Posts on Jan 1970

Melb hols + Adam the Trooper.

Off to Melb in a bit. For mostly hols, I think I’ll need a short break before what is to come. Lenore recently scored a grading opportunity in the same studios as superman returns. I’m not quite sure what grading does (about to find out though), but anything associated with some sort of Hollywood related tech gear sounds pretty schweet to me.

I am learning heaps about film production watching my crew work, and sometimes helping with bits and pieces, and I like that they take the time to explain to me what the hell’s going on half the time. It’s been fun, beats trying to pretend you know filming by watching extras on DVD anyways.

At the moment, Lenore is in a process called up-ressing. I already have a final cut of Lenore’s in my hand which I will randomly flash at people I meet. It’s a fun calling card. Be patient though, I’m told the final product will be 10 times better.

Anyways, to initially edit the clip, a low res version of all 17000 digital pics had to be made. This is so that the 2 gig ram on Adam’s computer doesn’t choke. Even then, it occasionally splutters. So with up-ressing (you guessed it), it involves going through the original res pics, deciding which pics you have used for the final cut and then replacing the low res clip with the high res images. AIKH! Hardwork! Bonza to Adam who is ploughing through that like a mighty trooper.

Lenore Diaries (crew meets& pre-shoots)

Here’s a couple more diary entries…

Sunday (Crew Meeting)

Yeah yeah…I ain’t the crew but still. It’s fun to be invited to one..but you do get lost in all the industry lingo….

Interesting to learn that any object of focus is called a “hero” and it can extend beyond humans. E.g; If a cup is the focus, it is kindly referred to as the Hero cup. Then there’s the “Hero hour” basically time of shoot…etc etc. Information for the day.

The first assistant director is Jamie Platt. He usually works on the set of “Home and Away” as 2nd assistant director. Am strangely honoured in his presence, though I don’t really watch soaps. Speaking of which, I celebrate my 1 year TV abstinence sometime this month. Thanks to pesky reality TV.

Anyways the job of a 1st assistant director has something of a right brain function. Since the director is an immensely creative being, the 1st assistant director plays the part of a devil’s advocate.

“can we do this in 3 days?”
“how can we do it?”
“can we really fit these 5 scenes in 1 afternoon?”
“how?”
“Maybe we should let this scene go…we have plenty of other good scenes…”
“Do we really need to drive to Tempe to hire a BUS?!!” – (Tempe is 1.5 hours away from location in peak hour traffic.)

Here’s where I feel for Tahnee…whose creative soul is slowly eaten alive under the weight of practical issues. A fellow creative feels pain like that strongly.

Tarnia (set designer) is fretting over pregnant lady body costume. Jamie has volunteered costumes from Home and Away. Works out quite good. Here’s Tarnia having some fun.

Apparently, the costume makes it hard for you to breath and stuff.

Very realistic.

Somewhere in time on a certain Tuesday: Pre- Shoot takes – Matt insists this is NOT day 1 of the shoot.

Shooting begins on a Tuesday for some of us. The actual shoots are to take place on Fri to Sat on the end of March. Tuesday’s footage will basically be used on the shots for the weekend…

You see, we are shooting pictures within pictures. These are the animated photograph scenes.

My day begins early at 6am. I’ve been told to cut excerpts from Lenore’s where there will be Syncing. Being the Queen of last minute jaunts, this is me at 6am busy making the sound clips and on the second cup of concentrated caffeinated beverage.

Here are excerpts of how slowly I will be singing the song for your amusement. –as I said…the world of digital stills is a s-l-o-w one.

10.45 — I trek down Surry hills with my trusty sandals and boots in my bag. I’m crazy not stupid to do hilly Sydney in a pair of high-heeled boots. No freaking way. Packed into my mini luggage is my laptop (aka zombie girl), external drive, trusty USB 2.0 card reader.

I forgot to mention that crew today is small, and aside from starring in roles, I am now officially acting head of tech department.

11am — I’m at location. A little lost when an army of make up artists from Final Checks have already arrived and are ready to paint the apprehensive subject.

The first thing Debbie whips out is a shaving knife – I was duly rendered facially hairless as I chant “for my art, for the love of my art, for the love of my fucking art”. I’m thinking sheep shaving, then I’m thinking human skins, I’m thinking writing paper made of skin. Your mind likes to bring up strange issues of concern when you are under duress.

Her apprentice Janine, is looking at me with strange pity – I was hoping for actual salvation but oh well…Christina Ricci’s geisha look is stapled on the wall to the left of me. We’ve decided on a boof-head geisha styled look. So here it is.

