Category: General

Another year down, another short film in the can.

Today I’ll talk a little about my history with 48hours, and my experience competing this time around. After my short has been screened I might also write about my production design, decisions, specific problems, and so on – but for today I’m going to stay away from anything that might be a spoiler.

If you’re not familiar with the V48HOURS event, it brings somewhere between 700 & 800 teams of enthusiastic amateur and professional filmmakers together on a Friday evening, who are locked away in a room in each of the main centres, given a randomly selected genre, as well as a required character, line of dialog, prop, and special technical element, then sent away at 7pm to make a film. You can’t write or shoot anything in advance, no one is allowed to be paid for their work on the film, and it has to be delivered before 7pm on Sunday evening. Deliver at 7:00:01 and you’re out of the competition.

In my opinion, the competition shouldn’t be the point of participation. With so many talented people working their hearts out the prospects of standing out at all, let alone placing is very small. So you should do it for fun, or because you want to challenge yourself, or you just shouldn’t do it at all.

I used to compete with a bunch of old friends in a team called Fractured Radius. They’d been going for a few years before I joined them, and they’d done quite well a couple of times but I told them that if they ever wanted to win, I’d help out. I like to think it’s no coincidence that the first time I helped write, we won the Auckland competition. But it probably is a coincidence.

That’s me and the girl at the starting line, on Friday night, along with dear friend James Brown, who this year finally joined me in breaking away from the Fractured Radius mothership and started his own team.

In 2010, because I wanted to direct, and because I generally had creative & process differences with the team, I left Fractured Radius, this was a hard decision, both because Fractured Radius is a great team full of my friends, and because it’s incredibly well resourced, but sometimes you really do just have to build your own thing.

So I formed my own team Ladies, oh ladies, and got a different group of friends together to have some fun and make a movie.

It didn’t go very well.

The film we made was called Action Manu.

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/11035444[/vimeo]

I’d love to make a lot of excuses, but the reality is I couldn’t work with the genre (biopic), and wrote a meandering story with an incredibly weak ending. My direction was also very weak, partly because I was new at it, but also partly because I was working with such dear friends, so instead of telling people what to do, I just let things happen. Still, that genre.

Not knowing what you’re going to make is part of the challenge, but along with that comes the risk that you’ll get something you’re completely unsuited to.

Anyway, my self-criticisms would take a hundred posts to detail, so let’s just say I had a great time working with my friends, and it was a huge learning experience.

Last year, 2011, I got a completely different group together, and we made a film I’m extremely proud of, a very challenging, and very polarising film called Kill Therapist.

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/24344425[/vimeo]

I’m not going to drop spoilers on my own film here, but please be aware that my assigned genre last year was revenge, and I made sure to give my protagonist a reason to want revenge. People who are very young or of a nervous disposition shouldn’t watch.

Some people really loved it, but many people didn’t like it at all.

Everyone who dislikes it has their own reasons. Fair call. I’m a harsh critic myself. If you didn’t like it, tell me about it, I’ll listen. But I’m absolutely certain that some of the people disliked it because they misunderstood something. And that is they actually think I was trying to make a comedy.

If I’m being funny, you’re laughing.

Fact.

But I’ve heard that criticism from a bunch of people now, so I’m certain that misperception hurt the film. I actually find it inexplicable. I wonder if it’s simply because there’s an expectation set up by the nature of the 48hours comp, most of the films in the comp are funny, that was the expectation, so that was the reality.

I’ve actually been told that I should be ashamed of taking the subject so lightly. I didn’t think I had, but once a film is out there, other people get to load their own interpretations onto it.

That’s part of the bargain of producing creative work.

Regardless of the criticism, like I said, I’m extremely proud of that work. I think I performed well as an actor. The whole team did a perfect job. I had more fun than I’ve ever had in 48hours.

But once again the ending wasn’t quite right – not as bad as Action Manu, but it still didn’t build right, and it didn’t really pop.

