Ready, set, kinda go-ish

The set as at November 1. The ducting was Corm's idea, which he liberated from the Fairfax Warehouse of crap, the walls were painted thanks to a bucket of the stuff found in my garage (Thanks Mr and Mrs Cordalis) and Corm also made up the consoley-thingies from cardboard and glue.

All Soul’s Day. Also Richard Soles Day. Not so popular a religious festival.

The set is taking shape. There is a plasma ball to go under the big light shade, a couple of lcd screens to go in, but it pretty, sort of, ok and once the A/V stuff is in and proven not to be a death trap, we can get to work with that filming stuff which is suppose to be important. I think we’re at least up to Blake’s Seven on the crapometer scale, so that’s nice.

To be honest, Blakes 7 does have a slightly better piece of ducting than we do. But our desk is cooler.

Gemma make silk purses out of sow ears

 

This had better be the XXL model or Gemma's work is about to be rapidly undone.

Of course, once I don the Kiwi Space Patrol Sous Chef battle shirt, it shall once again magically turn back into a sow’s ear.

The one with all the fancy stuff is Commander Alex’s. It includes the shoulder patch that Alistair designed and Embroidery Specialists in Wellington made.  I only had 10 made due to budgetary constraints. Most of them were pretty round. Well, spheroidal. Which is in keeping with the theme.

Steve Qian came up with a banner for the website proper. It is of such luminous beauty I had to tell him to hide it lest its glory outshines the final movie.  Well, I can bloody guarantee that now and we haven’t even started shooting.

It's a beautiful thing. It also has a built-in neurotransmitting spinal-linked computer. Though Alex doesn't know that yet.

Pah, Blake’s Seven never had a desk with big balls

The set, as put together by Australian Robotic Service Enterprises.

Well, we got promoted from the concrete alcove to the Hidden Studio of Storage, deep within the mysterious rabbit warren of the Olde Building of the Dominion Post. (Thanks Tim Nunan and Wayne Hunn. And Rowan for the big pannelly things).

Cormac and I lugged this goddam desk up from the furniture storage area, the big bally things came from a Lower Hutt company (if you want to know more, ask me, but I think it’s kind of a secret … I’ll check with Corm). The seats came from Upper Hutt for a buy off Trademe (Great trade, thanks Pierced1). Funnily enough, as I took a load of crap up to the Silverstream tip for the olds, there were two old car seats lying there waiting for the bulldozer to deal to them. I should have leapt in and grabbed them, but I feared being mocked and pelted by the locals.  Hard crowd, that Silverstream tip lot.

Anyway, Gemma has the costumes in hand, we have some flashy led lights from the Otto, Albie and Pold1e Moloney-Waldman Special Effects Co-operative, and we had the first reading through of the script.  There were two laughs. In 45 pages. Is that good?

Well, where did those 10 months go?

Hey, it's cheap.

It’s not that things haven’t been happening, they’ve just been happening rather slowly.

However,  due to the munificence of our building manager, I have secured this cubby hole/epic production studio at my place of work. It comes at the right price, and should be sufficient for our needs. I may even use the pallet in the back of it as a piece of the set.

The next thing is to actually build the set, get the costumes done and then rehearse.  I have shown the script to a few people and they all hate it, so that’s a good sign. 

The aim is now to start loading them in September. That should beat the Christmas release rush.

Collar designs

Ladies and gentlemen,

Two hundred years after Captain James Cook picked up a hoe in Fiordland, the designs on its impeccably shaped blade have been dusted off and turned into a design that will race around the Internet at the speed of light into the computers of the tens, nay, dozens, of people who come to gaze upon the wonder that is Super Awesome Mega Battle Tank. Quite frankly, I think that is fantastic, though I am occasionally prone to delusions.

See what you think. The link be here.

The hoe/paddle is here.

My life as a tortured artist

You might think being a tortured artist involves being waterboarded by Ewoks, but in fact it more aptly describes sorting through the nightmare which passes for the state of the episodes. So I got up at 4am and did a couple of hours making sense of what I had done, and rewriting an entire episode that I had somehow lost.

