I Have The Key

Here's a handy tip. When you leave your house, make sure you have your keys with you before you close your door.

This may seem like an obvious tip, and one that many of you have suffered the brunt of before now, perhaps many times. But for me, this was my first time I had ever actually locked my keys inside anything.

At my previous home, the deadlock on the (only) door was one that could only be locked from the outside by using a key. This meant I always had my keys with me when locking the door.

At my new home, I have the lesser deadlock that has only one setting - always locked no matter where the keys may be located.

I don't know whose stupid idea it was to invent such a system, or why it's so prevalent, because it seems to me to be the stupidest method you could possibly choose. It makes no sense.

I have four keys on my keyring, and all of them are the same, as every lock in my place matches. But as I couldn't think of a place to secrete one of the spares outside without it being glaringly obvious to any nefarious evildoer who should happen to find themselves wandering around my back yard, I had not hidden any of the keys anywhere outdoors. I had hoped to have figured out a good alternative idea some day, but hadn't gotten around to doing so before I found myself in the stupidest of positions, that of being stuck outside my house with no way to get back in.

Luckily I was with my mate Rob when I discovered this foolishness, and I stayed at his place overnight, and next morning he drove me down to the Estate Agent's to grab a spare key. I am eternally grateful for his help.

I have now solved the issue of spare keys. I will have one on me most times I go out, as I almost always have at least some extra doodads hanging off me which can contain a spare key.

With luck, this particularly embarrassing situation won't happen again any time soon.

What I Did During My Summer Holidays

In the industry I am hoping to be involved with professionally, that of Visual Effects, you don't apply for jobs in the standard fashion, where you send in a simple Word doc that lists your past places of employment. Though you still do that, it's less a list of places and more a list of achievements, skills, and software. And hopefully a little bit of name-dropping. My friend Cameron can name-drop a hell of a lot of cool movie names and Directors on his resumé.

But what you also must add is what's known as a Showreel, or a Demo Reel, which is a series of video clips and sequences that show off examples of your actual achievements. And before I can show up at an interview for an Effects job, I need to put one of those together first.

Until recently, I have not had a lot of stuff to show, unfortunately. Most of what I have done in the past has been small potatoes, and not especially amazing. They show some amount of competence, but not really anything dazzling. So for the last two years, while working on more original and spectacular films, I have managed to slowly accrue quite a few examples of more applicable Visual Effects work.

At first I thought I didn't have much to show, but then as I was looking back on what I had handed in recently, it started to dawn on me just how much I had actually completed and was viewable. And when I assembled them together, I was surprised at how much variety there was, and, dare I say it, how good some of it looked.

So I have assembled them into my Showreel, and I am probably not too far away from starting to put it out there for the Studios to look at, should an opportunity arise. Or maybe I'll just push it towards them all without a request required.

What Is Lacking In Aussie Drama

I don't watch any Australian Drama series. I do, however, watch a lot of US and UK Drama serieseses. Here's why.

Australia tries very hard to do realistic and significant drama, that has a unique Australian voice. But they really don't know how to do it without it falling into a soap operatic melodrama. Australia, you see, excels at soap opera. They have had worldwide success with all their shows which have melodrama and overwrought plotlines and "serious" acting moments in it.

For example: Neighbours and Home and Away are cheap, and easy to make. They have almost no requirement for skill in either writing or acting talent. They're really good for learning how to organise the production of a TV show, though. These shows are very popular in overseas market who like soap opera cheese.

Macleod's Daughters is an excellent example of being uniquely Australian in its theme, being set in a rural Cattle Station. But it is a relationship drama. It has no real action or adventure elements, except in that typical plot-driven way to push two characters closer together, or further apart. It's entirely about people, and not situations.

Similar concepts are central to shows like Water Rats, A Country Practice, The Flying Doctors, All Saints, Blue Heelers, Seachange, Packed To The Rafters, Stingers, RPA, Young Lions, and pretty much everything else you can think of.

When they try to be a little less melodramatic, and try to emulate the successful American shows, they do what ostensibly ought to work. They take ideas and inspiration from what they perceive to be the successful factors, twist them to fit Australia, then add in some of their own originality.

