So it's Sunday once again...

The weekend felt wasted. I read and watched movies and didn't feel inspired to leave the house much. I'm trying to learn how to budget my expenditures better so I can actually start saving some money instead of always just being even. Last Thurs, I did camera on the next to the last scene of jordan's short film. It was fun. We shot at an obscure location, all involving a payphone. I got a letter from a friend which was definately nice. I signed up for netflix(again) so I can start watching a lot more movies. Somebody recently asked me why I liked movies so much. I guess I like movies because of the story-telling and the style and art of it. I like reading and art(animation and comics) just as much and for the same reason probably. Story-telling in the human soul.

sunday night victuals

I just realized I've been breaking up life into 4 month intervals since the end of 2003, when I left New Zealand after my school year at south seas: -Provo -Arizona/Florida -New Zealand -Florida -Arizona/L.A. and all of them, yes, aproximately 4 months each. Well, Provo is on the verge of breaking the 4 month recycle. I hate it when people say that all places are basically the same. I've been to a lot of places and they all seem pretty different to me. well, I think it's time for bed.

autum comes

A picture with my pentax 35mm camera, using a macro lens. The nights are colder and lately there's been a cool breeze during the days. The foilage is turning orange up in the mountain hills. I suppose this is quickly becoming the fall season. the winter to follow... I don't think I am prepared for snow and the freezing temperatures offered here in the rocky mountains. As much as I've been worried about getting a car before then, lately I have become accustomed to walking and sort of enjoy it. I saw the movie Four Brothers today. It was pretty decent and better than I expected for sure. I really want to see the 'constant gardener' but it's not playing anywhere in Provo yet. I suppose it will eventually considering it's number 4 at the box office. I watched City of God recently and it was really really good story-telling. I've recently read The Lovely Bones, a best-seller, which is rumoured to be Peter Jackson's next film. It was pretty good but not really my thing. I've also been reading the Narnia Chronicles in preparation for The lion, Witch, and the Wardrobe. My apartment really needs some sort of decorating. It still looks really bare. Atleast now I have a couch and an improvised coffee table. Since I rarely have any company, I am not feeling very motivated to keep it real clean. So I will probably clean up tonight and tomorrow and see if I can get the place up to spec. Well, there's not much new going on. I'm still working the job, going three months now and it is going really well. I am still struggling with my Japanese script. I've got some good ideas for it lately that I'm excitted about. It makes me feel nervous cause when I think about it, I really want to make it but I don't know how in the world I'll raise the capital to do it. I'm just continuing with development with the hopes that it will be able to happen somehow. Well...I'll write more when more's happening.

Technology is...

