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I woke up after three hours sleep to the news that I was a monster.
Well, that I was going to be playing the monster, at least. I was somewhere between excited and perturbed by the thought – all the good points (the acting, the make-up, the dramatic death scene) were remarkably similar to the bad points (acting, make-up, dramatic death scene).
But first I had to find a mannequin.
The Mannequin
At the Rumpus, good buddy and god Leon provided us with some mannequins, shop window dummies, which we used to good effect. They’re old possessions of Leon, dating back many many years. So when we were writing our script a short time after the Rumpus, I confidently said, yes, we can get a mannequin, let’s script one in. So we did. The monster now had a friend.
Except Leon didn’t have the mannequins any more. In classic Murphy’s Law style, precisely a week before the first time anyone actually needed the mannequins, he’d tossed them. Argh!
But, I thought, I’m a resourceful chap. I can do this. I fired up the old cellphone and sent out a blizzard of Saturday-morning text messages, asking for leads. Fairly soon, one of them came up trumps – the lovely Mrs Hall-Hall, who used to work in a clothing shop in Petone and gave me a name to ask there.
So I raced off to Petone, sauntered into the shop, and discovered that the person in question didn’t work there any more.
Stupid mannequin! But all was not lost. I gave them my spiel, and my most trustworthy manner, and was duly entrusted with a shop mannequin to take away into the bush. Success!
The mannequin story isn’t that remarkable, really. I know lots of our team were pulling off similar feats in order to get crucial things or make stuff happen. It’s part of the coolness of the 48 – you don’t realise just how much you can achieve in 48 hours until you get stuck in and do it.
This Morgue, This Monster
I arrived up at the rainy location, stomped through sticky mud, and wondered if we three writers were going to get lynched for writing an outdoor shoot. Luckily spirits were up, and they stayed up for most of the day (although it got a bit rough towards the end as we were losing daylight and rushing to get shots done).
I helped out with a few things, then was sat in a chair for the big make-up experience. Norm drizzled hot waxy substance all over my face and hands, and once it dried carefully painted it a grisly mix of fleshy oranges and bloody reds. This took somewhere between thirty minutes and an hour, I think – I was sitting with eyes closed much of the time. Late in the process, the cast and crew arrived for lunch, and the yelps of horror and awe at my visage were a great comfort to me. Finally I was able to see myself in the mirror, and, well – I looked pretty damn horrific.
Not too long after, I was called to set and we shot the finale sequence, where the monster hunters confront the monster. There was a bit of physical stuff in here, some wrestling, some shambling, and a lot of looming. Some roaring and wailing was involved as well. I had to be muddied up, so enjoyed the attentions of a bunch of helpers gleefully smearing my bare chest with cold, gritty mud. Yerk.
I vividly remember the struggle between the monster and monster hunter Robin Slade (Luke Walker), where I had my arm wrapped around his neck, and we were both struggling to keep our balance on the edge of a very slippery mud bank. The shot of this moment in the final cut reveals Slade’s hand reaching around to gain secure purchase on my monstrous upper thigh. It was to help us stay upright, but it does seem quite a… tender moment.
So I roared, and wailed, and flailed, and raged, and finally I bring about my own end in what turned out to be a very successful death scene – it never fails to get a reaction. And then I was done, and stomped back to the cabin to de-monster.
But, before I did that, I wandered along with Fraser to meet a couple of wee ones who were keen to see the monster for themselves. Their eyes when they saw me were enormous. I told them this was what would happen to them if they didn’t eat their vegetables. That’s me; socially responsible monster.
So that was the end of Meltyman. We ended up shooting another scene the next day, a quick stunt where the monster tackles Nick, but I wasn’t in full make-up for it. I wasn’t too happy with the tackle – I was a bit lame with the physical stuff there, I think. But all the rest I’m happy with. I decided that if I was going to be a monster, I was going to really be an awesome monster. Following in the footsteps of Boris Karloff and Kane Hodder, I went for it, and it all turned out well.
The Fate Of The Movie
We didn’t make the finals. We did, however, make an awesome short film. I look forward to getting hold of a copy so I can show it off to some people.
Meltyman happy.
Face Of A Meltyman
There are better photos of the make-up than this, but this is the best one currently online:

