I haven’t posted anything for a while, so here’s a photo I took last year on a visit to the Enchanted Forest.

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Release day 2007, that is.

Courtesy of Jo, here’s a photo taken on the evening on the release of Heavy Lies the Crown. The afternoon was a rather fraught one, spent with Nick grappling with rendering a recalcitrant movie that didn’t want to be rendered. A month or so earlier I’d converted all the sequences to Quicktime because my laptop didn’t play nice with the MJPEG avis that I’d been using all this time. Rendering took an hour and we were running short of time to make the midnight deadline, inlcuding uploading for Micheal to place them on the servers. David’s final theme hadn’t arrived, so we agreed to use one of the trailer tracks in its place.

The IM was silent. Ten minutes. Fifteen minutes. And just as I was about to hit the button for the final output, David popped up with a message saying that the theme was ready to download. Hastily placed in the edit and then an hours rendering, then an hours uploading and four and a half years of effort was at at end.

I felt decidedly odd at that point.

What would everyone think? Would they like it? Would they hate it? So Nick went home and I went for a few drinks with Jo, who took the picture. As far as I know it’s the only photo we have from release Day. The hat and TV were added by the camera phone she used.

I’m still not sure what my expression means!

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This is mostly an Intrepid status update. The Stone Unturned only needs a few pickup shots to be filmed for the shooting to be complete. In the meantime, I’m now officially doing the editing. To that end, I’ve been piecing it together scene by scene and have now got a rough for the first third of it. It’s been going together a lot better than Wheres There’s a Sea did, something helped by the fact that there’s fewer effects to worry about. And also probably, possibly, because I’m improving as a director. (At least that’s what I’d like to think!)

To begin with, way back at the start of this moviemaking thing, I’d only be thinking about whatever scene we’d be filming on the day, with all kinds of practical issues to think about such as the noise the fridge was making and how much of the ironing board would be in shot: filming is easier when it’s not in a kitchen.

Paradoxically, it also seems to help when there’s less coverage to choose from: one bridge scene in Heavy Lies the Crown saw me ending the day with over thirty takes from ten angles. Now there’s fewer (much fewer!) takes but those are chosen better up front. And by up front I mean five minutes in advance.

I’ll have to work on that.

We also rehearse a lot more, which reduces the fluffed lines, though not to the extent that the blooper reel can be consigned to history just yet.

The other Intrepid items marked as ‘current’ in my brain are the Sisters Audio drama and Bit Patterns, which has been on the go for quite some time. Sisters hasn’t begun production yet, there being a character issue to sort out. One of them has a lot of backstory and the timeline doesn’t quite work out. In any case I promised at the start that I’d write it and then be hands-off, which so far I’m managing to do with an attendand reduction in stress.

My script for Bit Patterns is weighing in at 56 pages and now I’ve got to figure out how to wrap up the various threads, in addition to completely replacing one character with another. Why I’m doing that is the unexpected unavailability of the actor who was playing him. A character who was right at the heart of the A and the B plot and tying the two halves together.

Well, I guess it’s a challenge.

The name Bit Patterns is actually one that I recycled from a novel idea I had back in the nineties, but which never really got further than a couple of pages of notes. The original title for that was The Moiré Effect, and was to have been a story about an AI researcher who dies in an accident. The computer system he was working on is then apparently haunted. Genuine AI? An actual haunting, or is the whole thing some kind of psychological experiment? This was in the day of PCs maxing out at 100 MHz and were still pretty mysterious to the public at large. Not sure how I’d approach it today, since any mysterious message coming through the computer is either email spam, Twitter spam, IM spam, miscellaneous spam or a phishing scam.

Bit Patterns for Intrepid is an entirely different story. All that’s made it online so far is that it involves two long range probes which vanished in mysterious circumstances and that - again - it proves that the Merchant Service and Starfleet are best when they work together. I think I’ve also managed to get in some proper scientific terminology and methodology, something I feel strongly about given that I list astronomy amongst my nerdish passions. (There was a TV mini-series a few years ago called Supernova which kicked off with some of the most stupid nonsensical “scientific” dialogue I’d ever heard in something intended to be serious.)

Also there’s characters and a story. Important to include that stuff.

Further updates as events warrant!

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Well, according to Twitter Grader I am now ranked 777,641 out of 806,421 with a grade of 3 out of a possible 100. Some improvement possibly needed. Like me actually using it, one would presume.

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One of my guilty pleasures is an interest in the whole flying saucer malarkey business. Equally, it’s also something which annoys me intensely. The whole subject seems to have gone off the boil (to regurgitate a phrase) in recent years, with only a fairly recent pick-up.

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So, at the Iain Banks talk, I was originally going to suggest one of the ‘laws’ that might be appropriate, but then decided that I was going to keep it to myself; thought I think it rather fits in with the spirit of the Culture. So much so, that I might have subconsciously absorbed something like it from his novels. Anyway, Hammond’s First Law – and the associated arrogance which goes along with it – is this: “Any technology distinguishable from magic is an insufficient hoot”.

Sounds like something a Mind would say.

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Slightly sad news, as far as I’m concerned, this weekend when my old laptop - an HP DV1588 - finally ended up in Silicon Heaven. The noteworthy (if you choose to take it that way) part of all this is that it’s the machine on which I put together Heavy Lies the Crown, editing a substantial chunk of the movie on it, doing most of the compositing and rendering a number of CG effects. I bought it after my old Desktop had gone the same way, picking it purely on the basis that it had enough spec to let me finish the film. It even appeared in a couple of TV news items with me, where I pretended I was editing on the spot for the camera crews.

Why do I get so fond of these things?

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Via Mike at Life of a Games Programmer, I present the end sequence for Lemmings II, which has my name in it! The reason for this is that I designed some levels for it. Wow, I haven’t seen this since sometime late last century!

Update: Sorry, the video has vanished.

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