Category: Life

Today’s shoot was all about the boss character in the film, as well as another secondary character. Apart from them and the lead, no other characters were on set. Yet through the magic of cinema, when you finally do see the movie, you’ll see that he appears to often be dealing with groups of people at a time.

We’re running into a bit of an issue here. People’s clothes, hair length, and facial hair are completely inconsistent from shot to shot. What can you expect? We have been shooting for three months, and I certainly don’t have the money to give people shaves/haircuts before each shoot. And to expect people to submit to one particular hair/shave style each time would be alot to ask of these people, esp. given how much I’m paying them ($0.)

Whatever. Nothing can be done about it now. Since this a comedy, we’ll make fun of ourselves on that basis. This, my friends, will be a great film to see while high.

Well on October 26 we had the “Docks” staff party. Everyone that’s participated on this movie has been quite accomodating, and working with them has been a pleasure. So last Friday’s party was a means to thank them.

I bought ten cases of two-fours (24 beers a case.) Those who worked on Docks got free beer, free pizza. Lots more people were invited; the idea being that they paid $10 and got access to unlimited beer. In the end, it helped recouping a bit of the money spent.

Since the “interview room” for the movie is setup in my house, I also got those done. And the footage of the party will be part of the movie’s finale. So while this wasn’t really an official shoot date, I got some very valuable footage taken nonetheless.

There’s a shoot tomorrow, and after that two more need to be done ASAP. At this point, it’s starting to get quite cold outside. It was even snowing today; so I got to do this fast. After all, this movie is set during the fall, not winter.

Internet is still out at my place. At this stage, it’s been out for 15 of the 30 days we’ve been with them. The tech support has been less than helpful, and after much frustration we’ve decided to switch.  Bye bye 3Web, hello Tekksavvy.

This was a long one.

The pre-shoot was from 10AM-2PM. From 2:30PM-8:30PM was the actual shoot. Somewhere in there was supper, which I bought for the remaining crew.

The pre-shoot was broken down into two stages: the planning phase, which is where I organize what gets shot when, and the setup phase, where I get props made and sets readied up. For today, I turned a corner of my basement into a callcenter cubicle. As seen through the camera lens, I’d say the intended effect was achieved.

It was a small crew today: the lead, two main supporting actors, three extras, and my mom. I got tons done today, to the point that I’d say were now 80% done with the shoots. It was simply incredible. The shoot was originally scheduled for yesterday, but rain was in the forecast – so I delayed it. And what a payoff: today it was clear skies, and a full 22*C. A full ten degrees warmer than what we’d expect for this time of the year. Heck it’s almost November, and yet it felt like a day in August.

But none of this would have been possible if it wasn’t for my mom. She drove me out to Value Village, to get a series of props. She drove me downtown. She brought a very large, bulky, prop I needed too. She got two critical extras I needed. She figured out how to store the said bulky prop when we needed to store it. She pretty much single-handedly created the callcenter/interview-room sets I used today. She drove us all to my place for an additional shoot. She is always there during a shoot, seeing what she can do to help.

She is incredible. She is my mom.

My step-dad has been the same way with the earlier shoots: bringing me and my stuff down, getting coffee and doughnuts for the staff during those early morning shoots we used to have, waiting there to help. Incredible people, and I’m really fortunate to have them.

If it wasn’t for them, this movie wouldn’t exist. Simple as that.

Well, after taking a weekend sabatical, I’m back at it. There’s a major shoot happening this Sunday, then perhaps one or two the following Monday. Those three operations should conclude the major shoots.

Then we’re down to the in-house interviews, a sequence with our main character while he’s in a dreamworld, and a few other small sequences.

As a thank you to all the volunteers that have spent their time on this project, I’m throwing a “thank you kegger.” That’s happening two Fridays from now. Free beer and pizza for all those who helped me out; $10 for everyone else. Hey, who said I was without business sense.

And on that note: I’m launching my own, original, Internet startup. It’ll target an important demographic, so I fancy that *if* it gets big that it’ll be a good source of advertising revenue. Or perhaps it won’t get big at all, and I’m just pulling a Nortel circa 1999. Either way, I think it’s a sound idea, and I’ll let you know more about it as soon as it’s fully ready.

In other news, the Opera browser rocks. You see, my main machine is not a powerhouse computer – it’s a ten year old 300MHz laptop, with a 6GB hard drive and 128MB RAM. But I love it to bits. It runs WindowsXP Pro (tweaked to operate damn smoothly), and it’s here where I do all my writing, surfing, etc. In fact, I’m writing you this from the said laptop.

But with websites getting all fancy, web surfing performance for this poor laptop was beginning to suffer. Especially with Firefox. Well, I’ve since switched to Opera… and all I can say is: wow.

First off, performance is incomparable. However, it’s more than just that. Opera does a number of things which I like… such as tab preview (Vista-style), automatic image resampling, a useful ‘blank’ page when opening new tabs, mouse gesture navigation (ie. using the mouse as a wand, with motions dictating certain commands [back, reload, etc.]) It also has it’s own built-in flash player. Sure, Firefox offers all of this with plugins… but why wait? Esp. since the default download for Opera is smaller than Firefox.

/me waits for hate mail from the Firefox camp.

I’ve owned the “celisus-studios.com” domain name for about a year or so now. However, it always just pointed to my personal website of maelys.bio. Wanting something a tad more professional, I finally decided to go ahead and create a specific website for the domain. I made this decision few months ago, and tried various simple CMS’. However, it wasn’t up until a month ago where I found a platform that worked.

And that platform was the WordPress theme by the name of Blueprint. Needing but a few modificiations, it now works beautifully. Though it would work much better if WordPress didn’t sanitize the raw code I dumped in when I’m in “Code” mode. In any case, you can see the new website for yourself too, by going to:

www.celsius-studios.com