Still, it did teach me the value of the index card system which Syd Field mentioned in his book about screenwriting. There is also an index card system built into Celtx but I am more content using my little pad of paper with scraps floating around the room. It has worked for me till now.

So I have posted episode two into the pages. It’s called Episode Two. It lives here.

More to come as soon as I sort out where some of the small bits of paper have drifted to. And the Blake’s Seven thing is purely for the benefit of Eric, who is spending too much goddam time watching it. It’ll eat you up and spit you out, man.

Men in dressing gowns

Well, I was hassling Mr Alistair Hughes this week when he was busy – and I should have been – demanding in no uncertain terms that he be at my beck and call for the designs of the shoulder patches of the Super Mega Awesome Battle tank crew.

I thought this being a cinematic endeavour, I would send him this wee message with its Kane pun.

Allow me to recreate the email.

I’ll be wanting those graphics soon, my boy. Or there will be nose blood.

Bwahahahahahahaha

————————————————————-

And then Mr Hughes had the brazen cheek to reply with this.

That would be Mr Hughes on the left. The 3 metre tall person.

Needless to say I continued to hassle him until we had to undergo a 15 round death match. I think it speaks volumes about who won when you can go to a page with a selection of shoulder patches to gaze upon.

That would be here.

Tell me your pics. There might be a slight variation on one more to come but I am too scared to ask Al to change it for me. If anyone else would like to, that would be super.

Secret Agent Man

Initially I went to Te Papa with the super hi tech spy camera I bought off Trademe with the idea of taking a few surreptitious snaps of the hoe/paddle to show the pattern.

It was collected by one James Cook from Fiordland between 1769-1771.

As can be seen, it has a kowhaiwhai pattern based on the fern frond which is still visible, despite being 200 years old and surviving a similar number of Christmas parties in various British institutions since Captain Cook took it back where it was a key feature in the ancient Pommy museum Yuletide tradition of scooting around on one’s arse on a polished wooden floor with a native paddle, singing a song about going up the Far Canal. If my sources on such things are to be trusted.

Anyway, the point of this is that I wanted to use the kowhaiwhai pattern as the basis for the high collars of the uniforms. Because it is from Fiordland 200 years ago, I am pretty sure there will be no iwi claiming cultural ussurpation, and because it went via Captain James Cook it kind of gets a get out of jail card free thingy for cultural ussurpation. Anyway, it is on display at the fifth floor at Te Papa.

So I skulked, real suave like, around the paddle, taking a few notes, while I waited for a couple of Te Papa people – who were standing RIGHT IN FRONT OF THE BLOODY THING for quarter of an hour – to bugger off. Eventually they did, thank ghod, because I’d had to spend my time in the display about, oh, let’s say global warming, and saving the planet, and after 10 minutes of that I wanted to kill the anuses behind it, so I thought best to leave.

Using my bull whip to swing down from the rafters I got back to the paddle without being picked up by Te Papa’s Cultural Ussurpation Surveillance Squad and snapped some quick shots. Checking they were razor sharp, I eluded the Te Papa guides by yelling out: “Freeze, it’s the Taste Police! Lay down now and take off those god-awful shirts!”

While a surprisingly high number of them complied, I scurried out the door cackling maniacally having stuck it to the Culture Czars one more time. It’s our culture, man, free our culture.

Of course, when I got back to the office, and the euphoria of the adrenaline had worn off (oh that sweet, sweet adrenaline rush of busting through Te Papa’s security cordon of middle aged dumpy women and bearded men. Oh, and Roger Gascoigne too, by the way. He’s pretty well preserved. Great hair too!)

… sorry, I lost the thread of that.

Needless to say, the pics were crap. Steve Wonder could have done better.

Working under the principle that Te Papa is actually keen to get these things seen, I hit the googlerama key and the goddam thing was top of the list. So I pinched the pics. And here they are. There are more on the separate Paddle page where they can be viewed with a minimum of prose and dribble.

The hoe/paddle is itself a perfect melding of form and function. Pity the whole Colin McCahon area isn’t converted into the Rita Angus Pavilion but there you go, that’s Te Papa, ya gotta take the good with the god awful.

What I did here was muck around with the gamma settings and the contrast to try and bring out the patterns a bit more.

