50th blog and award nominations!

Welcome to the 50th blog on my website..this is quite exciting, I had no idea I'd blogged

that much over the past year.

Anyway... This is just a short one to check out two little films I scored which are gaining attention in the festivals -

Lessons from a melting icecap - a 40min documentary directed by Jinty MacTavish

NOMINATED FOR BEST NZ FILM and and BEST SHORT FILM in REEL EARTH

Whetu Rere - The Sealion and the Coment - a 24min short film directed by Alastair Jamieson and Kat Baulu

NOMINATED FOR BEST NEW ZEALAND FILM  in REEL EARTH

view the other nominees here.

The awards are tomorrow night May 16th in Palmerston North, presented by Robyn Malcolm. I have no idea whether Alastair or Jinty will be there but I wish them luck across the interweb..

News if they pick up the awards soon!

48 Hours

Again, Team Rampion has triumphed over the 48Hours weekend, getting it in with a mammoth 25mins to spare! 

Our genre: REVENGE MOVIE

Our character: ALEX PUDDLE

Character trait: EXAGGERATOR

Dialogue: 'IT DOESN'T FIT.."

Prop: A ROCK

We called the film 'The man with the gravel tongue'. Here are a few shots.

We're in the heats on May 21st. 

Some facts about our filming:

- It was 10.30am on saturday before we started filming. 

- By midday we'd only done 2 of the 10 scenes. 

- By Midnight we'd done about 8.

- By 4pm sunday we'd finished shooting.

-By 5pm sunday we'd finished editing

- By 6.15pm sunday we'd finished sound and Voice Overs

- We had voice coaching in South African accents from australia via internet

- We had a lot of chocolate and lollies

-The director and art director played a gig on sunday morning

- 90% of images were derived from national geographic magazines from 1970-1999.

- At one point we had our frustrated sound man Jared searching for Osama vocal samples (when a mis-communication between producer and Jared had somehow misheard my actual request for Obama sound samples)

- Our producers copy of 'The Secret' provided great inspiration

- We had 3 scripts concurrently which confused almost everyone

-Our first 3 attempts at outputting to tape failed

-We took over Mark's flat unexpectedly and even roped in unexpecting flatmates to our stress circle

- The film is made up of about 1500 still photographs.

Things we learned:

-No matter how calm you are, when you're filming a piece of paper close up on the end of a kebab stick, you won't be able to keep it still.

-Polystyrene is awesome

-Delegation is the key to getting a job done quickly

-Make sure your voice talent doesn't abandon you for other 48hour films.

- a focussing stick is an awesome device 

- Camera people get really sore eyebrows from squinting into the viewfinder, possibly inducing headaches.

- We edited with imovie but wouldn't really reccomend it.

Director Claire Cowan, signing off.

Off.

NZSO Sounz readings

The NZSO Sounz readings happened on wednesday and thursday,

where my piece 'the legend of the trojan bird' was recorded.

The session was at the town hall in wellington. Conductor Hamish McKeich.

The score is revised from the version the AYO commissioned in 2008. I was happy with the recording given rehearsal time, and hopefully should have a recording soon from radio nz who recorded it. After the second day of readings there was a forum to discuss new music performance opportunities and collaborations with composers and performers. I had to explain to nzso staff and other composers what the anti-fashion league is. 

Here's me having breakfast after the first rehearsal of my piece.. I always get too nervous to be able to eat anything beforehand. Mmm banana.

Waiting for the performance to begin in the afternoon.

Mid-performance, Hamish cues the brass..

Now this weekend will be full on..so trying to get some sleep..

A reason to visit grenada

This is quite amazing.

A while ago I was fantasizing about having an underwater studio.. or at least the feel of one above water..maybe it's just my obsession with blue..

The bowed piano ensemble

Found this video on Youtube and wanted to share it.

Wordle, freesound, and easter holidays..

I found this cool tool on the internet called wordle. It does crazy stuff with text.. I pasted in some blog text and got these among heaps of other results. More pleasing to look at than boring paragraphs..

One is created from text from this blog, the other from the text on my sounz biography page. It creates bigger words for the words that appear more often. Would be cool if you could do this with sounds..

Another cool website i've been using a lot lately is freesound project

where I've managed to collect a lot of the sounds I needed for moonfishing. I got some lovely soft frog calls and some sounds of scraping concrete and creaking doors. It's a free creative commons based sharing website that is an excellent tool for sound designers when foley options are limited.

I have been recording my own foley for some of it though, which involved throwing things into the bathtub, crinkling crunchy bar wrappers and plastic bags, and cracking ice and pinecones.

Finished this week two arrangements for the Hamilton 'play it strange' show, a song by Annah MacDonald and one by Maria English, both talented young song writers from Hamilton girl's college. Their ensembles included everything from brass to strings and piano..and hopefully will sound great.

Emma's coming over for Easter, so will have some nice family time in the next week..probably not much work done, but ah well. I'm also moving into a new flat in waterview, which looks amazing.. very quiet and perfect for music creation. And a cute jack russell called cash.




Bye for now.

canada report

I visited Montreal for a week before leaving New York. I was invited by Kat Baulu, from the National Film Board of the Canada, (and who also co-directed Whetu-rere.)
I gave a presentation on 'how to create effective and long-lasting relationships between directors and composers.' It went well and I had good response.
This is the group of Doc Shoppers I did my presentation to.

I also met some famous Canadian film makers, including Alanis Obomsawin and Philippe Baylaucq.

One night Kat and I visited a small town called st adolphe where her parents have a house, we went snow tobogganing and I went snow-shoeing across a frozen lake (with about 4 ft of snow in some places.) Super canadian!




This snow-donut was extremely unpredictable and had zero steering capabilities.

Kat's Dad showed me the best way to sled..
And I broke the record..flea came to get me.


The flea herself.

Double sledding, extremely dangerous and not recommended.


Double sledding carnage.
Kat wipes out off the surfboard thing..



Snow shoeing gear.
Off to walk around the island. Those two poles sticking up are the end of the jetty, where boats are tied in summer.


The beautiful Kat and miss Flea.