers (don't be too clever for your own good), don't affectionately take the piss out of Canberra in a festival that is part of the celebrate Canberra festival and do spend the time getting your script right.

Other lessons are that there are some fantastic people out there who are reliable, helpful, surprisingly talented and giving of their time.

I haven't yet had a chance to put these works online but when I do I'll pop them up here.

Thoughts for this years are, as I mentioned, fairly vague. Even though I'm pretty sure also that it's only you, me and the cat reading this blog, I'm still a little reluctant to put them up online just yet.

There is a chance I'll take out the PXL2000 though - a toy video camera released by Fisher Price in the late 80s which uses audio tape to record video. It produces very pixelly black and white images and I've really been hankering for a chance to make something with it for a while.



This is a bit of a prime example of putting the technology before the story though, always a bad idea, so we will just have to see where it might go first.

The timeframe this year is going to be a little compressed though, as I'm off to the Golden Plains music festival at the end of next week (heading off on Friday) and the films are due on the Monday, so whatever I/we do, it's going to have to be pretty easy. This is where a good story will make all the difference.

LOLing: Death Star conspiracy revealed

Ok, even I think this is a little geeky but it's a story that has to be told.

There are simply too many unanswered questions about the destruction of the Death Star and the "established facts" of the case. (This is a Star Wars thing, for my less sci-fi enamoured friends out there).

This website - Websurdity - lifts the lid on a range of issues that must be told.

5) Why did Lord Vader decide to break all protocols and personally pilot a lightly armored TIE Fighter? Conveniently, this placed Lord Vader outside of the Death Star when it was destroyed, where he was also conveniently able to escape from a large-sized rebel fleet that had just routed the Imperial forces. Why would Lord Vader, one of the highest ranking members of the Imperial Government, suddenly decide to fly away from the Death Star in the middle of a battle? Did he know something that the rest of the Imperial Navy didn’t?

There are also a range of very funny (and admittedly some disturbingly geeky) comments about this site here on Digg.com

Questioning: my colour perception

I asked my housemate Eric this morning if he had seen my green cycling vest/jacket/doo-dah. (Ok, I didn't say doo-dah).

We found it and then he and two others said that it wasn't green, it's yellow. (Possibly a yellow-green but definitely more yellow than green)

I'm not saying that it's pine forest green but I have always considered it definitely a fluoro-green. (I could even go so far as to say that it has yellowish qualities but would never call it yellow over green)

This is it. (Yes it's a cam-phone picture but I think the colour is still fairly close)



Now I have never had any problem passing the standard colour blindness tests and I have no particular dislike of yellow but the fact that I alone seem to consider this green has me wondering.

(I asked a guy in the office when I got here and his first word was yellow too)

I kind of wished that I had my camera a little more easily accessible as I was riding to work - passing the Treasury building I was behind a guy with a similar vest and a distinctly yellow helmet and panniers. The difference to me seemed strikingly obvious - of course there are different shades and blah blah blah but it's just strange.

Two possible options present themselves directly to me - I'm right and everyone else is wrong (my preferred option), possibly due to some extra mysterious powers of colour sensitivity OR my conception of the difference between some greens and some yellows is out of whack.

Help me out here please - quick response in the comments - green or yellow?

Investigating: Babe you turned me on

Riding to work this morning, I had a couple of fragments from a Nick Cave song (Babe, You Turn Me On) floating around in my head. It's not a song that I normally pay a lot of attention to, even though I consider myself a bit of a Cave fan.

The lines were -

Like an idea babe,
Like an atom bomb

and

Babe, you turn me on

You can listen to a small part of the tune here (unfortunately it doesn't contain either of these lyrics)



Taking a look at the rest of the lyrics I wasn't entirely sure what to make of it - I mean, as with all Nick Cave songs (including his new work with Grinderman - released this coming Monday) it's a beautiful thing but a little on the obscure side perhaps.

Or rather it was until Wikipedia came to the rescue.

Babe, You Turn Me On is taken from The Lyre of Orpheus, one half of Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds' excellent 2004 double album Abbatoir Blues/The Lyre Of Orpheus.

Wikipedia (or possibly just some nerd with a theory) tells me that The Lyre Of Orpheus is a musical retelling of the ancient Greek legend of Orpheus, a great poet/musician who invented/perfected the lyre, and his wife Eurydice.

The story goes that Eurydice was bitten by a snake and died. Orpheus played a tune so sad that the gods wept and gave him advice on how to get her back from the underworld.

He went to the underworld and his music so charmed Hades and Persephone that they agreed to let him take her back to the surface, on the condition that he walk in front of her and not look back at her until they got back.

As they walked back, in his anxiety that it was a trick, he broke his promise and looked back and she disappeared forever.

Well now I'm just going to have to give this album a good re-listen - probably just as well, as it is a cracker.

So here is the Wikipedia take on the songs of the album and how they fit into the story.

