Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

About random stuff (so, boring)

Tuesday, November 22nd, 2005 | Life

Went down to the union today to get some forms for my many societies. I asked at reception who sent me up to the arc who sent me down to someone else who I couldn’t be bothered to find so I’m probably going to wait until the forms are posted online. I don’t want to go talk to someone, they aren’t real societies :P.

Have another film making soc meeting tomorrow in which I am going to pitch my new idea that I mentioned last post and also premiere the video along with the other groups. If we don’t win the competition I will not happy. But then ours wasn’t great, I think it might have been better to leave some of the stuff that was funny rather than going it half funny half serious.

Finished putting together Deep Space Hardy on DVD last night, it has an extra interview, the choice to play all episodes or select one and a trailer. There were actually only five episodes ever made of it though. I wanted to do a commentary also sort of – I wanted it to be on there, I didn’t actually want to do it ;). In the end though I decided to skip it as I didn’t think it was worth it.

My laptop is currently being a bitch. I am just doing a system restore as I keep getting a critical error message as soon as it boots up which asks me to send an error report. It gets worse, as soon as I sent it, it comes back and asks me to send it again. You have to send it once or it will just stay on top of everything and it’s always sitting on the taskbar.

It’s been before, it normally occurs when I unplug my network but the network is in. I ran the network setup to try and fix it and now I think I have lost my network connection which if I have is just unbelievable. I think I might need to re-install Windows which I REALLY don’t want to do as I have everything. The error message is still there though, I hate Microsoft soooooo much.

Random societies

Tuesday, November 22nd, 2005 | Life

I now have a list of 15-20 societies that I want to start up once the petition forms finally get posted on the LUU website. Well, I don’t really have a desire to start any of them, it would just be funny. I don’t think any of them are serious as the list includes Chris Soc, Another Film Society Soc and Random Soc.

Speaking of societies, I may turn up to the next LSTV meeting and see what that is about. I have a hot idea for a documentary which it might be good to pitch to them but I don’t want to defect from film making soc. I have a fms meeting on Wednesday in which Random Questions to Random People is going to be premiered. I need to burn some DVDs for that.

I also have a new movie I want to pitch to film making soc which is a kind of dark action movie like Max Payne or Payback (possibly Sin City also but despite my best efforts I have yet to see it). It’s a little ambiguous in that I am hoping the audience won’t be able to work out whether it’s serious or just a piss-take. The opening line is “they say you only eat two spoonfuls of beans in your life. Well I was about to eat three.”

Flash does not like avi

Monday, November 21st, 2005 | Life

I’m transfering all my movies onto DVD to make a giant library and stuff and am just burning the World Vision advert project I did for the first year of my media A-level. I tried encoding it though but I ran into some problems in that movies exported as avi from Flash so I had to take them into Premiere and re-encode them all before I could burn them to DVD.

The error message I got was:

no combination of filters could be found to render the stream

Not very helpful huh? I managed to get an explanation from Digital Digest.

I love film making

Sunday, November 20th, 2005 | Life

Been out film making today (well technically yesterday). Went down to the union for a film making competition and the end result was a movie called Random Questions to Random People. It was awesome, I was directing it though we didn’t really stick to assigned roles, I even felt like a producer when I was rounding up interviewees (or victims as some would call them ;)). I’m putting the DVD together now.

Getting to work

Friday, November 18th, 2005 | Life

It’s time I got my next movie started. I’m leaving my Sleepless script for the moment and see what the Film Making Society writers group can do with that. In the mean time I am working on a new script currently under the name of “Project Grant.”

It’s a horror movie an I am going to try and round some people up from my halls to get involved, it’s only a 2-3 person cast anyway so hopefully that shouldn’t be too hard to find. Once I get the movie out of the way I can get on with the important stuff – special feature documentaries, audio commentary and so on.

Google Video update

Friday, November 18th, 2005 | Life

After the Branch Planet VNU successfully made it into Google Video I have just updated the other three VNUs that I have so far produced. I also noticed that the transcript for the video has been accepted though there appears to be no way to view it on the video page.

It can however be viewed if you search for the video and click list rather than grid.

Britney Planet coming up fast

Friday, November 18th, 2005 | Life

My laptop sucks. It hates to be moved. I’m using it on my bed after moving all the power cables and stuff because I can’t run it off better and now I’m laid down because I can’t put it on my bed. The D, U and O keys don’t always work it is running even slower than normal now it’s running solely on a wireless network connection.

Anyway, since the launch of xmeltrut.com over a year ago, Branch Planet has been number one in the number of news stories, mainly because it pre-dates all the other sites.

Now though Britney Planet is climbing fast. Just 23 stories separate the two sites and which Britney Planet regularly has several stories per day, Branch Planet just has one story per day around 75% of the time.

Lord of the Rings marathon

Friday, November 18th, 2005 | Life

The D key isn’t working properly on my keyboard, it really sucks. Anyway, I’ve just finished watching my LoTR: special extended edition boxset (well I have all the extras and audio commentaries to go through but I have finished the movies themselves).

I spent 6 hours solid yesterday watching from 11:30 – 17:30 which took me well into The Two Towers. Then today I spent from midnight to 1 am this morning finishing off The Two Towers and watched disk 1 of Return of the King from 15:00 – 17:00 followed by the secon disk from 21:00 – 23:00, slightly delayed, taking me to now.

That totals up to 11 hours of LoTR in the past 2 days. Not bad at all.

Lord of the Rings

Wednesday, November 16th, 2005 | Life

My special extended edition boxset of The Lord of the Rings arrive this morning. I’ve been watching The Fellowship of the Ring since 11:30 this morning. I recon there is about 70 hours of stuff in this boxset counting all the commentaries presuming there are 4 for each one (I’ve only checked the first one).

This is actually the 4th time I’ve seen The Fellowship. Until now I had seen each of them three times. Not that anyone cares but because this blog is mainly for myself I’m going to lay them out.

I saw The Fellowship twice at the cinema.
Saw The Two Towers once at the cinema.
Saw The Return of the Ring twice at the cinema.
Saw The Fellowship on Channel 4.
Saw The Two Towers when we watched it at Bod on Channel 4
Saw The Two Towers again last Sunday on Channel 4.

Hmm, actually it occurs to be that I haven’t seen The Return of the King three times yet. Judging by the last gap it is going to be a while until it is on Channel 4. Not that I need to wait now I have it on DVD anyway. Oh well, on to watching The Two Towers DVD. The credits are listing the charter members of the fan club. It’s been going for like 5 minutes and has only reached C.

It’s not late but…

Tuesday, November 15th, 2005 | Life

Continuing my mission to make use of our 24 hour computer lab facilities I decided to drop by Eniac and make a quick blog post. I came down for Film Soc which doesn’t start until 7 so I need some time to kill and here seems the best place to do it. I will get here at like 2-3 am one day!

Last time I came down to Film Soc, ironically also the first time, we didn’t set off until like 6:30 for the 7:00 start and so ended up late. But then if I get the 6:15 bus then I end up early and have like 10-15 minutes to kill which is hard to justify going all the way down to Eniac for. Well, for a normal person, I’d do it anyway as it kills some time. That said if buses really were every 15 minutes then there should have been one at 6:30 although maybe we missed that, long time ago now.

Film Soc are showing some quite good stuff at the moment though, they have “Capturing the Friedmans” on tonight which I’ve never heard of but when I read the description it looked really good. Then on Thursday they are showing 12 Angry Men which I’m hoping I can round up some more people for; Elle said she really likes it.