The problem there is really threefold, firstly there was no time to put it into the storyboarded sequence, it was never intended to be linear, secondly I didn’t follow the time tested structure for this type of film (with that type of revenge film there’s usually an act that follows the recovery & training/preparation for vengeance), and lastly I had to cut some scenes from the end – there was a sequence we shot that was going to play interspersed with the credits – that would have really capped the film off, but it required a lot of special effects, so it just had to go.

So that’s Kill Therapist. Work I’m very proud of which garnered a very mixed response. Where do you go from there?

Where I decided to go, this year, was go it completely alone. To ramp the difficulty up to another level. To see if I could actually find my breaking point. You see, as difficult as the challenge of v48hours is, it’s never beaten me, so I’d gotten cocky. I thought that the only risk I was taking was to make work that I didn’t like, I didn’t think that I’d ever actually fail.

So, I opted to go solo, but in the end I was joined by Selena, and we really made a great team.

My normal process is much the same as many others’, brainstorm & write on Friday, storyboard & get props on Saturday morning, shoot for as long as it takes, then edit on Sunday.

I don’t think there’s an alternative that will produce a good film. I know some people start shooting on Friday night, but I need to take some time to write and get everything in order.

This time around I’m certain that I had the best writing experience I’ve ever had doing 48hours, after a little disappointment with my genre (Urban Legend), I realised that it was actually the broadest genre available this year, that I could essentially make whatever I liked. So I did. It was great fun.

And I was still so cocksure, that I really took my time on Saturday, I went out to a cafe for breakfast with Selena, drew my storyboards (storyboards are an important part of my process, I don’t know how anyone can make a film without them), and didn’t actually start shooting until Saturday evening.

I think we shot for 6 or 7 hours. Which isn’t so bad really, though we did get interrupted a couple of times by a helicopter hovering around nearby which was incredibly frustrating.

Then I made a long cut, with all my favourite one or two takes of each shot, in storyboard order, before heading to bed about 7am and got about 3 hours of sleep.

But the edit was the worst.

I’d shot 46 green screen shots, so in addition to the usual editing all of them had to be keyed and composited. Even with the invaluable help of Selena prioritising my production order (working through the storyboard to find all the shots that required the same work, etc), it was clear by mid-afternoon that it was going to be tight, and then in short order it was obvious that it wasn’t going to work at all.

I’d set myself an overwhelming task, and was being whelmed in all kinds of bad ways.

At 3:20pm, while waiting for a yet another green screen shot to render I sent a simple yet mournful text to Dylan, team lead of Fractured Radius.

Pretty sure I’m not going to make it.

By 5:00pm I was miserable, and nearly broken. I knew that my funny, silly, sweet short wasn’t going to be anywhere near completed, but I was desperate to make it work. So I persisted.

I asked Selena to see what we could cut that would maintain some semblance of coherence, to have any continuity, and she figured out a possible way forward. It would require cutting perhaps 60% of the story.

But there was something else that needed doing as well, along with the other required elements, every film has to have a team introduction included. It’s one of the very few things that you’re actually allowed to prepare in advance, but for whatever reason, I hadn’t made one.

According to the timestamp on the file, I loaded the footage from the camera and audio recorder at 6:10, and had the intro green screened, audio synced, and text added on the end and rendered just 3 minutes later.

It was now about 6:15pm and it was time to try to put Selena’s rescue plan into action. I cut out a lot of scenes. Deleting work that had taken me hours to complete earlier in the day. I cut some scenes shorter to exclude sequences that I knew would no longer make any sense, and I moved some things around a little bit.

I wanted to make sure it worked, but there was no time to watch it through. There wasn’t really time to do anything. I put the required credits on the end, dropped my intro into the timeline, and hit render.

It was 6:47pm and as I watched the final render bar filling up I sent Dylan another text.

49%. Cut most of the funny stuff. Wish me luck.