I was looking for an external harddrive enclosure for my crappy laptop and I came accross this thing: It's a harddrive enclosure for a 2.5 HD(laptop hard drive). The cool thing is that it has video out and it can play Divx and vob's and all sorts of other video media. So you just copy your media files to it from your PC and then you take the drive with you to your friends or where ever and plug it into their TV and you can watch/listen to your media direct from the hard drive. Thats a pretty useful hard drive. Well that got me thinking and I thought, yeah but it'd be cooler if the thing was really portable, as in running off a recharable battery, and maybe even if it had a screen so you watch the movies on the go. Well, I heard of all those iRivers and PMP's(portable media players) out there so I figured it should be out there. Next I found this: This thing can act as a mass storage device(a hard drive) and it'll play just about any kind of video you can throw at it. You can take it on the go and watch movies, listen to mp3s, etc... Also, the really cool feature is it will record video. Hook it up to your tv or whatever and push record and it'll record to the video to the hard drive. It costs $450 for the 20GB model. But I actually found a 100GB version on ebay for around $300(selling out of China). Now that makes a really cool external hard drive. Note that this is the kind of thing that if I ever bought, would be played with for a week or two and then set aside probably. Still Technology is cool, especially since it's getting cheaper. Oh, one more....I really found this little thing entertaining: I mean, I guess it'd be pretty cool to reach in your pocket for your lighter and instead pull out darth maul fighting some jedi's in episode one but I can't really imagine anyone seriously watching a movie on this tiny thing. Moving on, I downloaded a live demo cd of a linux distro called Linspire and put it in my laptop(yeah, I have been too absorbed with things of a technical nature this week). It ran perfectly and installed all the right drivers for my laptop. In fact some of the drivers worked better, like my touchpad mouses scroll button worked, which hasn't worked in windows since I installed XP years ago(even with the latest driver). Also, the OS ran pretty fast for an os running off a CD. It was a pleasant change from the windows interface. I've been using a Mac OS X at work so I guess I was feeling like trying to escape Windows altogether for a while. I was looking for editing software and I ran accross Cinelerra: I had heard of it years ago but I didn't know it had grown so much. It's being touted as a full 64 bit HD editing and compositing solution. And the program itself is free, released under GPL. So, if you've got a linux box, go download it and tell me what you think. ...hmmm...the only person that I can think that might even have a linux box is someone like Dylan(that guy who fell off his motorcycle and broke his arm). Anyway, I think it's supposed to be more comparable to adobe premiere rather than something like Avid Xpress or FCP. The documentation looked sparse and I couldn't even see if it had a trim mode function. It would definately have to have frame match atleast before I used it. Speaking of editing, I have been using FCP exclusively at work and it's grown on me. The main complaint I had about it was the keyboard shortcuts are a little too cluttered. You have all your keys but then you have all your keys with a signifier, like alt, shift, command, control... Most of the main keys I use are two keys deep. And why in the world does apple make F9 and F10 the insert and overwrite keys when those keys are both used by the OS with Expose??? Luckily FCP 5's keys are remappable.(is that a word?). I made a keyboard configuration that is a little closer to my old Avid habbits: Benji_FCP.fcmap FCP timeline editing beats avids in many ways in my opinion. It is smart. Complicated trims and moving whole clusters of clips down and up the timeline is a breeze. All those fellow student editors that i went to school with at south seas, who's biggest problem always seemed to be getting audio/video clips out of sync would love FCP. Of course I find sometimes that FCP is too smart but those occasions are rare. The media is a little scary because it is just quicktime files that you could have scattered all over your hard drive in many possible locations...so if you don't bother keep track of those files and organize them then you can really screw yourself by deleting them. Also annoying is the fact that FCP's settings are scattered about into like four different places in the menu of the program. But by and by it's a powerful editing program and I reckon as an offline editor it'll catch up to and surpass Avid in the not too distant future. It many ways it already has. The reason I think it will surpass Avid is because it is a really innovative program with lots of changes and constant improvements. It seems they are listening to their editors and taking suggestion quite seriously. I think they are honestly trying to come up with the best possible editing app. Where as Avid is pretty stagnat...It doesn't seem they are trying to improve their interface at all. It's a damn good interface but believe me, it could use some improvments. Avid is like Microsoft. They aren't really inspired to evolve to reach a better and more innovative software anymore. It's like they think they are already the best and can't be beaten. Then every so often they'll see some other company come along with something promising and that might spur them into action. Why the heck did they buy Pinnacle? Well, anyway...this is wierd. I was going to blog about me walking to the laundry mat but instead I went off on technology. I shouldn't talk technology.

Posted by Benji at 9/05/2005 12:36:00 PM | 0 comments read on

refunds, bill murray

About a year and a half ago I was planning to go to Taiwan. Well, I ended up going to Encino, Ca. instead to shoot a short film with my friend, Jordan. Well, the first thing I tried to figure out after I cancelled my Taiwan plans was if I could get a refund for my ticket. After a series of confusing phone calls, in which I was transferred back and forth between the Texas and L.A. offices constantly and in short given no clear answer on whether or not I could or would recieve a refund, I abandoned my futile attempts at dealing with China Airlines customer service. In a last ditch attempt to recover some of my money, I put my ticket in an envelope along with a note requesting a refund and mailed it to the China Airlines Houston, Texas office. Yesterday I recieved a check in the mail for the amount of my refund...One and a half years after the fact. Well, I had long since given up on it so I'm of course happy to see it. It's funny, that money came from when I worked as a P.A. for $50 a day on a feature in L.A. Now after all that time, that money is coming back to me. I'm going to use it to pay my rent this month and then try to save up as much as I can for a car. On to Bill Murray... Jordan took me to see a movie in salt lake city last night, called Broken Flowers, with Bill Murray. It was a mildly slow paced film and pretty understated. At first I was a little taken back by the abrupt ending but the more and more I think about it, it grows on me. In fact I think the ending may have been the most redeeming thing about the film. I'd give the film three stars, with some really good 4/5 star moments. An interesting film nonetheless and far different fromt the only other Jim Jarmasch film I've seen, which was Ghost Dog.