2006 has been quite an amazing year, especially considering that I hadn’t really started out with any major intentions beyond getting Secret Thoughts of Angels finished.

Highlights of the year for me were:

2007 promises a lot of hard work, but I think it will all be worth it. Ken is very keen to get Greetings finished ASAP, so that’s my primary concern for the first month or two, along with trying to complete my screenplay.

Then we should be able to return to Tolerance and work on that – it would be nice to have both films done and dusted by the end of May. I’m really hoping I can get to Cannes this year, but everything’s very much up in the air at the moment, so we’ll have to wait and see.

This week has proved quite productive – I’ve finished logging the 20 hours of audio for Greetings and now I’m going through the script marking up where the takes are should I need them later.

I’ve also been struggling to get the current edit from Premiere Pro into Final Cut and I’ve kind of had to admit defeat. FCP just doesn’t like the EDL that Premiere creates (so much for industry standards!). It understands the sequence cut points and the length of each clip, but it will not read the in and out points of each clip, so every clip resets back to the first frame.

This isn’t a huge issue as the primary task is to fix the sound, which will mean visiting each clip and checking the quality of the audio and replacing it with the DAT audio where necessary. I’ll probably tinker with the edit anyway, but at least I have something to work with and I’m not starting from scratch, which would probably set the whole project back a month or two more.

It’s going to be a long, uphill struggle this one…

Seasons Greetings to one and all!

May you all have a peaceful and restful Christmas.

Whoa, bad few days there…

Got a nasty little tummy bug that appears to be doing the rounds on Wednesday, got given some anti-biotics (three lots thereof) on Friday and then had a serious reaction to them yesterday.

I really didn’t know if it was doomsday or bin day. I felt atrocious. I couldn’t sit down, I couldn’t stand up, I couldn’t concentrate on anything, I had a fever, my eyes hurt, my ears hurt, my head felt like it was filled with thick, sticky ooze.

I stopped taking the anti-biotics this morning, and already I feel a hundred times better.

In the middle of all this the new Mac arrived. I got all the software loaded on, then found out today that the firewire port is duff, so my nice new Firewave surround sound box won’t work. Bah!

Luckily the nice people at Apple are sending a new one out to me and I can keep the current one in the meantime, which, firewire port aside, is absolutely glorious.

I haven’t really had much time to play with FCP yet. I’ve tinkered a little with Soundtrack Pro which looks more than comprehensive enough for the work I’ll need to do on Greetings.

I’m still ploughing through the DAT audio, which although gruelling, is quite entertaining – listening to the snippets of conversation that went on between takes. Unfortunately no juicy gossip thus far…

It’s shipped! The Mac that is. Now I just have to wait for it to be taken to the airport (about three days), loaded on a plane, (another day), flown to the UK (another day), taken to the distribution centre (another day, possibly two), passed over to TNT or UPS (another day) and delivered to me here (one to three days). So unless the plane breaks down in Taiwan (looking at Apecode, it seems to be a regular occurance) it should be here for Christmas…

In the meantime, Neil Gaiman posted this up on his web site this morning, which I thought was a) quite amusing and b) aptly titled. Neil thought the name change was unnecessary, but I think it’s great!

Ken seems very pleased with the latest version of Alligator, which is cool. Just two more tweaks and I think we can lock it down. Marvellous.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have 18 hours of audio to log for Greetings.

Having sat there all day with the Apple Mac order tracker on my screen constantly saying ‘Order Not Shipped’ I received an e-mail this evening saying, ‘sorry, due to excessive demand, we aren’t shipping your Mac ’til Friday and you won’t get it ’til the 20th!’

Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

Needless to say, I’m less than impressed. Obviously Mr Jobs’ famous saying ‘Real Artists Ship’ really is Folklore.

Still I’m sure I’ll forgive them when it finally arrives…

To cheer myself up I sat down to watch Mirrormask tonight (how long has that sat in my ‘to watch’ pile?). I loved the visuals, but was a little disappointed by the story.

There seemed to be two stories going on and so I wasn’t surprised when Dave McKean says in the Q&A section of the additional material that was the case – he was writing a story about a girl and a circus and a sick mother and the girls need to retreat into the drawings she had created, while Neil was writing a kind of Prince and Pauper story about similar looking people swapping worlds.

The two ideas really didn’t gel at all for me and it left me feeling a bit giddy, desperately trying to tie the two stories together and ending up confused.

They should have just focussed on Neil’s story, to me it was the more interesting of the two and ultimately it was weakened by the other storyline and the attempts to patch them together.

Stardust seems to be getting rave reviews, though… can’t wait for that one.

…but the Mac still hasn’t shipped – with any luck that should be winging its way out of the Apple factory tomorrow.

If there’s one thing I love about Apple (apart from making the best computers on the planet), it’s their packaging. The boxes for Shake and FCP Studio are gorgeous, sitting here taking up most of my desk (the box for FCP Studio is huuuuge).

I actually got round to writing a few more pages of the new screenplay over the weekend. I’d dried up a little, what with Alligator and Mac excitement, so I figured that if I was at least to have the first act done by Christmas I’d better get a shift on…

It was reeeeeaaaallly hard work. But I felt good for it. I was going through some doubts about the whole thing, but then I took out about four lines, and wrote another scene and felt infinitely better about the whole thing.

Two more sequences and I’ve got me a first act (of sorts).

I spent most of Saturday night until the wee small hours hacking away at that cafe scene in Alligator. It’s getting there, but it’s still not quite on the money yet. I need to let is rest for a few days, show Ken, then have one more go at it I think.

I also managed to add a few lines of dialogue I thought we’d had to lose. They were only recorded over one shot (two takes) and both takes, the frame is perfectly in focus (see graphic below), except for Ken – I guess there was a blade of grass or something in front of the camera, as David and Denis were about twenty metres away on the other side of the canal for this shot.

I didn’t think there were enough cutaways left to cover the shot (it was quite long – almost a minute) but I managed to find some other footage that matched rather nicely, which I’m rather pleased about.

If you haven’t checked at fellow screenblogger David C. Daniel’s blog lately, he seems to be having a rather good time of it. Nice one David!