And just for no particular reason, here is a fern frond unfolding which I think the hoe captures nicely. (Though quite frankly, I think one of the patterns looks just like a thingy …)

And as I gazed upon it, I thought, hey, wait a minute. I’ve seen that before somewhere. And it didn’t take me long to find the source of this.

Check out these two pics. Uncanny? Yes I think so too.

Finances for artistes, baby

This is something I will get John P, music scorer and business brain to comment on. It is the necessary and vital part of registering a company – what the requirements are, and what ordinary Joe and Joe-ess Schmoe need to know about should they wish to run a project like this.

Before I do this, when thinking about getting together a creative team to make Super Awesome Mega Battle Tank, I wanted a structure that would return the inevitably mountain of riches only an amateur, free-to-view internet movie would return to those that contributed to it.

John has registered the company as the Super Awesome Company Ltd, and my plan was to make everyone a shareholder with a pool of unallocated shares to distribute to others co-opted at a later date, and to leave the company with a certain number unallocated so there is a resting sum of money that can be used for sundry expenses as the thing spirals out of control into the Internet’s version of Waterworld.

Part of the issue I have is whether to allocate everything on a pure per head basis and we split any revenue even stevens, or whether those that come up with designs, music, writings etc that are more likely to earn money, should receive a higher percentage of those earnings than those people that may help out in ways that don’t generate dosh. As an example, perhaps those that are helping generate income get a few extra shares to compensate for this. I must stress that this isn’t in the expectation of actually earning much, but I am thinking ahead a bit.

I was talking to David Long, former guitarist for the former Muttonbirds, about this, and he says many a band has hit rocky times because the music writers who got publishing rights and the subsequent revenues, had an income out of all proportion to other band members with the subsequent ill feeling that can go with that. I think a proportionality of shares goes some ways to rewarding the creativity and work of people, but also recognises that moviemaking in particular, is hugely collaborative effort and nothing gets done without the team. There is a bit of thinking out loud here nd I would be interested in comments.

Have a good Queen’s Birthday Weekend. God save Her.

Three more costumes. Well, maybe four. Actually, all up, I think it’s eight …

This week has been focused on getting the costumes for SAMBT pushed along the line a bit. I had been a bit fixated on the three guys in the SAMB tank, but I realised that a bit of thought, which is about all I have any more, should go into the ancillary characters. There is definitely the waist-high shot of Commander Josh, and the torso shot of Bryce the Destroyer. (My rationale behind that is that I don’t want to devote a lot of time to makeup. And/or it adds a mysterious brooding menace to the character to never put a face to him. )

There could be an upper torso shot of three full Kiwi Space Patrol infantry guys, based on Alistair’s drawings. They’re only needed for a throwaway joke, but could be good way to get the costumes for KSP underway.

The other one is for Uber Uber Commander Liz, who would have a fearsome cleavage, for a joke that would last an entire episode of SAMBT.

There were two ways to go with him, I thought. One is to Klingon him up with a suitable suit of something armourish and big gauntets covered with studs and chains (probably a shelf item at Mr Fabuloso’s House of Leather) or we could go corporate pin stripe, OR we could do corporate pinstripe WITH some big, mean gauntlets.

Luckily, Gemma emailed saying:

“Ha ha I just had an image of a pinstripe suit with studded shoulder pads it was awesome! Metal grunge will also be good. but it depends on the character.

I’m linking the sound of a senior senior commander with cleavage…. if the actress is a similar size to me i have a victorian corset that gives you killer cleavage.”

Anyways, Alistair, you know what I said. I said draw costume designs with boobies. It is a get out of jail card, should they query what you are doing while you ride the rails drawing cleavage pics, to say that Bill said it was ok.
That rests the case for the defence, your honour.

Anyway, Uber Uber Commander Liz should also have some decent sized epaulettes. In fact, I was looking for something of a woman’s military dress uniform and I found this pic by Marla Rutherford which is pretty much what I had in mind. In terms of visuals …

We could replace the Red Army-ish collar dogs with the Southern Cross ones Alistair came up with, put on a high collar with the kowhaiwhai pattern and bigger epaulettes. (French for “little shoulder” from épaule, meaning “shoulder”, in case there is nothing else of value in this post.)