It was obviously impossible to get it to the Aotea Centre by 7pm, but Selena went and got the car out and said she’d be waiting by the front gate.

The render finished at 6:48. I copied my film to a USB stick, then bolted for the door, ran down the stairs rather than risking waiting for the lift, and hit the gate at a run. Selena was right outside, I jumped in the car “go, go, go!” it was like I was running for my life.

She hauled ass.

I’d been thinking about this route for hours, knowing that no matter how well things went it would be incredibly tight. I hadn’t ever counted on the worst case scenario, but now I was living it.

There are 10 sets of lights between my home and the finish line. Ask me how I know. I was watching the clock in the car tick up. 6:54 we’re at a red. 6:56 we’re at another red.

By 6:58, after the fastest and most nervewracking drive into town I’ve ever experienced we were at the intersection into the Civic carpark, another red light. But I’d already decided what I’d do if we came to this point. So I jumped out of the car without hesitating and ran for it. Straight down the ramp, past all the “NO PEDESTRIAN” signs, straight past the entry gate, and through the carpark.

I knew I only had seconds to make it, so I was running as fast as I could. It was that speed where you know that if you go even the slightest bit faster you won’t be able to keep up with yourself and will take a header. I pushed on.

Rounding the final corner out of the carpark. I could hear the huge crowd inside screaming and shouting. But I couldn’t hear the countdown any more, so I knew the doors were closed already before I could even see them. But I was wrong, the doors weren’t closed, and then suddenly I was in the lane running between jubilant screaming throngs, giving high fives all the way up.

Sometimes you want the clock in your car to be accurate, and sometimes it’s a good idea for it to be a little bit fast.

If we’d caught even one more red light, I wouldn’t have made it. If there’d been even the slightest hitch at any point during the render and copy process, I wouldn’t have made it.

48hours completely broke me, but I still made it.

The only thing is, I didn’t have any time to watch it right through.

It was never a “sensible” short, but now I don’t know if it makes any sense at all. From the storyboard it should, we cut carefully, but there was so little time, there are so many possible mistakes. The things that only take me a moment to fix if I know about them. The things I’d only know about if I’d actually watched the film. Even if there aren’t any glaring mistakes, that doesn’t mean it’s still fun – and it’s meant to be fun. It doesn’t provide any guarantee that my carefully written story will flow at all.

Apart from during the opening sequence which I completed early in the day, it doesn’t have any of the planned music that I’d so carefully selected on Saturday morning, or most of the sound effects I indicated on the board. It has none of the voiceovers or additional special stuff I’d planned.

But I don’t care.

I made it with my best friend.
It made me miserable.
It made her cry.
But it’s in.

And this Friday night I’m going to watch it on the big screen with a big crowd of strangers, and some friends, and that’s the first time I’ll get to watch my short. And I really want it to be good, I really want them to like it.

But that matters so much less to me than that we made it, we made it in both senses, and that can never be undone.

 

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I’m allowed to have 18 “crew” at my heat, but I had a team of only two, so I’d love it if you’d come along and support all the filmmakers and watch a bunch of shorts with me. Many will be bad, but some will be brilliant. And you know, you could do worse than voting for my short for audience favourite. That would be really nice.

The screening is at 7pm on Friday the 25th in the Academy Cinema on Lorne Street in Auckland City, right under the central library. Entry is free, and I’ve never seen the cinema fill up during a heat, but it’s not really meant to be for the general public, so if anyone asks, tell them you’re with me.

Some characters are so iconic that even representing them as the simple bands of colour, they’re instantly recognisable. I have such powerful, fond memories from my childhood of Lucky Luke & the Dalton Gang; Asterix, Dogmatix & Obelix; Ber & Ernie; and so on, that I recognised all of these instantly. Amazing things, brains.

It’s interesting to note how completely contrary these designs are to the modern approach to Lego, where they appear to design specific pieces for single uses – which is nothing like the approach they used to take, where the creativity was in making something from universal blocks, not in merely being able to follow a blueprint.