Went to see X-Men 3 over the weekend. Don’t know what possessed me. (Actually I do – a good friend I don’t see often enough invited me.) It surprised me by being surprisingly entertaining with a wealth of nice moments. It didn’t surprise me by being utterly incoherent, by featuring some jaw-droppingly odd storylining (let’s kill off major character from first two movies off-screen! And only refer to it in passing later on!), and by completely failing to dramatically or thematically resolve any of the numerous interesting issues at the core of the film. It felt akin to those movies where misfit kids save their summer camp from a nasty developer by pushing the developer in the lake during an exciting canoe challenge – action (a) somehow delivers result (b) despite there being no conceivable reason that it should.
Man, I remember after I saw X2 I was so stoked I went out again the next day and watched it again. Sometimes the movies get it right. X-Men 3 is not one of those times. Skip it.
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Went on a Queen’s Birthday Weekend road trip yesterday, up the coast. It was a nice day for a drive. Our road trip posse visited the controversial Market Gardener statue in Levin and the windmill in Foxton, and conducted a scientific experiment on Foxton Beach. We also did some balancing.
Posse included a the very stylish big geek, plus three new arrivals in the land of blog: Mr & Mrs Hall-Hall and !(Kate). Also Anna, who still survives blogless. These three are now on the growing list at right, along with old-friend-rediscovered Matt Wong (stick) – who was, incidentally, the primary motivation guy behind those Aliens weekends, for those of you who remember them.
I was pleased to note that my Edinburgh family went on their own road trip. They, being classier and more organised than I, and also being determined like bastards to make me miss them terribly, have a short film of it up on the web. I love the bit where the Scottish invade.
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Today’s lesson in the realities of freelancing:
This morning I visited the dentist to have the work done identified at the other week’s checkup. This morning I also received notification of my first royalties from my first sole-credit project.
Dental bill = royalty check x 40
*sigh*

Today I want to a funeral for Frances. I didn’t know her, not in any real sense – one meeting, a couple of emails exchanged. I do know her husband Bruce. It was strange to be at a funeral and not feeling the loss directly; to learn about someone secondhand. As the order of service said, today was a celebration of the life of Frances, and it had that feeling to it. Friends and family lined up to speak of her, lovingly and with enormous humour, and through the laughter I learned a lot about her. Laughter was fundamental to who she was, that much was clear. Heck, any person who decides the music as their casket is carried out should be My Ding-a-ling… well, that person knows a thing or two about making people smile.
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When I was younger, I remember feeling certain that there was beauty in loss, beauty in suffering, and we couldn’t see it simply because we’re stuck in the pain and anguish of it.
That’s a romantic view. I’m still a romantic, I guess, because I still sense beauty there, in some way I can’t directly grasp. Loss has its role to play in life. I don’t think we need to seek beauty; I don’t think we should even try to seek something as abstract as beauty when there are real people suffering. But it gives me comfort to think that it is there, if only we look from just the right angle, at just the right moment.
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Lyrics from another song from the funeral:
“We dont have to live in a world where we give bad names to beautiful things
We should live in a beautiful world
We should give beautiful a second glance”
– Beautiful, by Marillion
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Enough of this week. I’m past ready for this one to be over.

I don’t think I’m an uncompromising pacifist. There have been too many dangerous powers in history for me to be absolutely confident that diplomacy will always be a better alternative than war.
But I’m a pacifist, nonetheless, those caveats noted. And I think all human beings would be pacifists as well, if we fully understood what war does.
Ethics training as a response assumes that the Haditha massacre was an aberration, an avoidable blemish, not how things are done. This is a lie. Haditha is to be expected. Whether the war in question is a noble determined stand against evil or a petty oil-grab annexation is irrelevant to this truth – incidents like Haditha will happen during war. We are human beings. Give us guns and the idea of an enemy, and innocent people will die horribly.
War makes us beasts.

