So, we took part in the National 48 Hour Film Challenge. We must have been mad. At least four members of the team got no sleep. The rest of the team averaged single-figure total hours for the weekend. It was intense, hard and often quite tedious and pernickety work. People were ready to kill each other. And what for? This.

We were given the title (“An Association”) and the genre (“suspense”) at 10am on Saturday. The plan was to knock out the plan and script by lunchtime on Saturday, then do the bulk of the filming on Saturday afternoon and evening. Editing could then start on Sunday morning, and the remainder of the filming done in parallel with that, to be finished by midday sunday at the latest. I would work on musical ideas in parallel with the filming, and then as the edit came together on Sunday afternoon and evening I could turn these ideas into the score and sync it properly with the action. Editing could then continue until it was finished, and we’d all get a good night’s sleep before handing it in on Monday morning.

Pffffft.

I think the last rushes came in at about 10pm on Sunday. Bits of effects footage (for the bomb timer) were still arriving at gone midnight. The editing continued right through the night, until the film was eventually handed in 20 minutes before the deadline (1pm on Monday), with most of the editing crew having had no sleep. You can’t really account for things like discovering most of the footage for the final scene is basically unusable at 3am, or the presence of Brian’s ass in most of the office scenes.

I was originally brought in as the composer, but I was also pressed into duties as audio editor, as the sound captured from the office scene was nearly unusable because of the massive amounts of ambient noise. Working with a certain popular shareware sound editor (whose name shall not be spoken lest it appear again, which is something I don’t want to have to do) and a rubbish noise reduction plugin I made the best I could out of a bad job, taking several hours to cut as much noise as I could from 2 minutes of dialogue. And it still sounds like they’re talking in a metallic tank underwater.

The music went better, though. I’d knocked out a few generic thematic ideas during the preceding week, so it was partially just a case of fleshing them out and stylising them to fit the film. I wrote a couple of extra bits and bobs during the editing process, too. Having the 24 DVDs on hand for inspiration was handy, too 🙂 Overall, I’m pretty happy with the music (thanks to Lori for the very kind comments on the previous entry:), given how long I had to do it in; I’m less than happy with the dialog and some of the other sound, but lack of decent equipment and software along with inhuman time constraints prevented a more satisfactory result.

But, all that aside, the entire team is very, very happy with the result. We’re not particularly bothered if we don’t win anything. We’re not that bothered if everyone else thinks it’s rubbish, either. We’ve never made a film before, and given the time constraints, lack of experience, lack of decent quality equipment and availability of things like, say, actors and locations, we’re dead chuffed with what we did. Plus, once it’s shown in the AMC in a couple of weeks’ time, we can get our own entry on IMDb, which is pretty damned cool, if you ask me.

And to those who still scoff at our handiwork, I say: Okay, you try. Next year. We’ll see you there.

Gah. The case fan in the PC I use to host home.parm.net has decided to develop a death rattle. It’s still spinning, and the CPU doesn’t seem to be overheating, but the thing makes so much damn noise I had to take the server down last night so I could sleep (it’s in a room just next to my bedroom and it was just loud enough to be annoying). I’ll pop over to aria later to get a new fan, hopefully.

Oh, and I’m taking part in the national 48 Hour Film Challenge this weekend too. I’m writing the music, and helping out where I can for other stuff. Should be… well, hard work, mostly.

Growing up, we moved around the country a fair bit. No real exciting reason behind this except that the only places my dad could get promotions were, well, basically everywhere except where we lived at the time. For several years of my childhood, we lived in the village of East Markham, in Nottinghamshire, where I spent a good few years hanging around on BMXs, sneaking through gardens at night, and generally managing to mostly avoid the kind of trouble that a certain Mr S. Duck seemed so adept at landing himself in (mostly, it must be said, because I was from a ‘nice’ middle class family and so when blame was apportioned, it could be conviently shelved onto the local scallies whilst we got away scot-free).

Then, just as I started high school, we moved from Nottinghamshire to Norfolk, where I met up with a whole new bunch of reprobates and discovered that even more fun could be had if you just dispensed with the BMX thing and went straight on to the burning things with deodorant spray and solvent-based glues part. Consequently, the happy days of skateboarding around East Markham got forgotten as new and exciting things like girls and BB guns made their presence known in my life.

