I was being lazier that I realised here. This was my original entry for today’s VloMo 09:

That was April ’08. Dylan’s quite a bit bigger now:

It’s 2.30am and I’m in the office with all three cats. Two of them will eventually find other things to do, but Dylan will hang here until I go to bed. He’ll follow me in and then he’ll be the one waking me up in the morning.

I guess he’s been my partner since day one.

But when I was looking for the above photo I found this old screen cap:

Turns out I’d posted almost exactly the same video to my Blip.TV account last year. I’d forgotten all about Blip, Viddler and the other video sites I played with back then. Good reminder for me to go back and grab those old videos. So I was about to pull the above redundant video when I heard a noise behind me and turning with my iPhone saw this:

So I guess that’s today’s entry for VloMo 09.

Everyone’s a critic. The notes he’s destroying are actually on Blake Snyder’s Save The Cat, which is somehow kinda…

…perfect.

Had lots of questions about the shot of Junior I revealed a few posts back, but I’m sorry. I can’t show you what happens next. Shush now.

Here’s my completely unrelated VloMo09 entry in which a couple of stunt men get thrown around a little bit:

The gun shot you hear is real. In that we had an armourer firing a real weapon on set. The actual gun you see was last used by Sean Connery.

The weird ass noise before the gunshot is just sound captured on the day, but the music is by Guido & Maurizio De Angelis taken from the movie Milano Trema La Polizia Vuole Giustizia (aka The Violent Professionals aka Rue De La Violence).

I’m already a day behind with #VloMo09 which doesn’t bode too well for the future, but let’s give it a go anyway.

I was pulling some old photos from a drive last night and ended up duplicating a lot of files in iPhoto. As I sped through the stream to see what kind of mess I’d created it made for a nice cheap ass animation style that made me smile. So I screengrabbed the process from the entire drive and it came in at just over 20 minutes.

Way too long, but I think VloMo for me is supposed to be easy so I edited in my usual lazy ass way.

Rolling up random photos into a video made the Katamari Damacy theme a fitting piece of music to use. The version I chose was just over 4 minutes so I threw it into iMovie and cut the end of the video just as the music finished. Job done.

If I get really lazy again I figure there’s enough unused photo crap captured for another 2 of these. We’ll see.

If you look away from games and videos that carry those strobe warnings you may wanna sit this one out. Also there’s a fair bit of accidental subliminal marketing for that axis of evil Cafe Nero, the Church of Scientology and the Nazi party. Sorry about that.

After having some fun with film types and social media (I think there’s still some Michelle Yeoh footage to surface) I was approached by the publisher John Murray to see if I had any ideas about mixing things up with their authors. Of course, I said, as long as you have someone interesting. How about James Frey? was the reply…

Handily James was already scheduled to appear at the ICA last month and I’d already been chatting to those guys about helping out with what they do since they kindly suggested we relocate the Tuttle Club there. Perfect.

I’d read A Million Little Pieces just prior to its UK release and had actually met Frey before from my time as a bookseller, but aside from the South Park episode in which Oprah’s vagina pulls a gun and shoots a police officer, I hadn’t kept track of his career post-controversy. So off I went to his UK site and was pleasantly surprised to find it was the work of my friend @stml. Small world. Big Jim Industries is well worth a look too.

So the next step was to source some fan questions from Twitter:

In the meantime @blackpooltower (James’ UK publisher) got the word out via his forum which eventually lead to a fun afternoon at the ICA chatting to the author. He was as laid back and interesting as I remember and had a copy of Knockemstiff by Donald Ray Pollock (highly recommended!) tucked under his arm. He turned out to be eager to go past our allotted time and here’s the resulting interview in three parts:

“I don’t believe in inspiration”

“I’m from the notorious Freys”

“I have the same lawyer as the guys from South Park”

What was interesting to me was that while James wasn’t prepared to speak at the later event about the Oprah controversy, he was more than happy to answer questions about it direct from his readers. It was also encouraging to see how quickly John Murray themselves got excited about this kind of thing.

There’s a direct link here between both the innovative stuff we’ve been doing with Reuters and all the film related stuff I’ve had a hand in since the Juno Twitter screening back in ’07 and hanging out with Spielberg and the Indy cast in Cannes last year.

But more on all that later…

Oh and go read Bright Shiny Morning. It’s a lot of fun.

Slowly surfacing in San Francisco. A little behind with VloMo 2008, but this is the kind of thing I’ve been up to:

File 22: Ink from Mike Atherton on Vimeo.

More SF flavour here, but not here.

I should also shoot something in the apartment – it’s enormous.

Lots more fun people to catch up with, but also doing a little work in between not sleeping and eating too much pizza… a little bit like London then.

Things are starting to slip as I get closer to getting on the plane. Missed the (self imposed) UK deadline of midnight by an hour or so with this one. I have if anything too much footage of these guys. Hard to trim it down:

File 25: Empire from Mike Atherton on Vimeo.

Tomorrow I have to get in town an hour or so before Tuttle then have more Amplified 08 stuff to handle before going off to a fireside chat with Sarah Lacy before Stu arrives (did I mention he’s coming to San Francisco with us?). Then the whole packing nonsense. Maybe a hair cut. Somewhere in that I’ll get another VloMo post up.

Probably.

No more tank. I promise.

File 26: Just Not Cricket from Mike Atherton on Vimeo.

This is long enough already:

File 27: PoGo a go go from Mike Atherton on Vimeo.

I’m determined to do something fun on video with Rupert in the new year. Otherwise I’ll keep doing crap like this:

File 28: London’s Loss from Mike Atherton on Vimeo.

November is going to be a great month. This time next week I’ll be in San Francisco (which should help me mix up the VloMo content) and when I get back we have Amplified08. This last week has been spent mostly on that but I did have time to fit in a few meetings regarding some very cool stuff for 2009. Some of this as usual is under NDA and may never see the light of the day, but I did get to nip into Channel Four.

The timing was perfect as Charlie Brooker‘s Dead Set had just started and so amongst other things we chatted about this new TV show – I watched the entire thing again last night and consider it the most vital thing on British TV in recent history. It picks up the social commentary that Romero used to be so good at and pushes it hard through the back of your skull and out of your eyeball. Highly recommended television.

It also allowed me to have some fun with my second VloMo post:

File 29: Meeting from Mike Atherton on Vimeo.