notlikecalvin news

Later this week I’m off to the Glasgow Comedy Festival, providing technical wizardry to The Penny Dreadfuls‘ four shows.

Aeneas Faversham, Shamwagon, Lost in Time and, of course, Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Missing Plot are all being performed at the wonderful Britannia Panopticon music hall.

Each show is on from Thursday through Sunday, and they’re all free. Free. So pop along, if you’re in the area: I’m particularly fond of Sherlock Holmes and Aeneas Faversham, but they’re all worth a gander. For no money.

In just a couple of hours time, we’ll find out if A Plague Requiem has been selected for this year’s National Student Drama Festival, and if we have to do the whole thing again in Scarborough at Easter.

Either way, I’ll let you know.

[ Update: the show wasn't selected. It's a shame, and I'm sure it doesn't necessarily reflect the quality of the piece - but it is actually quite a relief, since my Easter is quite full enough already. Never mind, eh? ]

A few bits and pieces as things get updated:

1. There’s a new version of my CV available for download – it’s been nipped and tucked a little, with much more of a focus on lighting and theatre.

2. After a year with this third major version of notlikecalvin I’ve finally converted this weblog to the same style as the rest. Obviously it’s nowhere near finished, but putting it up now is great motivation for doing more work on it. At least, that’s the idea.

And a couple of tips from recent experience:

1. If, for some reason, you have to survive without your computer for a couple of weeks, you can charge your iPod off any powered USB2 port – including a PlayStation2, although it’s fiddly. Sometimes the PS2 won’t behave, but try unplugging any memory cards and going into the system browser – it seems to be entirely random.

2. If your fridge smells a bit, just get a new one. Much easier.

[Edit: comments are still bobbins in my new CSS, so I've switched back to the Green Marinée theme for the moment.]

I’ve made another short film: Commute.

Filmed entirely using my Sony Ericsson K700i cameraphone (hence the fuzz-0-vision), I shot this over several weeks of commuting – duh – into Leeds, a journey which usually involved a prolonged series of buses, trains and walking. It gave me something to do.

Commute is the second of three films that I originally planned to release before the summer, of which Landscape was the first. I finally got ’round to editing it together, just before my Mac died, as an exercise to familiarise myself with iMovie 5: now that Tranquility is back (and that’s a whole other story) I’ve redux‘d it into Final Cut, mainly for better control over the titles. Anyhew, there it is.

I once again turned to CC Mixter for a soundtrack, something a little more upbeat this time: Hit It by Jim Purbrick (which also uses samples from deutscheunschuld‘s track religion) weathered the long selection procedure to provide a suitable beat to cut to.

So Commute is also released under a non-commercial sampling plus Creative Commons licence. Mash away, play by the rules, and please drop me a line if you do.

Downloaderify: Commute.mov [8MB .mov - QuickTime required]

I’m off up to Edinburgh again this evening: we’re putting Crestfall into the Traverse for another short run.

If you’ve got some time to kill on Thursday, Friday or Saturday evening and you’ll be in the area, why not pop along for some “cutting edge” contemporary drama? It got a five-star review in the Scotsman (which was a bit of a shock, believe me) so we must have done something right.

You can book tickets online with no extra charge, and you’ll make the good ship Nutshell very happy indeed.

(I really should be using this space to publish some notes about my design – the sort of thing that only sometimes ends up in industry journals could be made very accessable here. Once I get back, I’ll do something with that.)

Nine months on, it’s happened again: my iMac G5 has a serious problem. After a week or so of irregular problems with powering-up, she’s now in exactly the same state as before: black screen and overblowing fans. I’m betting my bottom dollar that I’ll be needing a third midplane board from Apple, as it looks like this is the same problem with the power management unit.

Annoyingly, even with the same quick turnaround as last time I won’t get this fixed until next weekend. But it’s been a while, so let’s recap what I’ve been up to since and during the Edinburgh Fringe:

• Assisted Simon Wilkinson with a searchlight installation for the opening of Perth’s new concert hall [Simon's photos / my photos]
• Lit Crestfall for Nutshell at the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow [my photos / Scotsman review]
• Trained staff members at Fairbridge in using Macs for editing their own video projects
• A number of print design projects for CHA [research report (PDF)]
• Real-time reactive lighting and sound design for Sherlock Holmes & the Case of the Improvised Plot in the Edinburgh Festival Fringe
• Half of the improvising technical team for The Stand Players’ Fringe show, Completely Made Up

In addition, last week I devised a Murder Mystery evening for the Drama Society, set at Bretton Hall: I’d written a couple of these for the EUTC at the Bedlam, but this was a bit different – great fun, though.

Crestfall also gets another run later this week, this time at the Traverse in Edinburgh. We were all really pleased with the reception it got at the Citz, and it’s going to be another little adventure staging it end-on. Please do come along if you’ve got an evening free for a slice of genuinely contemporary theatre. I’ll buy you a drink.

(When I get a spare moment, part of my work in this final year of degree is to work out what I’m going to do once I get that piece of paper and can’t laze around as a student any more: looking at the list above doesn’t really help to clarify that much…)

I’ve made a (very) short film: Landscape.

It’s an exploration of the – duh – landscape that I’ve been living in for the last couple of years: some of the sights and sounds that come with being surrounded by Yorkshire’s fantastic nature, and some practical experimentation with framing and exposure. I shot the film on a series of walks over one weekend, wandering around the Bretton Country Park with camera and tripod, setting up then waiting for the sun to make an appearance.

I’ve spent much of the intervening time trying to find the ideal soundtrack – since there’s no real plot or dialogue in the film it uses music to help drive the visual, so getting the right track was very important.

I wanted to use Creative Commons licenced music, since that would neatly step around any problems with copyright, and I found what I was looking for at CC Mixter. After ploughing through practically everything in the classical, instrumental & experimental categories – among many others – I found sHORT fACED bEAR and his Big Idea (reduced mix).

Thanks to the wonder of Creative Commons’ non-commercial sampling plus licence, I could have sampled, remixed, scritched and scratched bEAR’s music, so long as any derivative works that I make with it are released using the same licence.

So, that means that Landscape is now also kind-of public property: you can “creatively transform this work for non-commercial purposes” provided that you play by the rules: please drop me a line if you do.

Anyway, downloaderify away: Landscape.mov [16MB .mov - QuickTime required]

[Update: file now hosted at archive.org ]