We Crowned a Kitten

Around a year ago an old friend of mine got in touch. We hadn’t spoken in over fifteen years and it was as we caught up over coffee that a baton story started by Michael Moorcock in The Guardian came up. I’d written part four and it turns out that Steve had written part six.

Small fucking world.

When we knew each other as teenagers I guess we were both working on our escape routes. For Steve it was music. And it was always obvious he was gonna break out. My own path seemed a little more muddled. We were in a band together for the briefest of moments – I think it was Steve who forced me to buy a bass guitar. What I really remember about that time is that I was more intent on writing about the music than learning how to play it. My bass fell to another friend with a natural ability and that was that.

We won’t mention my singing for Iron Hell.

Steve’s done a lot of cool stuff in the intervening years – including finding a wife smarter than either of us. One of the many things he’s up to right now includes radio drama. And wouldn’t you know it they’re also blowing the doors off the process:

After many queries about just how one goes about making a drama from start to finish, I shall, as producer and director, along with the writer, Michelle Lipton sound designer/editor Eloise Whitmore and composer Stephen Kilpatrick share this process with you

So now you have something else to keep an eye on.

Now I’ve paid Steve back for the bass and shouting at me for messing up ‘Motorbreath’ by getting him on Twitter. And we’re talking about writing something together again.

Probably not with Michael Moorcock this time, but you never know.

Run. Don’t walk

It came to my attention this morning that some of you may have not yet seen Na Hong-jin’s The Chaser. That’s ok – I have a back log of movies to catch up on myself and hey, we’re busy people. But it also came to my attention that some of you may be waiting for the inevitable American remake. This is unacceptable.

We don’t want a repeat of the incident  a few years ago where I was forced to drag some of you out of the theaters by the legs, hitting you over the head with the DVD of Infernal Affairs before the opening credits of The Departed had played.

Plus this time I have a claw hammer.

Novblomojogoflo

Skipped the normally mandatory Halloween post. My Bad. Spent most of yesterday trying to consolidate the external hard drives that pepper my office. Dug out a lot of old video I shot, a pile of movies I forgot all about and enough photos to put a little extra strain on Flickr’s ‘from Yahoo‘ hernia badge. They should really pop that back inside, out of sight, where it belongs.

Also found a pile of old bookmarks that I’m currently revisiting and feeding on. Figured the following pic managed to illustrate my previous two posts quite well so here it is:

Here’s the accompanying blurb from SADA104:

In the early 19th century, “Yamato Nadeshiko” (大和撫子) is referred to by Japanese as a ideal Japanese woman with loyalty, domestic ability, and wisdom in the male dominated society. Rin Nadeshico (*Nadeshico spelled with “c”, not “k”) is an up&coming Japanese female graphic artist who illustrates a new definition of “Yamato Nadeshiko” in the 20th century. Those girls she draws are independent, with strong personality, and sometimes aggressive.

Sadly, Rin’s site seems to be down, but there’s plenty of her work out there if you google her name.

In short: girls rock. Don’t fuck with them.

Right. November arrived on a wet windy Sunday. Luckily most of the Halloween vomit seems to have been washed away. November means novel writing for some of you, but I’ll be playing the video version again this year. 7pm and I’m in the middle of a Firefly marathon, but I’ll see if I can get something up by midnight.

Looks like last year I only managed a week’s worth of video. So that’s the target to beat. I’m also involved in a couple of side projects, but we’ll get to those when they pop up. I’m a big fan of Vimeo still, but I’m a bigger fan of the iPhone so that means I’ll be using YouTube more than normal.

Sorry about that.

Sanctuary

There’s a word to conjure with.

The first thing that springs to mind is the ankh worn by Jessica in Logan’s Run. Perhaps the Iron Maiden song* playing in the background as Francis bears down on her and the reformed Sandman. I was always a sucker for sci fi and heavy metal.

I’m thinking about the word because my friend Alex posed a question:

Where do you find sanctuary?

It’s an interesting one. First I had to think about what it is that I’m trying to escape from when I look for the damn thing. The old chestnut it’s the journey that’s important and not the destination falls onto the page and I can’t argue with it. Partly because it looks so fragile it may break in two and I kinda like having it around. The scariest word I can think of, the one I keep in the closet next to the little dead Japanese kid who mews like a cat, is contentment.

I like the word sanctuary because it feels transient. It’s a rest stop along the way because the thing baring down on you is always only a few steps behind, but you can be smarter than the evil bastard as long as you don’t panic and give up. Throw a priest at it. Keep a nun to hand. The alternative is to be content. To give up. ‘This is it’, you’ll say. ‘I’m happy with my lot’, you’ll smile.