Compare these characters to bionicles, for instance.

//via Creative Criminals

It seems the current National government have decided that city & district councils do too many things for their communities, and they want them to stop.

From article “Govt puts the squeeze on councils” by Kate Chapman and Kay Blundell in The Dominion Post:

Local Government Minister Nick Smith today released his “Better Local Government” plan which he said would provide clarity around the role of councils and improve efficiency.

A major focus of the plan is introducing new fiscal responsibilities for councils.

“The rapid rise in council expenditure and borrowing over the past decade has seen some councils reach unsustainable levels of debt,” said Mr Smith.

He said the reforms would help keep rates affordable following an average rise of 7 per cent a year since 2002.

Last week, Wellington City Council said rates could rise by 4.4 per cent.

The aim was to limit expenditure growth to no faster than inflation and population growth. Except in extraordinary events such as disaster recovery expenditure.

The government’s justification for this change is that council expenditure is out of control, however the Department of Internal Affairs says something different, from a (now suspiciously deleted) page in the Our Policy Advice Areas section of their website on Rates Increases, they specifically say:

Why are rates increasing?

Rates have risen an average of nine percent this year. This includes commercial and residential properties.

Infrastructure provision has been the main reason for rates increases in the past few years and for projected increases over the next 10 years.

That’s right, the Department of Internal Affairs says that rates have been rising because councils have been investing in infrastructure projects. Not because councils have been running music festivals or swimming pools or programmes to reduce the impact of child poverty in their communities. Infrastructure.

The reason for this rise in council spending on infrastructure? From the DIA site again:

Past under-investment in infrastructure and maintenance.

There are other reasons listed, they include increased external costs for fuel, rising population, and lower tolerance of pollution.

The government try to tell us that the increased spending is because councils are out of control and wasting money in areas they have no business being in, and that they’re proposing these changes to force councils to get back to core business.

This is a lie.

The Department of Internal Affairs policy advice tells us that the spending increase is because we’ve had years of under investment in infrastructure. They’re spending so much now, because they’re trying to put that right.

The National government will try to tell spin it, they’ll say that the problem is that councils are wasting money supporting festivals, public swimming pools, running social programmes, and on providing local art and culture.

How do I know they’ll do this? Because they’ve already started.

This morning National Party mouthpiece* David Farrar posted (“An example of why local government reform is needed“) on his popular site Kiwiblog about Horowhenua District Council engaging in a joint venture with Focal Point Cinema to re-open Levin’s only movie theatre. A movie theatre which had been closed by its owner, leaving the town with no operating cinema at all.

Farrar is pretending to be care about this cinema partnership because the towns of Shannon & Tokomaru, which are under Horowhenua District Council control, have received “Precautionary Boil Water” notices. David’s suggestion is that if it wasn’t for the Council’s cinema partnership, those towns would have water treatment plants turning out deliciously sweet and crystal clear water.

Now, the cinema was re-opened in 2010, and the ‘Boil Water Notice’ was issued in 2011. So why it’s coming up now is a bit boggling until you come to the obvious conclusion is that it’s politically expedient, the government is receiving push-back on their planned changes to the law, so they’re trying to seed controversy. The fact that they had to delve so far down into the bottom of the barrel to find anything that even appears to support the Government’s claims of council profligacy should be revealing.

It doesn’t matter to David that according to the Horowhenua District Council’s own boil water notice the problem isn’t that they have no water treatment, but that the area was running on reserve supplies because the water treatment plants supplying those areas had been overloaded by flooding.

It doesn’t matter that Horowhenua District Council has a 3 million dollar water treatment plant for Shannon funded and in the design process, with deployment planned for 2013. Or that Horowhenua District Council has an even larger water treatment plant & reservoir planned for nearby Levin, budgeted at around 10 million dollars.

It doesn’t matter that they very clearly aren’t distracted from their infrastructure obligations in the slightest by the cinema project.

