EXCUSES AND HALF TRUTHS

thank you.

There’s always bloody something. Last year’s Straight8 was a farrago of rescripts, abrupt changes in personnel and wild changes in direction, approach and philosophy. Frankly, if I never have to go through that again, it’ll be too soon. This year, by comparison, has been pretty smooth sailing, and we’ve even managed to stick to the same idea. We were starting to feel bulletproof.

Last night our DOP dropped out.

This is a crushing disappointment. Gaul Pordon is a good friend of the Puppies, a great cameraman and a real asset to any shoot. But a paid job got in the way, and Clive and I could not in all conscience blame him. He’s given us fair warning. And it means we now get the chance to work with another, equally talented, equally cool cameraman. I’m thrilled that the mighty Flemming Jetmar is on board to shoot Gray For Danger for us, and I can’t wait to see how his crazed visual aesthetic will work matched to our vision.

Here’s hoping this is the only trap we have waiting for us…

Diz is still stuck in Dubai. His hearing is upcoming, and he needs help with his legal fees. I’ve just bumped him a tenner. How about you?

A critical step in securing the release of Cat has been made, and we have now acquired terrific legal representation for him. Having said this, we are faced with a bill for $50,000 USD, which needs to be paid in full, up front. The money will be held in trust by a trusted Legal firm in Dubai and released to Cat’s barrister in installments.

(Via The Truth About Dubai.)

In other Dubai news, DJ Grooverider has been jailed for 4 years, after pleading guilty to possession of cannabis. 2 grams of cannabis.

Saturday came up very bright, and very cold. The smart option would have been to stay, warm and snug, tangled up with Clare until circumstance or a full bladder forced the least determined of us out of bed. Tea would have been the prize for the victor. Clare very much won that battle, and I had to content myself with a sleepy kiss as a consolation prize. I had been up since daybreak, and was out of the door and taking a chilly cycle ride to the station at 8 o’clock. I had an interview to shoot.

Wayne Anthony was a promotor and manager back in the day, and was well known for running some of the best acid house parties going. He had written a best-selling book on the subject, and had generously given myself and Dom a morning of his time to chat about it. This is a good one for Decks, Dance and Videotape. It’s a different perspective, moving away from the creators of the music to talk about the scene in a wider context. And Wayne is a born storyteller. On the ride to the Battersea location, he regaled us with tales of gangsterism, scams and the tribal, uplifting power of dance in an era when the government was trying to legislate against it.

The location, a converted school just off Queenstown Road, is home to Dom’s mate Roger, who has a fine collection of fast cars. The standout, of course, is the banana-yellow Lambourghini Countach that we used as a backdrop to the interview. It doesn’t get used very often, and Roger was a little nervous about starting the engine. We pushed the thing into position. Well, Dom and Wayne pushed. I sat inside and steered. Which means that, technically speaking, I have driven a Lambourghini Countach.

Dom, despite my increasingly unsubtle hints to keep things simple, put five cameras on the shoot, including a Betamax for that retro analouge video vibe. Swear to god, the boy needs a slap sometimes. Three cameras is overkill for a basic interview setup. Five is not just greedy – it’s duplicating setups. However, clearly I’m whistling dixie on this one. As revenge, I let him do th emajority of the donkey work, trundling around and set up while I chatted to Wayne about conspiracy theories. I’m not a believer, he is. It made for an interesting conversation. Finally, Roger brought down tea, we checked the angles one more time, and fired the cameras up.

It was a great session. Wayne gave us punchy, incisive commentary, and was happy to drop in a soundbite when he felt it was necessary. The stories he’d told us in the car came out in tidier, less sweary form. We ran for just over an hour, and wound up with Wayne in the Countach reminiscing over some old flyers I’d brought over. The light was flawless throughout the morning, bright as you like but very, very cold. Myself and Hugh, the other cameraman, soon found ourselves wearing hats and hoods. It was a smart move to put Dom and Wayne in a patch of sunlight. At least they looked warm.