Fuck that.

Right now I’m very happy, but I’m far from content. Happy malcontents make for the best commentators. Its the truly miserable cunts you have to stamp on hard.

I’m in my office at home listening to Judas Priest. It’s not turned to 11, but part of what makes this space a sanctuary is the ability to turn everything up to 11. Try and drag me back to a regular office environment now and I’ll be Damien Thorn, aged 4, in The Omen contemplating a church service**.

Kids.

Within a week of moving here I did a not very grown up thing. I grabbed some left over black paint and scrawled a message on the office door:

Office wall

It’s a reference from The Walking Dead, but it does its job for the most part***. It lets people know to keep the fuck out, but it also symbolises that I can do what I like.

And that’s the sanctuary that being a writer gives me. I never really enjoyed the conventional gigs I had. Even the first few years I was actually making a living from writing and doing well as a freelancer I found constraining. It’s the last year or so when I finally got to write exactly what I wanted to that felt like a real breakthrough.

This morning for example I got to fuck up a space shuttle.

But there’s always something just out of reach that looks perfect and indestructible and the challenge is to 1. get there 2. fuck it up and 3. move on.

So Alex, the short answer to is that I find sanctuary not in a specific place (as those places by their very nature crumble away) but in a specific mind set. The consciousness that probably began to establish itself when I was a kid and my bedroom really was a sanctuary. The drabness I saw every day out of that window is the thing I’m running from.

It’s Francis screaming “Run, runner!”

I always found that to be damn good advice.

…………..

*I love that Derek Riggs had to write to the Conservative Party for a photo of Thatcher to draw the Sanctuary single’s cover.

**That kid got the part because he kicked Richard Donner in the balls. Fucking heroic.

***It doesn’t go down too well when we have lots of people stay over and the office becomes a bedroom.

Slingers pics

Aside from the ones in this post I think this is almost all the Slingers pics that have surfaced so far. Just rounding ‘em up to be tidy before I dig through to find a few more…

Sean Pertwee and Dalip Tahil as Colonel Thomas Hall and The Mark

Margo Stilley as Jeannie

Adrian Bower as DM with director Steve Barron

First day of shooting

Jeannie ready to pilot the ship

GUN in the safe hands of Tom Mison as Frank

DM and Frank

Haruka Abe as Marti

Off to Dublin

Short hop to Ireland to talk to one of the guys behind The Tudors.

Seems the little buzz we created at Cannes and LA has spread to Dublin. Slingers, although made for American TV initially, will be a Canadian/Irish co-production so this is really good news that we get to go out there early and learn a few things.

A lot of things probably.

Pretty pictures and more news when I get back. In the meantime, go watch Star Trek.

What we do

I am not a journalist.

I’m just someone who’s been blogging for a while, writing for a little longer and spots the important stuff when it comes along. In many ways I’m the same person I was when I started messing around on the Internet quite a few years ago and yet now I’m approached on a regular basis to do some weird and wonderful things. I haven’t changed the signal that I’m broadcasting all that much, but social media has certainly amplified it.

On Friday afternoon after a very successful social media cafe at its new home in the ICA I received a phone call from the Thomson Reuters news agency. I was asked if I wanted to come into their offices on Monday morning for a NewsMaker event with Gordon Brown, the British Prime Minister.

Sure, I said.

And here I am now. In the same room as one of the most important people on the planet and simply because I tend to use a series of online tools and platforms that anyone reading this also has access to.

If you go to http://ourmaninside.com/ you’ll see that Christian Payne is with me. He’s one of the very best social media practitioners that I know. Yesterday as we spent the day here at Reuters working out exactly what this meant and what we could achieve, we were asked by a series of people what exactly it is that we do.

It’s a very good question.

Today we help to demonstrate how forward thinking and innovative a huge organisation like Thomson Reuters can be. I’m as out of place here as I was in Cannes when a similar set of people wanted to try something new and put me in the same room as Stephen Spielberg and Harrison Ford among others. That was a spectacular success not because of the names involved or the fact that I have a crazy job, but simply because we removed some barriers and allowed people sat at home to join in what would have otherwise been behind closed doors.

Today we’re taking a similarly high profile event that is already being broadcast worldwide (you can find a feed on the Thomson Reuters site as well as Christian’s blog) and seeing what we can add to the mix. With Gordon Brown due to start talking on the present economic crisis what can two beardy blokes with a few laptops and small cameras possible hope to add?