Connection to the Orphic myth

The album's second disc, The Lyre of Orpheus, can be interpreted as an abstract retelling of the original orphic myth, separate from the version in the title track. Breathless could be seen as Orpheus grieving for Eurydice, whilst Babe, You Turn Me On is his memory of the moment of her death -

We stand awed inside a clearing.
We do not make a sound.
The crimson snow falls all about,
carpeting the ground.

Easy Money is a version of Orpheus' bargain with Hades, with heavy emphasis on the theme of the ease of getting what you want, as long as you are prepared to pay the price. Supernaturally could cover several bases, interpreted as both the protagonist's drive to rescue his wife, and as a lament for his failure to do so.

Spell is about the doubt slowly taking over Orpheus as he ascends the stairs out of hell - about his uncertainty regarding Hades' intentions to honour their bargain - and about the final confused moments before his climactic turn—

I call you by your name, I know not where you are.

Carry Me is the album's climax, the point at which Orpheus turns to look upon Eurydice, breaking his bargain with Hades, and condemning her to being pulled back into the underworld. The song could almost be described as a duet from one mouth, the chorus (possibly from Eurydice's point of view) asking Orpheus to either give in to his doubt or stick to his word -

Turn to me, turn to me, turn to me
Turn to me and drink of me
Or look away, look away,
look away and never more think of me

Orpheus also speaks of -

The many voices
Speaking to me from the depths below
This ancient wound
This catacomb
Beneath the whited snow

In the end, of course, he turns, and she is carried away.

O Children, the album's coda, describes the grief of Orpheus, and his death by his own hand, as well as a plea to be forgiven for his sins and to be allowed into heaven.

Here are the full lyrics to the song.

"Babe, You Turn Me On"

Stay by me, stay by me
You are the one, my only true love

The butcher bird makes it's noise
And asks you to agree
With it's brutal nesting habits
And it's pointless savagery
Now, the nightingale sings to you
And raises up the ante
I put one hand on your round ripe heart
And the other down your panties

Everything is falling, dear
Everything is wrong
It's just history repeating itself
And babe, you turn me on

Like a light bulb
Like a song

You race naked through the wilderness
You torment the birds and the bees
You leapt into the abyss, but find
It only goes up to your knees
I move stealthily from tree to tree
I shadow you for hours
I make like I'm a little deer
Grazing on the flowers

Everything is collapsing, dear
All moral sense has gone
It's just history repeating itself
And babe, you turn me on

Like an idea
Like an Atom bomb

We stand awed inside a clearing
We do not make a sound
The crimson snow falls all about
Carpeting the ground

Everything is falling, dear
All rhyme and reason gone
It's just history repeating itself
And, babe, you turn me on

Like an idea
Like an Atom bomb

thanks babe.

Applauding: Printable cold sores

I'm a big fan of a good culture jam - there's nothing quite like turning the marketing tools of big business back on them and their insidious attempts to warp our view of the world for fun and profit. Individuals and organisations such as Adbusters have been doing this for years now.

The most recent of these that I've come across is http://printablecoldsores.blogspot.com/ - offering downloadable images that you print onto sticker transparencies and put onto billboards and other advertising posters etc to highlight the unreality of corporate images of beauty.



Geek Graffiti - the creator of these - makes the point that defacing advertising etc is illegal and encourages people to put the stickers on, photograph them and remove them - which seems like a reasonable enough degree of legalistic self preservation. (And obviously I would neeeever encourage people to knowingly break the law either and leave them there.)

Almost makes me sad that Canberra is a city with a ban on public billboards.

Great work Geek Graffiti.

Making: phonecam videos of the storm

Parts of Canberra (and particularly my suburb Turner) were hit by a pretty fierce storm last night with lashings of ice cube sized hail that lasted at least half an hour and probably longer. (Now that's the kind of detail that good journalism demands)

Here's a screenshot that was snapped from the Bureau of Meteorology weather radar as the storm was passing overhead.



These are a couple of photos that came around on the email this morning - a view of the storm from Yass (about 60km from Canberra). (I don't know who took these originally, so if it was you, let me know - they're fantastic)





The first thing that I noticed (after the noise of the hail made watching telly impossible) was that a bunch of hail was collecting in the chair just outside my room. Great opportunity to continue experiments with the phone camera, so I shot this video.



It's kind of murky but hopefully you get the gist.

A rising pool of water outside the front door was the first real concern - we have about a 15cm step up to our front door and are at the bottom of a slope from the street. The water came to within about 2cm of flowing through the door, so it was touch and go for a while there.

These clips show some of the limitations of the phone video camera in low light but I still like the high contrast and the way that everything disappears into the blackness. The white stuff is ice that had flowed down the hill with the water.



With the water flowing steadily to the door, it was interesting to see that enough ice/hail made it along to form a small dam, diverting most of the water under our side gate and into the garden. This isn't really visible in the clip but you can see the curve at the top of the ice that the water was following.

Again, I really like the degenerated quality of the video, the way the colours bleed into one another and the high contrast.