We wrapped at about 2, and Dom courteously dropped me back across town to meet up with Steve Sick Puppy and talk sound for our upcoming Straight 8 project. He’s a bit of a genuis, able to sort out sound design and compositional duties with equal flair. He’s also building us a prop bomb, with a heart of marzipan. Sweet. I’m feeling better and better about this one. Everyone involved in this project is talented and focussed, and I genuinely feel that this one could be really worthwhile. I won’t claim I’m not nervous, but I’m as excited as all get out too. Can’t wait for the test shoot next weekend.

I bailed at about 5 for the long trip home, feeling happy but utterly whipped. I’ve got a lot on at the minute, and I’m fully aware that the writing is on the slide. The situation will improve, I’m sure, but I feel a bit hollow when I’m not banging out word count. The blog will suffice, at least for now.

Seasons Greetings From Warren Ellis:

Happy Valentine’s Day to all. And to those who hate the day, I say this: Valentine’s Day is a Christian corruption of a pagan festival involving werewolves, blood and fucking. So wish people a happy Horny Werewolf Day and see what happens.

Feh.

It should be obvious to regular readers of the blog that I am becoming an old school irascible git. Therefore the very idea of me settling down in front of BBC Three on the day of it’s relaunch as an up-to-the-nanosecond web-friendly zetgeistfeed should be laughable. Surely I should be comfortably plumped in front of UKTV Drama with a strong cup of PG and a couple of HobNobs, watching Tom Baker Doctor Who re-runs. Which I do, but that’s not the point here. I like BBC Three. It’s good, light entertainment programming with it’s own voice and it’s own style.
Or rather, it was. On the strength of last night’s viewing, I’m likely to be spending more time sighing over Elisabeth Sladen.

Let’s start with the basics. The cute interstitials with the monolithic Three logo and the talking blobs have gone. A shame. They had a quirky charm that got the point of the channel’s irreverant approach across well. They’ve been replaced with, of all things, a real-life continuity announcer. Sat in front of a desk and a backdrop and everything. A girl who’s maybe had a day’s worth of front-of-camera training, because she clearly looks scared out of her wits. I notice Three is running a competition to find new presenting talent, and if this is the best they can come up with, then I hope to god the competition isn’t over. At least the 60 Seconds newsblurt hasn’t been too monkeyed with. A new title, and a greenscreen background that somehow looks cheaper than the fake studio they had to use. Still, at least they haven’t tried to cut it down to thirty seconds, or speed it up.

Onto the programming. First up, Phoo Action. In theory, this should be a win-win. Based on a little-known Jamie Hewlett strip, directed by Euros Lyn of Doctor Who fame, starring Jaime Winstone in a fetching array of hot pants. Result. Right?

Did anyone see the movie version of Tank Girl?

Let’s put this in context. Get The Freebies was created by Jamie Hewlett after the collapse of Deadline, the magazine that had brought the strip to fame. It was a single page strip running on the inside back page of The Face, that enabled him to relax and stretch out creatively again. Hence a talking basketball as a villain, a freewheeling anarchic sensibility and a ton of 70’s TV and film references. The surly, spunky heroine was a spit away from a plagiarism lawsuit, but hey. It was very silly, good fun but it was doing nothing new. No-one paid a blind bit of notice. It quietly expired after a year.
Welcome to 2006, and all of a sudden Hewlett’s visual lyricism means he can do no wrong. Some dim bulb at the Beeb digs out an old copy of The Face, and sees a tentpole opportunity. BBC Scotland throw a ton of money at the idea, hire an experienced SF director, and rub their hands gleefully for being so clever.

The thing is, in one way they have genuinely succeeded. The programme on screen last night was the purest live-action replication of a comic that I have ever seen. The production design is spot on, it motors along at a decent clip, the performances are broad without being particularly cartoony, and the casting is pretty much right. Jaime Winstone does grumpy teenager with a good chunk of flair, and whoever thought of casting Carl Weathers as the police chief deserves a solid wet smacker, because he’s great.