Well nothing directly on what is about to be said. I have as much interest in current politics as I did in marketing movies. I’m here with Christian to start conversations around the NewsMaker event that are currently not part of Reuter’s remit. I sincerely hope that following today the idea of getting these events discussed on social media platforms such as Twitter, Seesmic and Phreadz becomes a natural part of the news media’s roadmap.

Broadcasting on such a scale is brilliant. Listening to the conversations those broadcasts generate is even better.

And a happy side product is that we legitimise a little more the work we do (and by we I mean not just Christian and I, but all social media users) and the platforms we live and play on.

And hey look – I just used a free iPhone app to break a huge event. Don’t you just love living in the future?

Talk to Christian and I on Twitter right now and we’ll keep the conversation moving along.

Posted with LifeCast

LifeCasting

I’m beta testing the WordPress version of LifeCast from my iPhone. This represents a new mindset for me as I’ve hardly ever felt the need to liveblog much. Huge events such as the London bombing were the exception, but now platforms such as Twitter offer a more concise and interactive solution to firing up a blog.

However, just as I believe blogging hasn’t been replaced by micro-blogging or video blogging neither do I think new techniques kill off the old ones. And when new tech like the iPhone offers interesting ways for old dogs like me to learn new tricks then it simply means more strings to my bow.

Couple of things to note. The current version of LifeCast availabe via the iTunes store (for free) is already compatible with Blogger, Tumblr and Picasa. As I don’t use any of those platforms anymore I’ll be concentrating on text posts to see how the app handles formatting. Also wanna get used to typing on the iPhone. So far so good.

Full disclosure: I’m currently working on a number of projects with Sleepydog, hence the opportunity to get my mitts on this early. I’ve also had a chance to see some cool stuff leave the drawing board and am very interested to see how this all hangs together.

Depending where I am (which you’ll know via the post’s geolocation) I’ll probably be playing with this a few times a week. I’ll also write something about the potential of apps like this one which I think is going to be the real strength of the iPhone and Android.

As opposed to say pretending your phone is a fucking beer glass.

Posted with LifeCast

Coffee Interlude

I muddied the waters a little this week by suggesting that the regular London Creative Coffee Club follow the Tuttle and move to the ICA for its regular meetings. While the Tuttle now has a real partnership with the ICA this wasn’t what I was suggesting for the CCC. At least not at this stage.

As with the Tuttle I can’t think of a better place to host this regular event, but it does make more sense to discuss the possible move of venue as a group. We’ll be doing just that this Wednesday alongside the usual subjects. If you fancy popping along full details are here.

As there’s such a large overlap between CCC and the Tuttle this should be an easy decision to make. Let’s see how the Social Media Cafe slots into its new home on the 10th and talk about moving the CCC in its wake on the 15th. I’m sure that if we do make the move that the ICA will be very accommodating, but as a smaller group I wouldn’t expect an early opening. This would then mean moving the CCC back an hour, but does open up the possibility of extra people joining us for lunch?

Let me know what you think.

Photo credit: Mobile Workspace by jazzmasterson (CC license)

Twestival

After hosting some smaller scale Tweetups myself I was very interested to see how last night’s Twestival was going to go. These things can get worryingly complicated, but I’m happy to say that despite an initial bout of confusion (over whether the venue was going to enforce its ridiculous dress code) the whole thing seemed to go off without a hitch.

I’m a little hoarse this morning from having one too many conversations over the ‘music’, but the free beer, wine and grub made up for that. Hell, I even won a raffle prize and did a little jig with a cute girl to Ben‘s crowd rousing Twitter song.

As with all social media events though, the emphasis for me was the people – catching up with a few familiar faces and finally meeting some fine Twitter folk for the first time. In that respect the event worked really well and I had a much better time than at the Moo bash a few months back. There was a real sense of moving out of the echo chamber and it was a relief to see and meet so many people that I’ve never crossed paths with before. I had a lot of conversations that I’ll follow up on this week so some interesting stuff should come out of the evening.

I also got the occasional nod about some of the cool stuff I’ve been involved with over the last 12 months – and each time it was my great pleasure to remind everyone that everything from the film screenings to hanging with Han Solo started at events just like this one and through working with people that I’ve met almost exclusively through social media.

Amanda and the Twestival team did some sterling work last night and I’d certainly love to see the Twestival become an annual fixture on the London events calendar.

Speaking of events… I’m off to the Tuttle soon. We’re announcing some big news there this morning, but I’ll be writing about that later…

Braaaains on YouTube and BBC 3

This is interesting:

This website follows Bryony as she attempts to make the world’s first UGC zombie movie.

