Saturday 2 February 2002

A lot has happened since December.  Last weekend Peter Papantoniou provided us with a dual Pentium server, an iMac and some hard drives, and we arranged a DVCAM deck from a guy in the city.  It's his own personal deck.

After a lot of stuffing around, we found Premier 5.1c wasn't able to handle the DV Stream data recorded by iMovie on the iMac.  It flashed and flickered and was all broken up.  Even making low resolution versions made no diff.  So we arranged Premier 6.0.

In the mean time, I just pottered around with more Making off footage with Rebecca Hall and Harry Clegg, releasing the third instalment on Thursday last week.

Friday we got Premier 6 and voila, mostly it was fine.  Can't render a DV Stream output - god only knows why, it seems obvious to me that what you put in is at least what you want out, but it does output to DV via Firewire and does great resolution on screen shows.

So I've edited the rough of Scene 33 and just working on Scene 44.

Premier 6 hang a fair bit under Windows 98.  I'm going to install it under Windows 2000 on Peter's machine and see if it is more stable.  (Bit like Premier 1 on my Windows NT4 - works without crashing! But boy did it fail under 95 and 3.11)

Anyway as I seem to need to (again) install Windows 2000, I thought I'd add the two 80 Gig hard drives Suzanne picked up from Tech2U on Friday. 

Peters machine now has 2 x 60, 2 x 46 and 2 x 80 gigs in it.  That's 292 Gigs for the slow math people.  292 Gigs equates to 1460 minutes of hi quality PAL DV Stream!   Almost enough to load our entire 1528 minutes worth.  Fortunately I have another 46 gigs on the Pentium III (from Paul Shenk) which is another 230 minutes :)

Bronwyn Hancock, a long time friend who knows the full story of this film almost as intimately as we do, has given us $500 towards Finalcut Pro V3.  It arrives on Monday which we'll run on the iMac to finesse the footage completely.  So it's all go here.   We can accommodate 3 editors and a  supervisor in our office, which is rapidly growing up in temperature.  Anyone got a portable air-condition they can lend us!

Friday 1 February 2002

Suzanne and I are again disappointed with the results of our attempts to get print facilities for the film.  Just for one small part of the total printing process we've been quoted $120,000.  There are three other parts of the process to be quoted yet - not to mention film stock, which it now seems Kodak will only "discount" for us.  

Unfortunately discounts don't help, especially is the "Australian" cost is as is.

Suzanne has been looking over seas now and found a couple of companies that will do the entire process from exposure to cans for an amount in US Dollars you have to blink at three times.

So we're hunting competitive prices now in Japan, the USA, Canada and Europe.  I always said we weren't necessarily interested in the Australian market for all our productions, I didn't realise I mean the Production side too!

With any luck, we'll lock something down.  NBC (The biggest TV Network in the United States) still owe me USD$22,000 for my work on their Olympics in Sydney.   Suzanne has been trying to contact them for a few weeks now (over a year since they promised to pay) and we're still waiting for replies.

At any rate, looks like with a little help from our friends (the true friends) we're rocking on our way.

I guess the end result is, we'll do the un-Australian thing because it's too costly to do the Australian thing.  I guess it's an indication of how much film work Australian Film business really wants to do.  Doesn't both me, the world is quite large.

Monday 31 December 2001

What a brilliant day it's been.  Although half of Sydney is covered in a thick haze from the bush fires burning all round the mountains and the Sydney Basin, the activities that go on leave inspiration to imagination.  From 10 AM today, Shelley Green (Suzanne) and Adam Todd (Producer/Director) enjoyed the company of Marcia (Station Manager) and Charley (Announcer) at Sydney's Western Radio station WOW FM 100.7. 

The interview commenced with the TJPS Theme music being played and Charlie dived right in on Shelley calling her the next Nicole Kidman and that wasn't where the compliments stopped!

Shelley, enjoying the attention from both Charley and Marica continued her true poise and delivered a wonderful interview which you can find in the media section of our web site.

WOW FM Station Manager, Marcia, has offered her full support to see the community brought to awareness of this fantastic film.  Iconoclast Promises to ensure Marcia gets a double pass to the exclusive "Pre Premier" screening of the film!

Watch here for more WOW FM/Iconoclast announcements!

Monday 24 December 2001

Shelley Green (Suzanne), Eliana Dona (Monique) and Darren Hawkins (Dr. Polack), accompanied by Adam Todd (Producer/Director) made their debut "Caught in the Net" media appearance today at 2GLF in Liverpool South Western Sydney. 

Appearing on "Dads on the Air" with Uncle Buck and interviewed by John Stapleton, Shelley, Eliana and Darren (making lots of weird noises) enjoyed an hour of intense questioning about the film.  The 2GLF Dads team interviewed Adam about the actual background story that forms the basis of "Caught in the Net" earlier in the year, so it was a real treat for the two groups to be united for an exclusive first interview!

You can hear the interview in the Media section.