Stick and glue and paint and

I felt like such a little over-achiever last night. After work I went up to one of the mini soundstages in Soho where my college chum Rosco was building a set for a promo he's shooting today . The idea is to take the mini trailer to Cannes to drum up "interest" (for which I'm assuming read "money") for the project. Although there is very little in the way of budget to shoot the piece they will be needing some post-production visual effects shenanigans to make the film work so I went over to offer my tuppence on how to get the maximum bang for their tiny wee buck. After that I went home and quickly cobbled together a rough animatic to show them what I meant visually. That got emailed off and hopefully it will help them out a bit today.

Next on the task list was my housemate's birthday invite. He decided he wanted to be both Pet Shop Boys on the cover of "Actually". He taken the self portraits needed and I cobbled together the composite in Photoshop. After that I finished editing my other chum No-not-that-Paul's showreel which has been sat, taking up a large chunk of my laptop's hard-drive, for a couple of weeks. Doing showreels is odd. Choosing the music is always the hardest part. He's ended up with "Get Your Snack On" by Amon Tobin as it has the right energy to carry the fast paced cutting needed to cram 5 years of visual effects work into under 2 minutes. Hopefully he'll like it. It's pretty much tough tits if he doesn't, but it would be nice if he were happy.

After that I read another 50 pages of Greg Bear's "Blood Music" which a work-mate recommended to me after I'd explained my metallic plant short film idea. I'm really enjoying it. I haven't read that much sci-fi recently (apart from a couple of Philip K Dick novels last year) but when I find a good one I still have a huge appetite for them. Thus far this one's a goody.