What’s a UGC movie?

UGC stands for User Generated Content. That means it’s a film that’s made entirely by contributions from the online community…

So what’s the BBC’s involvement?

The Zombie movie is entirely up to Bryony – we’re just following her as she makes it…

The Beeb are actually doing a bit more than that. By choosing to follow the project and committing to having a documentary by the end of it the BBC are in many ways legitimatising what Paperlillies is up to. At least in the eyes of BBC viewers who think YouTube is nothing but a place to watch old episodes of Doctor Who or ‘that video with the monkey’ (take your pick).

It’s an interesting step for a channel like BBC 3 and I think the correct one. Just recently I watched Adam Buxton’s MeeBOX and while I’ve always enjoyed his work and he’s obviously very in tune with the Internet  this came across as a tad dated and way too obvious. Disturbingly he also suddenly looks a lot like Documentally.

The other show that promised to play in the world I live and work in was Delta Forever:

This was a pilot for a proposed show about an online community whose lives revolve around a very Harry Potterish series of novels. Some things the pilot got absolutely right (the Scottish character defending the original title of the first novel over the bastardised American version rang some serious bells for this Dark Materials fanboy), but the most obvious failure was the idea that these kids needed a visual cue to help them stand out as Internet nerds. The cast had to suffer a tedious amount of OTT makeup. Horrible to watch, which was a shame for the few good performances that got buried. But there was something there that to me at least warranted further viewing and I’d be interested to watch the concept develop if it gets picked up for a series.

That may of course have more to do with the pilot revolving around an advance geek screening of a film that the fans will either love or loathe. Something I have a certain familiarity with…

The zombie project though is an entirely fresher idea. First and foremost this is a project developed by an already popular online community member and something that was set in motion before the Beeb swung a beam on it. I think an organisation as big and respected as the BBC getting involved at this stage of an online madcap idea is very important and the payoff for everyone involved is accumulative.

There is of course the danger that if handled improperly the YouTubers will come off as a little irregular, but to survive on YouTube you need to be pretty thick-skinned so I’m not too worried with that angle. It should be win-win for the Beeb as this kind of thing makes them look web savvy at a time when they need a leg-up in that area. The worry is that they’ll cut corners on this in the way they have with the iPlayer (great concept, horrible realisation – note the two show links above now have nowhere to go which will now instead send you straight for a torrent).

What they could have on their hands is something as vital as say the upcoming We Are Wizards or at the very least an interesting companion piece to it. It also comes at a time when Joss Whedon is putting a fork in this space too.

Oddly enough this seems to be the summer for home-made zombie projects. I’ve been made aware of a small pile of them currently in production with budgets ranging from the very modest to the very respectable. This however is by far the most interesting. The plot for once is the least of my concerns as I’m far more interested in how a community comes together to pull this kind of project off.

It’s the kind of thing that was talked about a lot in the early days of Seesmic but it came to nothing. While some of my more succesful recent projects have been built in a similar way by finding the right people with the right skills in my own social media backyard (which handily stretches across the globe), but nothing quite on this scale.

Getting the right people together to land an interview with Stephen Spielberg is one thing. Beating him at his own game is quite another…

All you need is a girl and a gun

A few months ago I saw an extended trailer for the new Pixar movie WALL-E and it immediately stood out thanks to a barrage of visual gags and an animation style that was both stunning and beautiful. I’ve been eager to find out if the delight I felt in watching the snippet would carry through for the whole movie. The image that I took away that evening was the rusty battered robot hanging on with one arm to a spacecraft in flight while allowing his free hand to wade through an ice field:

There’s been a lot of talk online comparing WALL-E to Short Circuit (which I hoped was lazy linking as the robot in that movie is about as endearing as a lump in the testicle), but as I watched that little guy hanging onto the ship I was immediately hit by memories of The Black Hole and more importantly Silent Running.

I was really looking forward to seeing it.

I got my chance at a press screening last night and as soon as it started I felt all those expectations and the NEED to see a good sci-fi movie taken out of my hands, pushed to one side and given a little reassuring pat on the head. Any worries I had simply fell away as Pixar gave me far far more than I expected.

WALL-E is by far the best movie I’ve seen this year.

I’ll go further and say it’s the best thing to come out of Pixar to date and has given me renewed faith in what can be done with technology in a medium that at its heart is about delighting the audience in a very old fashioned way. This story of a love sick robot and his accidental adventure that changes the lives of those that he bumps into (often literally) should be an easy target for a cynical bastard like me. But the little guy won me over immediately and in the same way that Harold Lloyd did when I was a kid.