I was in the writing team for the 48 hr film challenge. I admit to some trepidation – although I back myself in the writing arena, my two counterparts were hix and Sean, who have a long history of collaboration and whose work I admired long before I met them. (Yep, I was one of the people who saw and loved Hopeless on the big screen, woo! And check out that user comment, huh? Nifty.) My experience in writing for screen, and working collaboratively, is pretty thin in comparison.
But mostly I was excited. I was confident it was all going to go well.
So the writing crew gathered at base-camp Indigo City for the 7pm announcement of genre and required elements. We watched the elements being decided live on TV, and shortly after that the cellphone call came telling us our genre: Monster Movie.
We whooped. We actually whooped. I’d always wondered what a genuine whoop sounded like, and now I know. See, Jenni’s Angels was well-supplied with a bunch of assets that other teams didn’t have. Of specific interest to the monster movie genre – we had a great make-up artist, and a small but eager team of stunt performers. This was good.
The required elements were the character Robin Slade, who is an eternal optimist; a mirror; and the line ‘that’s what I’m talking about’.
Getting Ideas Flowing
We got stuck into the brainstorming. The brainstorming group was fairly large – director Jenni and the three writers, plus a contributing presence from Steph, Svend and Lee. This worked out quite well, as we nailed a bunch of clever ideas quite quickly. One of them, which jumped out and grabbed us all very fast, was that the characters should be monster hunters.
We decided to build our short around a classic feature of such movies – two ex-lovers who are forced by the monster to work together and overcome their differences as a result. With Robin Slade as the optimist, the counterpart we settled on was a pessimist. This suggested a conflict of methodology, with the optimist seeking to understand the monsters and avoid violence, while the pessimist was enthusiastic for the violent solution. We had the conflict that would drive our film.
Getting It Done
We gradually settled on a series of scenes and started working through the beats we needed to hit, and finally the three writers got stuck into the business of actually churning out script pages. We divided the film into three and each of us wrote one of the three segments. (I started with the beginning.) After each iteration, we read through it together, dissected what we’d done and where the problems were, then took a new section and wrote that. After three cycles, we had something we were happy with.
Actually, we were more than happy – we were damn proud, I think. We had something quite special on our hands and while we were a bit fatigued from being inside it for ten hours, I think we knew it was the basis of a kick-ass film. (Although, somewhere in there, we made the fateful decision to film the entire thing on location in the bush.)
Through this process, I was definitely the junior partner. Sean and Steve were full of good ideas and snappy lines, and their sense of where the meat was in scenes and what bits were falling flat was very astute. I contributed a bunch of things, but they made most of the calls, and rightly so. I learned a hell of a lot, actually. In fact, I think I learned more about scripting for screen in this one writing session than in the entire rest of my life. It was good 🙂
Stuff I contributed that I was quite proud of
The line “We need to figure out what it’s trying to tell us,” which conveys a huge amount of Robin Slade’s character and approach very deftly and is way better than previous attempts at that line.
Giving the ‘It’s trying to tell us we need swords’ response to sidekick Nick, instead of hardcore Diana as it was originally written. It not only gave Nick his greatest and most perfect line, it also solved all the issues with a very problematic beat.
Diana’s “I already have a team” line, delivered just before the entirety of Diana’s team is taken to pieces by the monster. I angsted about this line for a while before I realised that it was exactly right, and the performances would sell it.
Difficult But Awesum
The hardest part of the process was the cutting back. We had to keep slicing out wonderful lines, over and over again. Some incredibly funny stuff was removed for the best of reasons – it wasn’t part of the story we were telling. And all that ruthlessness worked, and worked well. The proof is in the produuct: the film rockets past, never flagging and never pausing and never losing its momentum, which is a sign of a well-honed script.
Another thing I’m particularly happy with, and I hope the judges care about it, is the way we included the required elements. They weren’t just tacked on – they’re each fundamental to the story. Robin’s optimism is the basis of the entire story. The ‘That’s what I’m talking about’ line is a crucial turning point in the narrative and the film’s tone. And the mirror not only provides a nifty early gag, it turns out to be the keystone to the entire resolution. The way we used the required elements makes me very proud indeed.
It was an awesome experience. We had a satisfactory draft done at about 4.30am. hix set to work assembling it, tidying it, and emailing it to our crew, while I headed out home. I walked in the door about 5am, and didn’t manage to get to sleep until about 5.30. But the weekend was only just beginning…
My Fave Cut Line
In closing, here’s my favourite line that we had to cut, which came from a hix draft I think:

ROBIN (to Nick)
Our chain of command is much simpler. Me, you, monster. Monster at the bottom.

