Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

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.

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.

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.

Today after many hours, 40gb of video sitting on my hard drive and a DVD or two wasted I got a working copy of my cousins wedding video on DVD. Not that I had much interest in doing it really but then again I can never pass up the chance to work on my special features production skills. I just love doing them.

This one featured deleted scenes, outtakes, audio commentary from myself and a director’s cut. All very flash. All the editing and stuff has really got me back into the movie making spirit now that I actually have a DVD done again even if it is one that you would never actually want to watch.

I keep having ideas but I haven’t been able to throw together any kind of real plot yet. I’m thinking horror but what exactly happens? I don’t just want a serious of visuals so do I have a killer? Too generic? How about an object? Too cheesey? I’m not too sure, I need some kind of inspiration. Or to just steal the plot of an old 1970’s horror flick.

Have a gander at this. Oh yes, it’s me :). I logged onto Google Video just now expecting my movie to still be in processing what with it being a Windows Media Video file that I couldn’t get particularly close to the specification but it’s on there and searchable. Cool.

Google Video is now using flash player apparently though as I tried to play it just now and it came up with the missing plugin thing in Firefox. Weirdly enough it actually will play in Internet Explorer. It even creates automatic chapters throughout the movie so you can jump to them. I think I’ll be uploading more VNUs very soon.

Hmm, the way I see it, my computer is on so I might as well blog. Just got back from a house party at Elle’s friends. Quite a nice house actually though the stairs are a little steep. That seems common with most terraced houses though. Anyway so yeah, myself, Spanky, Olly, Precious and Stoner Matt got some chips then got the bus back. We actually just missed a bus which is a bitch when they are every half hour.

Jess was absolutely wasted though. Ben and Tom had to take her home a little after midnight after she feel over three times trying to stand. On top of that she has lost her keys (she left them in Grant House though so it’s not like they are really lost, she is just too drunk to remember at the moment) so she is currently sleeping it off in Ben’s room.

On top of all this there was in interesting event at the bus stop. I don’t really know the story although the events including a guy throwing a drink in a girl’s face which was full of ice so it half blinded her and one of the guys got cut up with broken bottles and had blood running down his face. Leeds is a cool place really :).

Got listening to Chuck by Sum 41 today, I love that album. Kind of regretting watching the last episode of Rock School though (suprisingly I’m not going out, everyone seems to be having a night in tonight else I would have headed down to Fruity and maybe even succeed in reaching Star) as I’ve distracted myself with rock music now. I’ve had Grace (it’s a song I wrote for Seremia, well actually I wrote it before the band was formed) stuck in my head for days now and find myself randomly singing it.

That’s all well and good but I also have the movie making bug, due to a large part to Premiere I think. Editing together the video news updates for xmeltrut.com I got into the editing spirit and wanted to get to work on a new project (I’ve had the movie making bug for a while now actually) so I started scripting an idea together and moved over to my bed to start typing up a script.

I’m a little uninspired though. I’m not sure a horror movie is what I want to be doing at the moment. I feel it’s too generic – it wouldn’t be a generic horror movie but all the movies I have been planning in recent times have been psychological horror movies and I’m thinking I might be better going for something else.

What else can you really do though? Horror movies you can do good stuff with a small budget – look at Blair Witch, Dog Soliders, etc, horror movies have serious potential even at low budgets whereas you just can’t do a decent romance with a low budget. Well you can but I still maintain horror is far easier.

I also need to talk wireless, because it was annoying me. I stuck my wireless network card in my laptop and re-enabled wireless connections on my router and had some nice security on it too. Well that’s over. It kept connecting and disconnecting and I’m not just moaning I mean it was doing this every 3 seconds, not like the odd problem, it was screwed.

I have it working now and with some security on too so I should be ok. I want to test how far my wireless network will go though. That said as much as I would like it to work all the way down in the common room I don’t think it is going to go through so many doors.

Pointless landmark I know but I just noticed that the last post took me up to a total of 300 :D.

Given my expansion into video for xmeltrut.com I decided I needed to get a little syndicated. So I signed up to the Google Video program and have submitted one of the videos to see if it is acceptable. I couldn’t get the format they wanted, I tried but when I tried to play my mpeg-2 video there was audio and no video and that was like 8mb for a 2 minute minute video. If I am submitting all the videos that would take longer than forever to upload them all.

I’m also thinking about MRSS which is media RSS, a format both used and developed by Yahoo so that they could do their whole video search thing. I’m going to try and work that one out and put a feed up on xmeltrut.com so that, that can be spidered too.

I’ll probably have a flick round to see what else is spidering video content too. Suggestions on a postcard. And by postcard I of course mean the comments section ;).

Really starting to get into Adobe Premiere Pro now. It seems to be much simplifed from the older versions which is generally a good thing although I didn’t like the look of the audio mixer when I took a quick glance at it. The DV camcorder control thing is cool though.

The Adobe Media Exporter or whatever it is called is by real bug bare though. It errors out a lot and each time I even want to change the metadata for my video it asks me to save it as a preset name and you don’t appear to be able to update the presets other than typing in the exact name which is just stupid. Hopefully there is a way round it.

Oh also, every time I start a new project it makes the timeline really far zoomed out again which is annoying.