But the problem is, without fail, they inevitably take the wrong elements from the US shows, then add in either unnecessary "sexy" elements, or melodramatic cliché storylines. It's heartbreaking to see they still haven't learned anything.

What they don't put in is humour. Yeah, some of the characters joke around occasionally, but that's not what I mean. I mean the concept itself has to have a central comedic element to it. The ideas have to be super-real, and stylised, to make it fun, to make the adventure over-the-top just enough to be a rollicking joyride. Instead they lay it thick with realism and drama, sucking the fun out of it, until it's just a bland standard Australian drama, exactly alike to all that has gone before.

Their latest adventure action dramas are Sea Patrol, which is one of the stupidest titles for a show ever, like it was something made up by a twelve year old in 1967, and Rush, which doesn't seem to mean anything, and is just an exciting word they randomly picked from a thesaurus.

Sea Patrol is set on a Navy Frigate, and appears to be about border patrols and stopping the criminals from getting into or out of the country. But, inevitably, what it's really about is who is sleeping with whom on board the ship.

Rush is trying desperately to be an action packed Police Rescue show, so it has tons of people abseiling down buildings, or being stuck in cars precariously sliding over clifftops, or helicopter rescues in floodwaters. Except it's really about who is sleeping with whom back at the Station.

Even the most celebrated mini-series of recent times, Underbelly, based on real events in Australia's history, and widely lauded, is still more notable for how many nudey sex scenes it could cram in.

The UK is great at dramas that are realistic and yet not cloying or melodramatic. America is amazing at coming up with heightened reality, adventure with a sprinkling of self-awareness to make it zing and sparkle off the screen.

Get over it, Australia! Do we have any fantasy adventure shows for adults here? Not one. Do we have any action adventure shows with a stylised plot, and a range of quirky funny characters? Nothing. Do we have any drama at all that doesn't fall back into the "Who is sleeping with whom" premise? God forbid we try something original in this country.

Save us!

No Other News?

Gosh, have you heard? Michael Jackson died!

Gee, you'd think somebody might mention it on the News.

Look! Up In The Sky!

When I was a teenager, I was not as sceptical as I am today. I assumed that what people said was happening, really was what was happening.

I was fascinated by mysterious goings on, like Bigfoots and Yetis, Loch Ness Monsters, Ghosts, and UFOs. I devoured any book I stumbled upon with this subject matter, though I didn't really seek any of them out otherwise. If they were there waiting, I'd pick them up and read them. And believe them.

That is, until I was about 14, when things started to sort themselves out in my head, and I began to realise that the niggling inconsistencies of these tales of supernatural wonders did not actually stand up to any further scrutiny than a cursory glance.

Most of the best "sightings" had photographs. Many of those photographs truly were amazing - but some were just absurdly clearly obviously fake. This picture below, for example, purportedly showing a ghostly figure in a photograph, is obviously a double-exposure of a man dressed in a sheet. How can anybody take that seriously?



This image below, the best ever of the Loch Ness Monster, which was fully accepted as genuine for such a long time, and was the one that all other sightings were basing themselves from, turned out to be completely faked. And, in retrospect, obviously so; you can see the part where the neck meets the body is shaped like a submarine conning tower. And that is what it was; a plasticine moulded neck and head, stuck to a toy submarine.



And the most famous Bigfoot film ever, showing the beast walking through the woods, has long been doubted. It's certainly very convincing, but there are many unofficial stories behind its origins, usually speaking about the special effects technician who built and wore the suit. It's clearly just a fat guy in a costume.



UFOs are the most persistent, mostly because you don't need to be in a specific situation to see them - you just have to look upwards and sort of catch something out of the corner of your eye that you can't at first explain, and it's enough to claim it's a sighting, and it only takes a little bit of imagination to convince yourself it was a flying saucer from Beta Centauri.

When I read about a lot of these UFO sightings, a consistent description was of a "cigar shaped craft, with windows and coloured flashing lights". Now, as that stands, you can imagine something like a cylinder, with flattened ends, a bulge in the middle, big round windows, and rows of blinking lights flashing off and on down its side.