Callan and Tahnee are in the back of the house setting up the lights. This is a shot where I become a moving picture. I wish I had more behind the scenes pics but then you can’t go around playing journalist when you ARE the scene…☹

4 scenes to get down for me…
1) crazy geisha mode (white)
2) pompous vindictive Victorian
3) red dressed wild haired thing @ alleyway
4) screaming thing

Without going into too much detail, crazy geisha mode probably took the most effort.

Make-up had to be applied at every 10 shots to make it look like I was crying. Debbie was standing by with drops to wash the eyeballs. And no I’m not shit hot as an actress with the whole emotional display thing.

USB 2.0 card reader worked like a dream. We used USB 1.0 the other day and time-wise it was suicide. 100-odd pics averaged a 20 minute dload time. With 2.0, 5 mins was max.

Zombie girl is slurping lots of data today. Love my PowerBook G4.

4pm and my scenes are done. This is when I first meet Mini-me. Otherwise known in the real world as Stephanie Parthenos. Stephanie is a wee 6 year old who is secretly 5. She plays a younger, less screwed up version of me. Cute-eh?

Somewhere on the set. I’m watching Stephanie slowly walk the longest 10 metres of her life. She’s unbelievably patient and animated as she moves slowly and delicately around in digital stills world.

Somewhere on the set, my boots start to feel like well carved torture devices. I want my sandals and I want them now…

Thursday eve of Day 1

With a little maths and some well wielded amounts of estimation. I sense that my current data storage isn’t going to hold.

Picture this: a single pic shot in RAW format comes up to 12 MB.
15 frames /second is the frame rate chosen
Wild ideas will come up here and there to make the original 3 min 30 clip come up to 20 mins thereabout worth of footage pre-edits
Makes it round about 17000 photos for the 3 days. (to be safe)
=Round about slightly less than 191GB. (for the paranoid)

A new drive and a RAM upgrade was in order, and it had finally arrived in the nick of time.

Introducing new toys:

Ice Cube and 1 gb of RAM…beautiful RAM. All ready for tomorrow. Tech dept also bought DVDs to back up the footages as they are made. More in a bit.

Bye bye Drone World…(hopefully forever)

All being equal (if not before), 4th August 2006 is the official last day of my drone life for awhile…hopefully permanently. With an upcoming album and video clip crowning, I’m going to give music a shot full time. I think I owe this to myself and all who have believed in me thus far.

Thank you for that.

Meanwhile let’s drink to

A new life
Courage
Taking chances
Faith
and fellow dreamers

Wish me luck. My climb begins now.

Dear muse

Dear muse/s

I have no delusions about who is in control here. I know it’s not me. If someone’s going to drag me by the hair with a tune in her head, it’s going to be you.

Not me.

You set the goals, not me. You decide when you are going to write 15 songs in 2 days or 5 songs in 365 days. I now know it’s your call. I also know that 3 days ain’t going to cut it for a writing break, because you are probably going to want to spend the first 7 days cleaning up and catching up on reading and doing whatever you damn well please. Yes I know that…I finally find 3 days of slack time and you made me vacuum the vortexes aka blackholes forming in my room just so u can write.

So we have ended up…not quite writing again. You are a Nazi at times but I’ll only love you more.

Books and films to be read and seen remain mountainous and I realise you probably want to catch up on all before you ever speak to me again. I realise that I haven’t really been listening to you and it is only right that you grant me the same courtesy of silence after all this time.

After all I’ve been ignoring you. By painful choice. Because I want to get to the point of being able to speak to you all the time everytime for the rest of my life and not be tainted by drone world.

To pull that off, sometimes you’re going to have to take a back seat only somestimes.Still, I apologise deeply. I do miss you lots. I miss waking up at 3am with you because you had something to tell me. I miss learning from you even when sleep eludes me in the studio. I guess I just miss my friend.

I promise you that sometime in August, rain or shine I will lock myself away from humanity for a minimum of 8 weeks and be with you again…but first there is much to do before we fuck off to the hills to be an artist.

It would be fun…just u and I. See u then but do drop by.

eh…finally an all ages gig

It’s been awhile but starting up the gig machine yet again. These days it’s been a loop of activities like that. Gig for abit, go online for a bit…write for abit…so forth…I’ve lately found a way to survive on 3 hours sleep.

check out this crazy labrat. Of course, I’m tempted enough to try it on meself. I cannot tell you how useful an extra 20 hours will be for me.