After a while, this got a bit boring (which if you've now watched these clips, you're probably vigourously nodding in agreement with) but there was more excitement to come.

Water had started vigourously flowing through the heating duct in the ceiling of the lounge room - not just a drip but a full fledged stream. This started about 30 mins after the storm did and continued for about an hour after it had finished. (where the water came from I'm a little puzzled but hopefully the handy guy will sort this out. One of the joys of renting I must say)



I think that the flickery quality of the picture came from the use of the energy efficient bulb we are using. Yes, a more sensible person would probably have turned the light off - but the water seemed to be confined to the heating duct.

Getting up this morning, damage seemed pretty light - a couple of chunks taken out of the window mounted brake light housing on my car, possibly a few small roof dents but that was about it.

Riding to work was eerie - at least the first part - ice everywhere and a mist rising to about 4 feet high as it melted. Here's a pic I found on Flickr which gives you some idea.


There are a swag of other pics on Flickr - best bet is to check out this search - http://flickr.com/search/?q=canberra+hail&s=int

Spotting: Kaftans

As a teenager in the 80s, you were pretty much expected to be savagely cruel about all aspects of 70s fashion (oh, how little did we know - and don't even get me started on 90s fashion, I'm looking at your Mr Happy Pants*) - moustaches, flares, disco wear, massive collars, powder blue safari suits and most of all, the Kaftan.



For those who came in late, the Kaftan is a big, shapeless, full body, one size fits all tentlike structure which was particularly popular in the Ottoman empire and was introduced to "the West" in the late 60s by globetrotting hippies.

Fast forward to now - ok, last night - sitting around the kitchen table idly flicking through the weekend papers and chatting to my housies when I suddenly exclaimed WTF!
(in real-speak though) and could only hold up the Sun-Herald tv guide in amazement. (Click on the image for a full-sized version)



Yes, someone out there has been sitting in front of the sewing machine, patiently waiting for the day the Kaftan might return and recently they decided that time is now. Alternately, they have just woken from a 30 year coma and picked up life right where they left it.

The text in the ad leans towards the latter for me -

Pretty enough for Candlelight dinners

Made from lush pure 100% polyester

flatters every figure

These shiny caftans are so elegant you can wear them while entertaining or even for a candlelight dinner for two

(Someone hasn't been getting enough candlelit dinners methinks)

As a multimedia guy, I have a bit of an eye for proportion in images - noticing whether things look right. My housemates have come to know (and mercifully tolerate) my need to change the picture scale on the telly depending on whether something is 4:3 (standard tv ratio) or 16:9 (movie/widescreen ratio). (It just looks wrong Goddamn it :)

Looking at the images of the woman modelling the kaftan, the first thing that struck me was the fact that she looks stretched vertically. Not noticably but enough to look wrong. This says Photoshop to me.

Now there are two equally reasonable explanations for this - they needed to squish the image in slightly to make it fit the layout OR they were trying to emphasise the whole "Flatters every figure" aspect of the kaftan.

For the sake of curiosity, I stretched the image a little to see if it looked more natural - click on the image for a full sized version.



The difference isn't that significant but to my eyes, the image on the right seems more real.

Ok, well all this TodayTonight style minnow-busting is quite tiring, if only I had a comfortable yet stylish piece of clothing to lounge around in, perhaps even sleep in.

Update - Just been chatting to my friend Marg whose hubby Choo has just returned from Malaysia with - you guessed it - a male Kaftan. (But I bet it's not leopard print)

* For the record, Jeff (The Big) Lebowski is the only person who can get away with Happy Pants

Battling: wireless adsl modems

Well, one anyway - I'd hate to exaggerate :)

Our old modem was reclaimed by its owner late last week and initial attempts to set up our long dormant (but faster) spare modem and get it talking to our internet connection proved unfruitful.

Sunday was crunch day though as I had office work to get done - working on the weekend is not a common occurrence, fear not, I'm still a happy public servant - so after a fortifying breakfast, I girded loins and looked the beast square in the blinking lights. (Um, this is coming out far geekier than I might have expected - bear with me)

After an hour or so of working through the automated setup and then onto a small amount of guess work, I tried tech support. As the account is still in the last guys name (I'm getting to it Tim, honest :) they were able to tell me that there was a problem with the password that we were using, just not what it was.

Spool forward two hours during which I've been exercising every possible option I could concoct to reach him (mobile turned off and moved interstate en route to UK) and I find out that the password is in fact correct, it's something else.

Anyway, to cut a slightly dull story (to me it was an epic, frustrating, maddening quest but perhaps you had to be there) to a slightly shorter length, after trying the same thing I'd tried at least a dozen times before, it suddenly decided to work.

Of course, then I decided to try something else to make it more secure, stuffed it and spent another hour trying to get back to the original working state, with success, I should add.

Modem 1 - Col 1.

(Another indicator in my SkyNet theory that the machines have reached awareness and just like messing with us)