Stand-Off

Met up with Ben Shockley for lunch today and was introduced briefly to the great Ken Colley. He didn’t hang around for long but at least I got introduced which now puts one degree of separation between me and George Lucas and Clint Eastwood. I also got to meet two of Ben’s other friends, Denis and Alan who are both filmmakers and/or actors. A good time was had by all.

Ben was telling me about his appearance in the banned X-box 360 advert. He plays the taxi driver at the end and can be seen at http://www.youtube.com/watch.php?v=WnpGtHq7Z0U. I’m not entirely sure why it was banned, I thought it was quite good and could see little in the way of anything offensive. I guess it’s just not the image Microsoft want to promote.

This evening I went round Daz’s to see how the sound mix was coming along for SToA. It’s sounding rather good. Daz showed me a new method he was trying of playing along to a drum beat, rather than just playing along to the film. It was amazing how rhythmical my edit was, I was muchly pleased. The drum beat worked really well and, although it won’t be in the final mix, I’m sure we could release it as a single… Perhaps not.

I like the way Daz is taking the music, going quite synthy, rather than classical. He feels that it will give him more scope for ideas further down the line. Once he’s cracked the intro I’ll ask if I can give you a sneak preview (he did give me a copy, but I want the vocal effects to be dfferent, so you’ll have to wait!).

I also had some good ideas for the next short which I’ve been kicking about this evening. It could be quite a dark little story.

A very productive day, all told.