Month: April 2005

Alec and Suz are visiting Aberystwyth at the moment, in a hunt for a place to live next year and possibly over the summer too. Suz has a final year to go in her degree (having spent this academic year, and the next few months, traipsing around Europe as part of her course), and Alec is hoping to be accepted onto a UWA PGCE course, giving him an excuse to come back after his year-or-so of absence. In the long run, almost everybody comes back to AberWorld, it seems.

So, Alec and Suz joined Claire, Andy, Sian, JTA, Ruth and I in curry at Cafe All Spice and drinks at The Cambrian (where we were also joined by Katie and a friend of Suz’s, Jo). Finally, we retired to the flat to watch 40s public information films, including:

• Molly Grows Up – “It’s okay to swim, so long as you don’t do it on the first few days of your period, and if you wash your hair you must dry it promptly to avoid catching a chill. But strenous activities like horse riding and square dancing are to be avoided.”
• Easy Does It – “In this sped-up film, it’s easy to see that the little woman walks over four miles every day… from sink to refrigerator to dining table…”
• Perversion For Profit – “Psychologists believe that exposure to this kind of pornography…” [demonstrates] “…by even normal men… can turn them into homosexuals.”

Alec & Suz are crashing at the Flat these few days.

In other news, Andy K is pissed off and nobody knows why, Paul & co’s Birmingham Egg experiment is mentioned on Viking FM yesterday morning.

I did the Commonly Confused Words Test (hey; shouldn’t that be the Frequently Confused Words Test): here’s my score –

Which I’m at least slightly pleased with. Not least because I beat Claire (barely).

However, it does turn out that I was wrong about something, earlier – over the weekend, she and I had debated use of “I” and “me” (subject/object). Now, as you would expect, we both know how to correctly place them, but I claimed that it was also incorrect, when writing in the subjective sense, to fail to put the other objects in front of you (i.e. “…my friends and I” was better than “…I and my friends”). It turns out, according to AskOxford, that either are equally correct, merely that the former is considered more polite. So, a point to you, there, Claire.

On the other hand – if you get your point across, who gives a shit? Just the pedanticists, that’s who.

Matt, a co-worker, just looked over to my desk, where I was eating a jacket potato covered with bolognaise sauce. “Ooh! Is that spinach?” he asked, and it took me some while to work out why he’s said that… before I remembered that he’s profoundly deuteranope-colourblind (red/green). “Umm, no… it’s bolognaise,” I responded. But of course, to him – and to almost 10% of white male humans worldwide – the dark green of spinach and the dark red of a rich bolognaise have always been pretty much identical. Fascinating, isn’t it?

Further reading:

• AskOxford – English usage guides (might want to do the test first, if you’re gonna)
• Wikipedia on colour blindness
• Simple online colourblindness test

Things are making progress re: the film – JTA‘s made a few script changes that actually make a couple of the relationships in the story make sense, to which Paul said “These changes make the story work… I don’t like them…”

In other news, my parents have each agreed to lend us their respective video cameras, which gives us enough to film scenes sensibley. Couple this with Rach’s offer of a second tripod, and we’re laughing. I’ll be putting up the placeholder web site for the film… tonight, hopefully.

It’s been a fun, sunny weekend. Claire and I met up with Rach, Kathleen, etc. (finally got to meet Issac, Rach’s baby). Geek Night was fab, if quiet. Troma Night was okay, but it’s a great pity that we weren’t able to get Electric Dreams working (although Paul and I have since managed to download a fresh copy).

And last night, Claire and I were joined by Paul, Bryn, and Hayley for food, which was nice. So it’s been a jolly, social little time we’ve had. There’s always been somebody who wanted to touch bases with me, even if it’s just people sending hate mail about me auctioning the late Pope’s dead body on eBay in an auction that lasted just give hours before it was pulled. Heh.

I had lunch today at the cafe with Paul, Claire, Andy R, Sian, Bryn, Ruth, JTA, Liz, Hayley, and Jon, for the first public scrutiny of the script for The Film. As Production Coordinator (and Assistant Director), I’ll be keeping Paul and The Cast from killing one another. Or, at least, keep the former from killing the latter.

The good bits:

• The script, given a few tweaks, rocks. We’ve got a lesbian sex scene, a body mutilated by a train, a fire, beer, bad movies…
• With only a few exceptions, the cast and crew are highly motivated, despite (a) a delayed start to this point, which eats away at filming time, and (b) some of them having worked with each other before, and therefore knowing why they wouldn’t want to.
• The project remains ambitious, but this afternoon’s meeting makes me a little more confident that it can all be done.
• Did I mention that the script rocks?

The bad bits:

• I’m concerned by the balance of the complexity of the plot over the projected length of the film – can we realistically express all the things we want to in as short a time as we need to?
• Some of these characters will be hard to portray in a believable and likable way, particularly by cast members who have little or no experience of the performing arts.
• We’re still missing some key equipment, we haven’t contacted our proposed sponsors, and I’m only marginally closer to having everything I need to ensure a filming plan gets put together.
• There’s a particular couple of scenes that I think are vague and wooly, and will need some work.

So; it’s all coming together at last – given some time, space, and weather, we’ll be able to start filming next week, or even this weekend. I’ll be keeping tabs on progress on here, for those who are interested, and giving a couple of hints about what to expect, when… but only Troma Night folks will have access to the film plan and associated discussions. So, if you should have access and you don’t – sort out your Troma Night account now!