But. Look. Okay. It’s an hour long. Anyone that isn’t so high on sugar that they’re foaming candyfloss out of their tearducts has got the patience for an hour of blipvert. And the money that’s been spent on it doesn’t disguise the rubbery nature of the villains, which instantly breaks any kind of spell. To my mind, it would have been much better as a week-long chunk of ten-minute episodes, complete with cliffhangers and previouslys, with maybe an omnibus on the following Saturday for those of us that don’t mind the visual equivalent of being yelled at by a five year old with a bullhorn. With a compressed time frame, the faults become much less easy to pick at. I’d gladly sign up to that kind of broadsheet programming. As it stood, I was bored by the forty minute mark, and back on my laptop before the end. Hardly the sign of a gripping piece of innovative TV. I hate to snark, but it just left me feeling a bit hollow and disappointed, when it could have been so much more.

Unlike Lily Allen and Friends, which was so lazy and slapdash that I had to give up on it before the end. At the the point when the Chocolate Rain guy started doing a cover version of Smile.
Basically, we were presented with a studio full of Lily Allen’s MySpace “friends”, a couple of deeply bemused guests and a wedge of YouTube clips. Oh, and at least three requests for you the viewer to get involved and send in your own ideas. For which you can read, some more YouTube clips. This is the kind of thing that Graham Norton was doing five years ago, and it didn’t work then. Any show that falls back heavily on user-generated content is frankly a show devoid of decent researchers.

I ended up feeling quite sorry for Lily, who came across as very sweet and completely out of her depth. She allowed her guests to walk all over her, had to yell over the studio audience quite a few times (reports from the shoot day are that the programme was so disorganised that half the “friends” who had been specially invited to the show walked before the end) and generally just didn’t seem to have a clue as to what was happening. Much like the guests. David Mitchell took refuge in a large glass of wine, which he ended up clutching defensively in both hands, as if he was afraid that someone would take it off him for taking the piss so heavily. Cuba Gooding Jr took his top off and kept talking about his knob. Then Mr. Chocolate Rain pitched up, and I lost the will to live.

So, this is the new BBC Three. It’s kind of like chasing down a mouthful of space dust with a swallow of Cherry Coke. The rumour is that it’ll make your head explode. All that really happens is that you get a headache and a mild sense of nausea.

Brent Simmons has written a detailed account of the decisions he made in designing the series of dialog boxes that pop up the first time you run NetNewsWire.

Although it’s written primarily for other programmers, his post is perfectly readable by the rest of us. It’s not so much about programming as it is about thinking carefully about users’ needs and expectations the first time they run a strange piece of software.

Based on the recommendations of a couple of online sources, and the fact that it’s now free, I thought I’d give NetNewsWire a go. And well, let’s just say I won’t be going back to using Google Reader anytime soon. Configurable, fast, easy to use, and when you tie it into a dedicated tool like Marsedit you have all the tools you need to turn you into a power blogger. Just look at the post rate for today…

(Via Sore Eyes.)

…in movies, at least. Michael Moran over at the Times nails the cliches that still strangle most mainstream movie SF at birth. I can think of few SF films released in the first few years that don’t have at least five of these in there somewhere. Primer, maybe.
Interesting that there’s a YouTube embed in the article to Aeon Flux – which seems to have all ten!

(via the Forbidden Planet blog)

After a long lie-in, I cooked pancakes and bacon for the Clare. Then, after washing up and tidying the kitchen, I spent the morning catching up on correspondence, writing letters to the local council and my MP. As it’s a sunny day, we drove out to a couple of garden centres, where I bought bread flour, making sure it was milled with wheat from local farms. On the way home, we bought seed potatoes, which I chitted. I put some dubbin on my spring boots, and then settled down to write this blog post, with a cup of tea and a Tunnock’s teacake by my side.

Oh, good grief. If anyone can tell me at which point I turned into Richard Briers, and supply me with a time machine so I can go back to just before that point, give my past self a slap and take him out for strippers and beer, I’d be eternally grateful. Thank you so much.