Here are details of my next gig. 18+ ONLY. (Younger readers scroll downwards)

Location: Kelly’s Irish Pub
Time: 8pm
Date: March 14th

Then there’s an ALL AGES gig coming up on April 1st. So if you have been discriminated because of your age…Here’s your chance to roam free in my realm

Details on here
Time and other itty bitty little bits TBC. But see you all soon

murderous thoughts

Just lost a post…so I’m a little evil.
—Warning – if you see yourself as a pretty moralistic individual, you might prefer to look away …now.—-They are after all theories I pull out of a pretty psychotic head, I trust you will do well to dismiss them. So there.

Delusions aside, Earth time is really one down from Hell. I mean, in hell you know you’ve fucked it all up and the pressure’s over . On earth, you can be stuck in a bowl of pretty acidic crap and still have to decide over the issues of god damned moralities.

It’s a bummer. That’s why I don’t do religious discussions well. Nor do I understand the concept of good and evil. I tell you what I DO understand though, tis the concept of convenience—namely, principles of attaining a balance between long term vs short term benefits and convenience

That I understand. Allow me to illustrate with a few practical examples from my daily life.

Attaining Radio Airplay 101
Short term convenience – Hire a bazooka, hold a heist at triple J or any other major radio station, put a gun to their heads or better yet de-animate everyone, take over the station for 5 – 20 minutes, depending of pig intelligence.(See footnote) Stick my album in, hit PLAY. Then interview myself — the psycho singer chick
Benefits: I get my airtime. The broadcasted gun shots will be something to remember.
Even when I get caught, I will be a big time anti celebrity…freaking YAY-ness!
Cons: It will be decidedly inconvenient once the cops bust in on my act.
It will also be decidedly inconvenient when I have to enjoy fame from prison, or the authorities could go one up, send me back to Singapore, where they will dangle me from a rope.

Ding Dong Bell.
Yunyu goes to hell.

–oops.

So really, it isn’t the concept of Good and bad that stops me from being a murderous, psycho brat. It really is about the concept of convenience. A lot (definitely not all) of “bad” actions come from the need to fulfil some sort of short term benefits, then of course, you screw up the minute you act on it.

So I guess life is really about trying to find that balance between long term and short term benefits and convenience, otherwise known in the normal realm as GOOD vs EVIL.

Take the concept of societal morals.

What really prevents you from murdering your fellow human bean? The reasons really vary, depending on how you have been schooled:

The religious will tell you that it’s the concept of heaven and hell. Being in hell and burning for all eternity I guess…is decidedly inconvenient. That’s probably why we don’t kill the asshole behaving like a total dick in your office.

The scared will tell you that you get thrown in jail. Which is again…decidedly inconvenient.

So what really really holds it all together? My theory is only that if we are truly allowed to kill each other at will, without societal payback, the world on the whole becomes unsafe, i.e decidedly inconvenient.

So we have laws, we have rules..that basically say, I won’t be an asshole if you won’t. Together we can TRY and live happily ever after. Of course when all fails, we have what is known as war.

That’s really all that’s keeping me from spraying everyone at an Australian Idol concert and the like.

Back to the spidey lair for me…this post is decidedly…
Pointless.

Right Now…

Right now I’ve got a voodoo doll of a certain sound guy taped under my sustain pedal. May his chest implode.

Right now on the eve of 6/6/6 Lenore is awaiting grading in Superman Return’s studios. Coolios. My film crew rocks. (Work your charm Callan) Looks like another couple of days of delay. Dang (I was actually stoked about the 666 bit)

Right now I’ve decided that 31/7/06 is when I fuck off to the hills to be an artist.

Right now, Tom is scaring the shit out of me.

Right now…I’m a little snowed under with the album related preps. more soon….I promise

Lenore's Video clip is DONE!!

As of last Friday,

Lenore’s Song was declared complete. Trish Cahill (Senior colourist, Superman Returns) handed the tape gingerly over. Hushed silence befalls the crewe, as the crew no longer wants to incur the cold wrath of Lenore.

In Lenore’s wake, we mourn the loss of 7 machines and a spooked editor. The crew hopes that Lenore’s machine killing spree ends here.

Please, Ladies and Gentlemen, spare us a minute of silence for our fallen machine comrades who have died for the sake of great art. They are:

2 apple powerbook G4
1 Apple G5
1 2GB ram
1 External drive
2 digibeta tape transfer machines.

Now that we’re done with the dramatics. I’ll be spending the next few days burning DVDs or CDs of the clip for my loyal minions who buy the album.

Have locked in online release at 1st week August (if Australia post doesn’t fail me)

More in a bit, I must head back to Spidey’s lair! Busy Busy times.

We have a shelf life

Time now is 1,2,3,4,5,6

This of course assumes that humanity will have been successfully exterminated by year 3006. wise words