blowing bubbles1.0

Battles played here over the weekend, and it was swell.

Boogie to this, the video clip for Tonto, featuring work by United Visual Artists:

If you would like to see/hear an entire concert, check out this recording (30-3-07, Empty Bottle, Chicago):

It’s always refreshing to hear someone talk with great ability and passion. It’s equally refreshing to hear someone talk about our human society in a humane way. Former New Zealand Prime Minister David Lange did this on quite a few occasions. One most notable occasion being at the Oxford Union debate in 1985 where he argued that “nuclear weapons are morally indefensible”. A debate which he won and for which he was accorded a standing ovation from both sides of the house. This speech can be read and listened to online and if you don’t know who Mr. David Lange was and/or are up for a speech that was spoken both from the heart and from the mind, I suggest you do check it out.

Also, below you can listen to ‘Nuclear Weapons Are Morally Indefensible’, a derivative work incorporating audio from the recording of David Lange’s Oxford Union debate speech. The accompanying music was composed and produced by Andrew B. White, aka Tomorrowpeople.

To download this MP3 file, please visit publicaddress.net.

A long time fan of his work I was absolutely delighted that some of his animations are now available for viewing online at YouTube.com. For those of you who haven’t heard of Lye or haven’t seen his films, he was a New Zealand sculptor, photographer, writer and film-maker who worked with motion in various ways and was an early pioneer of colour film in the 1930s. His films are vibrant and usually playful. (read on »)

Fark i’m tired!

Edit: Yes, after being up for 16 hours after a 3 hour sleep and working on the set alongside a - thankfully - professional crew, we got the shoot wrapped up. The editors had edited about two minutes at 10pm and were going for around 7 minutes. I hope it all went well, as I slept right through all that. And now the film has been submitted. Hopefully! I haven’t seen it yet, but from the moment that it’s online I’ll post a link. It features a really great gnome.

The weekend of filmmaking as mentioned in my previous post has now officially started. Each of the 400-odd teams had to pick a genre out of a bag and were each given a name for a character, a prop, a line of dialog and a characteristic of the character. Those are the constraints for the film and a jury will give extra credit to people who incorporate those elements well.

Our team got the genre “Fairy Tale”, which I think is pretty awesome. In any case I’m glad we didn’t get the wonderful opportunity to make a musical over the weekend. The other constraints are:

Name: Robin Slade
Characteristic: eternal optimist
Prop: mirror
Line of dialog: “That’s what I’m talking about”

Our initial brainstorming session yielded a lot of interesting ideas for a story and now a few writers are making them into a coherent plot. We start shooting tomorrow morning at 8am. More as the story evolves!

This weekend is film competition weekend in New Zealand.

An initiative called “48Hours” aims to get people out and about making short films - writing, shooting and editing - in, well, a 48 hour time span. It’ll be a weekend of complete mayhem I’m sure, with hopefully a bunch of nice films as a result. And the logo has a gorilla in it!

I’m on one of the teams as a tape logger, so expect a link to our short soon. The 2004 and 2005 films can be viewed online at nzshortfilm.com.