A few years back, I got back in touch with one of my friends from East Markham, Richard (aka Dick; he doesn’t like being called that any more. Funny, that). He was still living there, it seemed, and I happened to be passing through on the way to visit some relatives for Christmas. Would I like to stop over for a few drinks? Sure, why not. Be nice to see the place again, I thought.

Well, as these things do, a “few” drinks rapidly turned into “quite a few” drinks, which then turned into “damn, we’d better eat something now before we die”, which then turned into a tequila party in his front room. Various people I’d known from school turned up, including Richard’s mate James, Jame’s sister Alison, whom Richard spent most of the night flirting with despite the disapproving presence of Richard’s girlfriend, and quite probably some other people, the memory of whom half a bottle of tequila prevents me from recalling. All of them seemed to have become professional piss-artists, which it seems is quite a common profession amongst people who never leave the village in which they grew up.

At some point during the night, someone suggested that it might be an idea for some people to go home, and that the rest of us should go for a walk around the village and I should go with them, “so I could remember how things used to be”. As it happened, I’m sure I remember things being a lot less wobbly, out of focus, and I’m sure people threw up in their neighbours’ hedges a lot less. We eventually made it back to Richard’s house, where some of us crashed in the living room, and the next clear memory I have is of some bastard opening the curtains and my tongue seemingly having been coated in the stuff you get floating on stagnant ponds. It all seemed an awfully long way from the BMXs and issues of the Beano which had, up until that point, formed the bulk of my memories of the place.

So, perhaps the old adage needs amending. Yes, you can go back, but if you do, prepare to have all your happy childhood memories sullied by the combined effects of beer, tequila and the guy who you used go skateboarding with from next door puking over some poor bugger’s begonias.

Apparently, the guy at the end of the road who we all thought was a nobber is still there, and is still a nobber.

There are some nights when you just want to watch some really bad TV. And thankfully, in the UK, five exist for just that purpose. Tonight’s special was a Steve Oedekerk cliche-a-thon in the shape of “Nothing to Lose”. Starring Tim Robbins (who had a high point in 1994 with both The Shawshank Redemption and The Hudsucker Proxy, but seems to have not made a good film before or after that), Martin Lawrence (Yet Another Eddie Murphy Wannabe, but not a bad one, to be fair) and That Guy Out Of Scrubs Who Plays Dr Cox as some psycho highway robber dude, it’s a completely cliched, no-brain-required, almost so-bad-it’s-good waste of a couple of hours. I’d never recommend anyone actually go out and try to see a film that five have broadcast, but as a way to provide diverting sound and images for a couple of hours in an evening, they’re unparalleled. Hurrah for five.

In other news, a large part of the northeast coast of America is currently without electricity. To put this into some kind of perspective, it’s roughly equivalent to the entire national grid turning off; you’d imagine there were some kind of backup systems or redundancies in the grid to allow for this sort of thing, but no, apparently not. And you thought it was bad when the substation down the road blew and took your street out…

But it should be fixed now. Blimmin’ ntp…

This one seems to be doing the rounds of the UK blog sites at the moment…

1. If you want to participate, leave a comment saying “interview me.”
2. I will respond by asking you five questions – each person’s will be different.
3. You will update your journal with the answers to the questions.
4. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview others in the same post.
5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.

My questions came courtesy of Lori. Blame her, then 🙂

1. If you could devote your life to either art or science (and not both), which would you choose?
This is really tricky for me, as I don’t think the dividing line is clear; my job, for example, kind of involves both – programming is both a creative and scientific process. I guess what it boils down to is what couldn’t I live without, and I reckon I’d have a hard time if I couldn’t ever write music again, so we’ll say art.

2. Girls are evil. Discuss.
Heh. Someone knows me too well. Or they just know I’m involved with this. I could discuss, but I’m not going to. Yes, they are, sometimes. But not always.

3. What is the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to you?
Sorry to be cheesey, but probably “I love you”, when they meant it.

4. Cameras – digital or film?
Film. Sure, you can get digital SLR cameras, but they are far, far too expensive at the moment. Plus, I like the art of getting a good photo – not the art of getting an okay photo and then touching it up in photoshop later. Maybe I’ll change my luddite thinking when digital SLRs come down in price enough for me to be able to afford one, but for know I’m very happy sticking with 35mm.

5. What qualities do you most admire in other people and why?
Tricky. Intelligence, eloquence, quick-wittedness, self-confidence without arrogance, self-security. That sort of thing.

I’ve bashed out these answers pretty quickly ‘cos I’m going off into Manchester now to… um… do something. I’ll post more later.