I had a wonderful weekend. (Monday and today: not good. But anyway.) Three big reasons:
48 Hour Film Challenge went really well. I will write more of it at some stage. For now, let me just say that our allotted genre was Monster Movie, and the following image should give you the rest:

(cool poster by the lovely Debz & Matt, I believe)
Good news from Seattle. My buddy Aaron (award-winning chef, fellow West Ham supporter and dodgeball advocate) is coming to NZ in September – his work visa is all arranged. This took me by surprise, the best kind of surprise.
RPG writing goes well. My first sole-credit RPG product, a D&D adventure available in .pdf. was released this weekend. The retro-titled Spawning Pits of the Tomb Bats promptly picked up a 5-star review. This pleases me.
There were some other lesser reasons, too. The 48 was overwhelming and great and there’s more to say on that subject. I’ll get to it.

The 48 Hour Film Challenge begins tonight…
…how was it that I didn’t know until this week that the frontman for the challenge is Ant Timpson, NZ’s own filmic connoisseur of the incredible and incredibly strange?
…how cool is it that we have two professional stuntmen in our team?
…how excellent is it that we have team t-shirts? I love me some team t-shirts.
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This deserves to be widely read: the mayor of Bogota (Colombia) who used mimes, superman costumes and thumbs-up cards to turn around a city on the edge of chaos. It’ll restore your confidence in human beings, and increase your frustration with the ill-built systems that negatively structure so much of our behaviour.
Located by the other moose, unsurprisingly. Go read his blog, it is always interesting. Although, fewer pictures of birds, more pictures of boys tearing their skulls apart.

An’ a fantail!

Happy.

Today’s bird-just-outside-the-window is the kereru, or native wood pigeon. Great big plump thing, too.

I remember encountering a silhouetted kereru in the near-pitch darkness of Central Park when walking up the hill to Brooklyn, and using its presence as an excuse to say something to the mysterious footsteps keeping pace behind me. The footsteps turned out to belong to a scared young woman new to the city who didn’t know that the Central Park shortcut ran out of lighting a third of the way along, and was keeping pace with me because I seemed to know where I was going. We had a nice friendly conversation until the top of the hill, where she went along one path and me along another. I never saw her face; it was completely dark the whole time. The pigeon, for its part, seemed quite happy to sit on a branch arms-length from me even when I stopped to point it out.
Listening right now to the sounds of Aquaboogie, soon to listen to Group Five, both CDs acquired during my fleeting appearance at their joint CD release gig last night. Which looked like it was going to be a lovely night. And I’m sure that it was.

There is a lovely tui hopping around in the tree just outside the open door, about two metres from where I’m sitting. It doesn’t seem too bothered by my presence. I haven’t seen a tui in many years. This living on a hill lark has its benefits!

I love that little white collar ruff they have going on. Very stylish.
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Over on his LJ and Xenodochion, Matt M discusses the Justice Therapy industry:
“This Justice Therapy industry makes it personal, it makes it about “getting the verdict we need”, it makes it about dragging the people who hurt you through court so that you can get some vague sense of closure. It is wrong on so many levels.”
I’m not entirely convinced that it is appropriate to call this an ‘industry’ – my instinct is to locate the cause here in systemic factors and broader cultural trends – but it’s a great piece. Go check it out. A reply is going into the bubbling stew of ‘blog posts I will write real soon now’.
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Also, Buffy fans who don’t read my LJ will really seriously want to check out this link. Not kidding.