It doesn’t matter to National that the water infrastructure projects have a combined cost of something around 26x more than the trifling little cinema partnership.

And it also doesn’t apparently matter that the cinema project is what would popularly be called a Public Private Partnership, which you’d think would be eagerly supported by a right-winger.

They don’t care about the details, because they know that most people won’t look them up.

Most people will read the headlines and they’ll think “I pay rates and I don’t want them to be wasted, so let’s get these council lunatics under control”.

Well guess what, my dear rate-paying friend, those rates you pay aren’t being wasted. On the contrary, in the majority of cases, your rates are being put to exactly the sort of use you’d hope. You’re being lied to by your government. But don’t feel bad if you believe them, they’re very convincing because they’ve got so very much practice.

Now, of course there are bad projects out there. Councils can be dysfunctional. They’re full of people, after all. But those misuses of funding appear to be a drop in the bucket in the grand scheme of things. Breaking the entire system in order to get rid of those edge cases makes no sense.

Note that nowhere in their spin does the National government ever say that once they restrict our councils’ funding will they pick up any of the slack.

No, once the central government stops the district & city councils from providing services, they’ll just hope that private business picks it up.

Spoilers: they won’t.

Levin wouldn’t have gotten their cinema re-opened without their council stepping up. They previously had a cinema run by a private business. It closed it down.

Which business will pick up the pieces if Porirua City Council is forced to end their child poverty programmes?

No one will.

But then we come to the second prong to the central government’s attack on the councils.

Because National’s not only squeezing councils’ funding, they’re also changing other parts of the Local Government Act 2002, which is the rule book on how councils operate.

Where the Act currently makes references to “social, economic, environmental and cultural well-being of communities”, these will now be changed to “providing good quality local infrastructure, public services and regulatory functions at the least possible cost to households and business”.

Spot the glaring differences.

So even if councils are somehow able to find the money to continue work on their current social or cultural programmes to benefit the community, they’ll no longer be allowed to.

We elect our councils democratically. If they have programmes that we don’t like, we can vote for someone else.

In Auckland we’ve seen regular swings from one side of the political spectrum to the other, no single ideology is ever in complete control permanently.

The point of democracy is that sometimes you get your way, and sometimes you have to suck it up while the other guy has his, but what the current National government are doing is changing the rules so that councils are forced to behave the way National wants, even when the local voters haven’t voted for National.

We need to send them a message that this isn’t the way it works.

National failed to get their way with the Auckland Supercity, losing control of the mayoralty and the council, but they still want to be able to tell us what to do.

If the National Party wants to control what councils do, then they should do what everyone else has to do: win council elections. Then, and only then, should they get to decide the focus of any city or district council.

Convince the local community of your programmes, win an election, implement your proposals.

Otherwise, leave community issues to the local community.

 

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* David Farrar has repeatedly protested that he’s not on the National Party’s payroll, I believe him. However that doesn’t mean he isn’t gladly doing their bidding.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAzDzEjvg4s[/youtube]

Make sure you watch this instructional video before the giveway rules change, it provides important additional information.

 

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My first give way rules video ‘If you’re turning right, give way’ is also available.

Fact: New Zealand’s education system is the envy of much of the world.

This is a matter of pride for many of us, I’m sure, but it simply does not suit the National government’s “private is best and nothing the government does is ever any good” ideology, so let’s do all we can to break it, how about that for an idea?

According to this article ‘Class size life could help education’ (NZ Herald) the latest claim out of Treasury is that if we increase class sizes by “about 3” students, we’ll be able to have less teachers overall, so we can pay the ones we still have more, so we’ll then (somehow) have more gifted and master teachers, and that will somehow make things better.