Except that's not what they actually described. Imagine a cylindrical shape, with a rounded front, and a pointed end. A row of small squarish windows, thirty of them, down either of the cylinder's sides. And suspended off from the sides of the cylinder, and positioned at the front and the end, are tiny lights, alternating a blink every few seconds. And, most importantly of all, if the cylinder was to tilt to the side just slightly, coming into view would be... two wings.

Yes, what they are all consistently describing is a standard jumbo jet.



I realised that's what they had been describing all this time, after watching planes fly overhead here at my new place, as I am right under the flight path for the airport.

It's all about perception. If you are already conditioned to believe the possibility of something exotic and supernatural, it is very tempting and very difficult to stop yourself, to choose to believe that's the explanation for what you saw.

But if you are already a skeptic, and regularly question everything, then more often than not you are more likely to figure out a logical and realistic explanation.

Ejecting The Plasma Core

My telly was broken. It had a dirty great line through it. Big thick and black. If it had been somewhere to the side of the screen, that probably wouldn't be so bad and wouldn't interfere with my viewing too much. Tolerable.

But it didn't decide to be at the side of my screen - noooo, it had to be right smack dab through the very centre of the screen, top to bottom.

It's surprising to me how many shows frame their shots to have a character's face right in the centre of the screen.

Luckily, this particular issue was not unusual - there are plenty of other examples of this irritating fault developing on plasma TVs around the world. It is apparently caused by basic physics - a loose connection exacerbated by age and temperature.

I therefore had three options available to me: chuck it out and get a whole new TV; take it to a professional to fix, who would charge excessively and force me to buy new electronics that they'd replace inside the TV; or find out how to fix the fault online, and get a mate who knows his way around electronics to come round and repair it for me.

I did seriously consider all the different options. A new TV would be great, I could get a proper HD screen, but that is really seriously big money I don't have to throw around anymore. Ah, to be back in the era when I was overflowing with cash. And I considered the practicality of getting it down to the TV fix-it people, and if that was my only option I would have taken that step.

But I in fact do have a mate who knows his way around electronics, and he did come round, and we took the back off my TV. That was a bit of a potential nightmare, as there were around fifty screws, a whole lot of circuit boards and mysterious sockets, and a few very hard to reach doodads that had to be negotiated around. In fact if the fault had been in a different location on the screen, it's possible we wouldn't have been able to reach the bits that were the root cause, as some were buried under layers of electronics and cables.

But we found the right bit, we figured out what needed doing, and my wonderful mate Adam soldered up the fiddly part that was causing the whole trouble. With fingers and toes crossed, we screwed the back on again, hooked up the cables, and let it rip.

So far, so good. Three hours have passed as I write this, and so far the black line has not returned. This is a very good sign that we have fixed the right bits.

Though I suppose it's possible just jiggling things in the back may have been what really fixed it. If so, that'd be awfully disappointing.

Time will tell if it's really fixed. But I am optimistic.

Shiver

It's bloody cold.

Australia is not known for it's freezing temperatures. Dunedin, New Zealand, however, is famous for it. So when I moved here I thought those cold miserable days were behind me.

For the most part I was right. Winters are not exactly tropical, down in the southern parts of Australia, but they at least don't get snowy and icy. In fact, I sort of miss the frozen puddles and snowy fields. But I don't miss the shivering and shaking, the suffering the cold temperatures each day.

An unexpected development in Melbourne's winter this year, is that it started early with quite a sharp, biting cold snap. I don't have efficient heating in my new home, there's not a jot of insulation in this, rather shoddily built, cottage, and the heater built into the air conditioning is, undoubtedly, sucking up electricity that is going to hit my bank account hard.

So I have had to just sit and tolerate it, so far, which is not very pleasant. I have found a couple of warm blankets I like to sit under, all toasty, while watching TV, but I can't really wear them when I'm at the computer, so my extremities are a bit exposed for most of the day, which is quite the discomfort indeed.

I have always preferred the warmth to the cold, that's one of the reasons I moved here and don't miss being back home, but the four months of winter chill is unavoidable, and I guess all I can do is grin and bear it.