By far the most interesting Pixar creation so far and what’s best is that he’s teamed with a for once formidable female lead in the sleek, smooth (and just a little bit deadly) Eve.

At its most basic level WALL-E is about an old school SONY tape deck trying to win the heart of an Apple iPod.

I dare any geek not to love that concept.

I have a lot of time for movie robots*. One of my first websites was nothing but movie robots, and Huey, Dewey and Louie from Silent Running are way up there. Whenever anyone talks about the wonders of 2001 A Space Odyssey I drag them back to reality by pointing out that Douglas Trumbull’s 1972 eco space movie is the real wonder. The relationship between Bruce Dern and his renamed drones is something that got under my skin at an early age and WALL-E has more than one nod to that movie.

I’m going to see WALL-E again as soon as it opens on the largest screen I can find and ideally on a weekend afternoon when the place is filled with kids. For all the joy an old nerd like me got out of it WALL-E is also a brave family movie that dares to swap obvious voice talent for some real story telling. It’s something I’ll be returning to here once everyone else has had a chance to see it.

I hope it makes a fucking fortune.

*Not as much as this guy. Check out his home built Dewy. If I was working on something like, I don’t know… the remake of The Day The Earth Stood Still for example… I’d probably drop him a line.

Welcome to the cheap seats

British B Movies

I don’t watch a lot of TV anymore and I certainly don’t sit there with the remote in hand looking for something to watch like I did as a kid. The stuff of interest I can find online (and usually torrent) while things outside of my usual remit normally get mentioned to me via Twitter. With homegrown stuff this means I can have a quick look on the iPlayer to make up my mind if a show is worth torrenting.

I’d use the iPlayer a hell of a lot more if it didn’t have the dumb one week only* rule attached to most of its content. Although it’s growing on me slightly since this morning when I noticed that the thing goes all the way up to 11. Dangerous joke that though when the iPlayer is so very reminiscent of Spinal Tap’s Stonehenge…

Being without my Macbook did mean that I regressed slightly and spent at least one evening last week trying to find something to watch. Needless to say it was all swill, but that made the BBC4 documentary Truly Madly Cheaply all the more enjoyable when I stumbled across it half way through. Matthew Sweet even got to dress up while hanging around a mock cinema in between the clips of mostly forgotten British B movies ala Alex Cox and Moviedrome.

Now if only the Beeb had the balls to give us a full season of this stuff instead of pasting so much of it into a single 90 minute slot. Fair play for following the doc with Psychomania, but out of all the films mentioned that’s the one that’s had the most screenings. I still have a video copy from when Cox showed it as part of Moviedrome and it gets dusted out at least once a year.

Sweet makes a good argument for re evaluating these lost gems while at the same time teasing the audience with the stuff in snippets. If the Beeb wanted to give the iPlayer a run for its money it should pull out the majority of the films mentioned and have them available online or at the very least organise a season of the damn things. Chucking Sweet an extra couple of quid a month and asking him to blog about the movies would mean I wouldn’t have to Google this shit and end up reading about it over on The Guardian instead.

I’d much rather watch Harry H Corbett menace cover girls while wearing bizarre eyewear than just about anything currently being pushed at me by the Beeb.

*You can watch the doc here, but only for 5 more days (unless you torrent it or have something handy like Snapz Pro X to hand).

Red Carpet

I turned down a chance to do some red carpet stuff at the UK Iron Man premiere last night.

Seemed like a good idea at the time…

Now more people have seen it I’ll find out exactly when I can start talking about it.

It would be nice to tell you guys that it fucking rocks, without Paramount punching me in the throat.

Staminoly

pick up my phone and dictate the quotes to Spinvox (which after a shaky start seems to have grasped my dodgy accent)

Not quite:

———-
“Hi. I’m just talking with Jesser(?) from Book Slot about Twitter and how it’s evolved and I’ve suddenly started thinking about the transition from silent movies to talking movies. So I need to collect some old staminoly(?) pictures I guess. Cool.”

- spoken through SpinVox.
———-

Not too shabby considering I was on the top deck of a moving London bus. Jesser(?) is of course Jessa from Bookslut (as opposed to Book Slot) who I was explaining Spinvox to.

Being someone who makes up words all the time I like that Spinvox occasionally spits something at me Burroughs style.

Staminoly is fucking fantastic.

I was of course referring to these guys:

That’s another fine mess you’ve gotten me into, Spinvox…