Saturday, February 27, 2010

Long Overdue Update

There's plenty things been going on the last few months and they're all continuing.  I've finally got a mostly finished version of the Bit Patterns script currently at the being-scrutinised stage of development.  I'm hopefully going to get some feedback in the next few weeks at which point I have to write some additional scenes, make good any places where it's lacking (too many characters is an obvious one!) and give it a final polish.  With any luck, we can get it into pre-production by the summer.  Still very excited by this as it'll be Intrepid's first original movie.

I'm also working on a script/design for a computer game of which I can't say too much, suffice that it's still the early days and will likely take increasing amounts of my time as the year progresses.  And bear in mind that I do all this stuff in my spare time - which is only laughingly called free!  More details when I'm able to talk about it freely.

The editing of the Intrepid episode The Stone Unturned is almost finished.  Myself and Nick filmed the last outstanding scene last weekend, which went smoothly - I wish all the scenes were like that - and also a short scene for Star Trek: Odessey, another fan film series.  The only "setback" was hooking up the camera to the microphone, where a loose connection inside the audio connector box resulted in a lot of crackling.  So instead we used the HD camera in DV mode.  Nick was kind enough to edit together the Stone Unturned scene to take a little pressure off of me.

Speaking of filming, we're tentatively scheduled to do some filming in a fortnight's time for The Conviction of Demons, the latest Intrepid episode.  Nick is nominally directing this one, his first time, whilst I'm doing camera.  When we shot the first scene (production-wise, not Scene 1) in Perth a few months back, I was still so used to being director that I was shouting "Action" and "Cut"!

Finally, I'm dabbling away at a novel, the idea of which I'd had literally twenty years ago.  Only now am I feeling confident enough to actually write it, but I'm having to fit it in amongst everything else because other people are involved in the other endeavours and that's a commitment!  It's been simmering away at the back of my mind for all that time.  Part of my motivation for doing an Open University course back in 1998 - Astronomy and Planetary Science (passed!) - was to get a good handle on how a supernova worked, a central part of the book!

And finally, finally, I'm working on a large blog post about Body Harvest, an old DMA Design game which I was involved in.

There's other stuff I wish I had time to do, but I suspect that'l always be true.  Too many ideas and not enough time.