I was eating Tandoori chicken and had a random idea involving Tyrannosaurus Rex and a Time Machine,
It goes a little like this. If a T-Rex got hold of a Time Machine and travelled forwards to the present day, how traumatised would it be to find a near relative (the Chicken) being devoured in vast numbers by (from its point of view) a bunch of small pink mammals?
After all according to some frequently posited ideas - there are genetic links between the T-Rex and the chicken. So 65 Million years after the end of age of the Dinos, we get to eat mini T- Rex
Anyway here’s the Challenge. How do you show a T-Rex traumatised by seeing such a bleak future for its species.
Please feel free to take this idea and run with it. If you have any luck please send me back a link - I’d love to see it.
Over the last few months I’ve become more and more aware of Twitter. Mostly through listening to podcasts whose hosts have become twitter fanatics. I eventually decided it was time to learn more.
In essence Twitter is micro-blogging - posting information in a very short form. Very short in fact - you only have 140 characters to get your point across. At first sight that looks too short, impossible to convey something in. Not true. The point of twitter is to answer a simple question - What are you doing? 140 characters is enough to get single thought or piece of information over. 140 characters is small enough to write in almost no time. This is not blogging in articles. This is sending a stream of consciousness over the Internet. Its an opportunity to keep up with what someone is doing and thinking.
As you might have guessed I’ve been converted over to the Twitter side. For the last couple of weeks I’ve been tweeting away on subjects as diverse as thinking about Ubuntu Studio to my thoughts on the last film I saw in the cinema.
So what does that give you? It gives you a chance to keep more up to date with what is going on with Shared Creation and the person behind. In essence its an excellent form for the notes on “The making of…”
I’m now going to introduce this as a Shared Creation project. A fourth stream of information. This means Shared Creation will look like
- The Magazine: News and General Information
- Projects: The Creative Projects of myself and others
- Tumblr: Inspiration pictures, videos and stories
- Twitter: Declarations of postings and what is going on in the background.
It is fairly comprehensive coverage.
I think it could build into a very interesting log. In the near term I’ll be changing the Shared Creation Home Page to better reflect the stream of information going into SC. In the mean time = I’ll just list Twitter.
If you want to follow me on Twitter then take a look at http://twitter.com/robdavies
That’s almost it for now. Except for one last thing, Twitter can be updated from a mobile phone. I’m finding that very useful when away from a computer. All you do is send an SMS. Makes the job of posting even simpler and in the moment. Great!
Barely a week ago I was talking about how easy it was for a creative project to have problems with its supply of energy and that Consumed was such a position.
Now I have great news. Our director and lead cameraman has released edited footage from our last shoot to the team and it is looking very good. There are moments in it that have exceeded my expectations. Alas I cannot show this new material yet, thought I do feel a video blog coming on regarding it. The important thing is that we have a new point to rally around. A fresh point of focus if you like. It is exactly what was needed and it came at the right time. It would seem that you can’t keep an attempt to make a good film down.
At the moment we’re distributing this as a piece of private footage on YouTube. We’ve done this before and it works very well. Don’t try sending footage around for viewing purposes only. Use something like YouTube or Google Video. It simplifies the entire process.
There’s a useful side effect too. How it will index. Under YouTube put in a private video, play it a few times and you can see which related videos will come up alongside it. So far we’re seeing Consumed videos from different members of the team grouping together. This self networking should help us out in the long term.
It would seem that things keep looking up and up.
Tags: Consumed, Film, Progress, Report
There comes a point in many creative projects when everything seems to come to a halt. It is a totally languid time. We’ve hit it a few times in the making of Consumed and we’re in such a time at the moment. It seems to go a little like this.
When things take a long time it is impossible to keep everyone involved busy all the time, without being busy over aspects of life take over from the project you are involved. The habit of doing what you were doing is lost and so getting back into the zone of doing what you were doing.
So if a break occurs galvanizing everyone back to work can be hard. Its not a question of commitment, its a question of trying to make time to do something different. Remember once you stop doing something it stops being what you are doing and then becomes something to add onto your life.
In a sense I think it means this - manically working on something of a creative nature is great. Pausing is ok, but the longer you pause the harder it is get going again. Its like Newtons First Law of Motion - a creative project keeps running unless an external force is applied. The external force can be anything that causes a pause.
Pauses are the enemy. You have to keep moving.
So if you are embarking on a long and large endeavour make sure that you can keep people busy. That increases your chance of success.
This may leave you wondering where that leaves Consumed. Well we are in pause, but all the signs are that it will take off again. The plan is to hire a location that we now well for all exterior and some interior shots. Its all a matter of agreeing on dates to work to.
In the meantime we are in a lull a sort of creative conservation of energy, but one that is the calm before the storm.
Tags: Creative, Inertia, Consumed, Film
