Film festival special

Last night Em & I went to a session supported by the Sydney Film Festival that was specifically devoted to internet distributed short films hosted by two people Emily has worked with/for. This is great for a number of reasons, my favourite being that I can show you the three stand-out ones right here.

The first one is a Will Ferrell film (!) called The Landlord. It speaks for itself but if you are interested in how they got a child to do this then have a look at the Funny or Die site for 'the making of' and outtakes clips too.

The second film is too odd to describe so I shan't. It is distributed by atom films who support independant film makers through advertising. This means that there are some pre-roll adverts on the video but stick with it, it's weird!

AtomFilms.com: Funny Videos | Funny Cartoons | Comedy Central

The last video clip is a piece of machinima. Machinima - machine animation - for the purposes of this film, is taking the output of your computer and dubbing it as film. The artist in this case has built a Vincent Van Gough picture in the very powerful 3D rendering engine of virtual world Second Life, put some effects on and dubbed it then dismantled it in Second Life leaving only the video clip behind. It is a breathtaking piece of work when seen on a big screen, I'm afraid I can only do small on here.

Linkdump digest

With the rather pretentious high-minded ideal below I feel in need of some light relief, so here are some of my favourite things I've posted on the linkdump recently.

This is an advert for a New Zealand porn chanel stuffed with innuendo. It contains nothing you can't put on TV, it's all in your filthy mind! [posted 30 August]

A NASA satellite picture of the recent bushfires in Greece. [posted 30 August]

Staying awake by switching brain hemispheres. Remarkeable, but still stupid. [Posted 13 September]

A robotic presence at work. Genius, flawed genius but genius nonetheless. [Posted 10 September]

Ah, that's better.

Top Gear vs Alabama

Hicksville Alabama

I have lots of erudite and witty observations to make but right now I am hung over; subtlety is a forlorn hope and wit a forgotten dream. Watch this instead, it's very funny indeed.

Soft as shite shandy drinking broadcasters.

Thursday night out

Last night we went to Cherijam to watch our friend Ephrem perform. The video clip you can see here is of his second song of the night. The man has a great voice and a terrific stage presence – bastard.

Now lean in and grin like a drunken fool...perfect!Ephrem was one of a selection of performers on that night all of whom were pretty good. The night itself was organised by Sally who I did take a picture of which was hastily deleted at the subject’s request – she will not be appearing in this post. I also have a fantastic one of Emily which will not be published here without her permission.


The best seat in the house was claimed early on
Cherijam is a great venue with two extremely well decked out bars above what looks to be a great restaurant. We ate in the bar upstairs – good pizza, nice wine - I feel a bit the worse for wear today, again.

Er...video

Anyone got any ideas what I do with this? I mean it's great and my inner geek is simply delighted but I just dunno what I might do with this.

Filed under:

• me
• video

Maroubra beach today

This is a bit of an experiment. I have just shot some video of a small section of the view from our balcony and uploaded it to Google video. This means you can actually see what it's like outside my window today.

Warning the file is nearly 11Mb and it's not very long, I just wanted to see if it worked.