I think it goes something like this:

1. Increase class sizes
2. Fire a bunch of teachers
3. ???
4. Profit!

Step 3 is left to sort itself out, but we’ll probably hear the phrase Public Private Partnership at some point. Don’t you know that private business never do anything stupid or wrong, never mind that about 80% fail in their first year. Because privately run businesses are SO EFFICIENT, and the public sector is mumble-mumble-let’s-sell-it-all-off.

Something along those lines. (We’ve heard this all before.)

Treasury say that “master teachers”, through their skill at the job, teach so well that educational outcomes for students turn out to be about the same as students who were in smaller classes.

Their number is that it’s the equivalent of about a 10 pupil reduction.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this were true. Gifted teachers are inspiring. I think we’ve probably all had one (or if we’re extraordinarily lucky, 2) at some point. They make you strive, they show you the way forward, and they help you figure out how to get there.

But here’s the thing, maybe 1% of teachers is really gifted. You can’t send a normal teacher on a week long training course and turn them into a gifted teacher.

So we’d still only have about 1% of these amazingly high performing teachers. But the class sizes for all teachers across the board, including the very large majority who are merely good, and the few who are (frankly) bad, would also increase.

In other words, we’d have worsened the likely educational outcomes for 99% of pupils.

Exactly who do they expect to buy the rubbish they’re trying to sell us?

I’ll give you three guesses which kinds of schools will remain entirely unaffected by these changes, and continue to have wonderful educational outcomes for their (mainly white, mainly rich) pupils. Some valid answers will rhyme with words like “Drammer Bone”, or “Brivate Stools”.

There is literally no education system in the entire world where teachers are paid so little, yet perform at such a high standard that their students come out topping the global educational outcome rankings.

Don’t understand how good our system is? Check out this revealing chart (as seen on DimPost):

New Zealand’s education system is a top performer, and by comparison with other countries that perform anywhere near our standard is headshakingly underfunded.

So I have a different suggestion than Treasury:
Don’t mess with a good thing, don’t try to fix something that already works, and just as an aside, maybe leave the design and future of our education system to education experts, not bean counters.

One very important note, as good as I believe our education system to be in the main, it’s clear that many Maori & Pacific Island students, and students in lower socio-economic groups generally, have much worse educational outcomes than desired.

Our system is not perfect, I’m sure it’s possible to make changes that will make the results for our people even better. But the idea that increasing class sizes is the way ahead is completely boggling.

But if any improvements are identified, it’s the teachers who are the ones who are qualified to tell us what they are. Then Treasury can do the vital job of helping find the money to pay for it.

But until that happens, they should stick to their actual job which is advising the Government on economic matters, not on education.

 

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Updated to note that there is some discussion on YCombinator about limitations of the design of the study behind the Pupil score as a function of teacher salaries chart. I don’t believe those design limitations change its relevance in this context, just don’t read too much into the chart in terms of greater causation. Thanks to Keith Patton on Twitter for providing the YCombinator reference.

[youtube width=”640″ height=”380″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pw-2LZT7Ys[/youtube]

This is very important info.

 

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My second give way rules video ‘Top of the T goes before me’ is also available.

I got this handsome chap in Art Museum shop in the Mori Tower in Tokyo, you’re meant to colour them in and customise them to suit yourself, but I’ve never been able to bring myself to sully his milky perfection. One day.

Check out this gallery of customised Munnys, some of them are completely bonkers. Not many Raffys though.

Tonight I’m getting the band back together.

Since Discourse has been on hiatus I’ve moved to a standing desk (the desk here is around my navel height), I don’t know how this will affect the show, or if it will affect it at all. Maybe my voice will sound different? Maybe I’ll be more impatient?

Regardless, the show is going to be a train wreck, we’re doing it live, and once again doing it with streaming video. But I’ve set things up to be a bit more flash than last time we did that (though still not nearly as flash as the Election Show, which was ridiculously flash), with clever video switching, multiple video angles in the studio, Skype co-hosts calling in, and interacting with whatever audience is left following the break, who will be heckling us from the chat room.

It’s all very exciting, you know. I hope you can make it.