Busy, Busy, Busy


Wherein our narrator tries to catch his breath.

It's been nothing but busy, hence the delay between the last post and this. I am happy to say that the weather, for the most part, has broken into a lovely springtime - not unlike Los Angeles in April - although there were a few drops of rain this morning.

Work continues to go very well; we're putting together the entertainment for a big show for the entire school tomorrow, in the big theatre, where we'll show off some of the latest and greatest features in interactivity. If we can pull it all together. We're certainly trying hard enough.

I did have too much fun on Saturday, exploring my neighborhood - which is impressively centrally located, and easy to reach everything from - and as a consequence spent Sunday and Monday in bed, recovering. I think that was the last of the cold, because people have reported that within the last 24 hours I seem to have a twinkle in my eye and a spring in my step. Thank god. I don't really understand how someone can handle just landing and working, without time to decompress. That's what I did at XML in June, it's true, but I'm still not quite sure how I did it, and i know I did crash by around 11 PM every night as a result. Because every day I woke up at 5:30 AM, which is ridiculously early for me.

Today I actually lay in bed till 6 AM, and when the alarm went off at 6 AM, I thought, "it can't possibly be 6", but it was. Because it was cloudy, it was hard to tell how early it was, as the sundial of my bedroom window wasn't shining across my flag, thankfully. So maybe my body clock is getting adjusted. I do like this get-to-bed-early get-up-early sort of thing, for as long as it can be maintained, as I have 45 minutes of yoga in the morning, and an hour of commuting, so I need to get an early start on the day, or it'll completely get away from me. Not that I've ever been known as a morning person. But then, there is the comfort of the tall black - which is basically a mug full of espresso, yum yum YUM.

Basically every day at AFTRS has been wall-to-wall meetings. I've met nearly all of the HODs (Heads of Departments) at this point, and have found some folks quite on top of things, while others are further out of the loop. I'm going to be writing recommendations for all of them, however, so hopefully they'll pay me some sort of attention. If not, and if they ignore my suggestions, they'll just find themselves increasingly irrelevant. Which they may not care about. But given the support I've gotten from basically everyone so far, this seems unlikely.

OK, Epping is the next stop. More soon.

And now on the express (3 stops!) back to Sydney Terminal, as they call it, or Central Station. Today was another busy day, in part because Peter spent most of it finalizing our preparations for the big presentation tomorrow. We looked at some FMV movies that had been created as video game trailers, presumably in real-time engines. They were part of the SIGGRAPH 2003 proceedings, and let me tell you, they looked really excellent. Plus an nVidia demo of a woman (Dawn) who had huge jugs of titties, wings like a butterfly (or sprite, or whatever she was) and very realistic skin and hair. More precisely, 20,000 hairs. It astounds me that something that couldn't even be *done* just a few years ago can now be done on a reasonably-well equipped PC or Macintosh. And the FMV sequence looked a lot like the "Helm's Deep" sequence from The Two Towers, so I guess the distance between cinema graphics and real-time work is down to about 4 years, or only half the time it takes to get an education at AFTRS.

If I do my work well tomorrow, I'll be able to lead these folks into believing that interactivity is a natural evolution from cinema, and requires all of the skills of cinema. That's a tale not all of them will believe, but we'll do our best to show it off with the examples tomorrow. You can lead a fool to wisdom, but you can't make them think.

Much back-and-forth today about my SPAA presentation, which people seem to be getting excited about. Here's the brief abstract I wrote for the program catalog, for a talk (their title) "The New Reality for Producers":

Audiences within a movie theatre send SMS messages to the crowds waiting in line; if the movie stinks, the queue will clear before they’ve been admitted to a showing.  “Flash mobs” and “American Idol” testify to the growing power of SMS interactivity – even when it’s not explicitly provided for, the audience wants to interact with their entertainment.  From televisionwithoutpity.com to the emerging form of “machinima” – animated features created on one-thousandth the typical budget - the viewer has leapt ahead of the producer. In the new reality, the producer needs to keep up, even try to get ahead of the audience. But personal video recorders (PVRs) destroy the advertising model that’s kept television well-funded for the last half-century, and DVD sales projections threaten to disrupt the greenlighting process of nearly every film. Film and television producers must embrace the world revenue-generating, deal-closing world of interactive entertainment – and quickly, lest they be replaced by a new generation of talent unafraid of the opportunities afforded by an energized and engaged audience.

I hope that does the trick, sounds menacing without being too frightening. It's a sweet spot, between abject fear and complete despair, that I've got to mine in order to change a few minds. But then, they might all be among the converted, with their game, DVD and film projects all cohesively flowing into a seamless whole. Not sure how that would work for your average "little" film, but it just might.

Hmm. We just flew by the Ashfield Community and Catholic Club. At least that's what I think it said. I wonder what that means. There seem to be a lot of these "club" things in the suburbs, and it'd be nice if I had some sort of roadmap to the explanation of Australian culture - because they all speak the same language we think, disarmingly, that it's the same place. But it isn't, not at all, and at some fundamental levels the culture is different, and everyone who has been raised within it thinks different. But I don't want to seem too rude - or too like an anthropologist - so I keep the bulk of the questions to myself. If Rachel & Jeremy were here (or even Big) I'd probably open my flap and start asking away, but they aren't, so I'm keeping my mouth shut.

And there's another point: Where is everyone? I've been flinging emails into the the Void that is North America and haven't gotten any replies. Are all these people just to busy to answer my god-damned email??? Nothing to do but try again, I suppose. And check the email conversation I had with Rachel back in early August, and ferret out the names of her friends.

Ach, I'm just bitching and moaning. Ignore me. Everything is going well and I finally feel as though I'm settling in, just a bit, to the life of Sydney. Which is important, because at some point I'll come to some internal decision about whether I should actually consider spending a lot more time here. That's a process and decision I believe I'll come to on my own, without any prompting or deep thinking. Or maybe I'm avoiding the question. Heh. Too soon to say. Still the Anglophilia of the Australians might just drive me nuts right there. Or maybe it isn't Anglophilia. Maybe it's just Australian culture and I just need to get over myself.

Central Station and the end of another day.

Posted: Wed - October 22, 2003 at 08:31 AM        

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