Peter Howard is Wintermute, mythologist

Dreams of a Place That Never Was

31May2006 [directLink] [personal]

Have had memories of last year thrust back into my mind lately… They come and go in waves; when they do come it can be painful. Homesickness for a place I didn’t think I called home.

Dad returned from a trip to England on Monday, bringing with him a bag I’d left with Jenni, full of artifacts of life from last year. Lots of books, most of which I’d read, the hand-cranked coffee grinder I’d bought over at my local coffee shop in Reims and used all year, a CD-wallet with twenty or so albums. I’d copied the music onto my computer, so I’ve been listening to it, but there’s something about having the real thing in my hands again.

I just played Disc 1 of Nas’ Street’s Disciple. It opens with two tracks that fit together: the Intro and “A Message to the Feds, Sincerely, We The People”. Way back at the beginning of last year I’d ripped the two tracks as one song that I looped while walking the 15 minutes to language school… When I play a song that much it becomes inextricably linked to the memory, and playing the song again bought back all those memories: walking in the melting snow, marching to a steady beat as Nas raps “I walk the blocks like whatever…”

Yesterday I read the opening of a novella May’s writing. It’s about a girl studying in Paris, and though the events aren’t taken from last year, the experience is all too familiar. Even though key to the story is the (hopeless) romantic expectations the protagonist has built up, I find myself building them up all over again…

…I still don’t particularly want to live in Reims, but I constantly find myself wanting to go back to Paris… It took me nine months to fall in love with the place, to become familiar with its form; the more time passes, the more I miss it.

Except that part of me wonders if the Paris I love even exists.

21-27May2006 :: This Week

27May2006 [directLink] [weekly]

• watched Deceiver; simple story but some clever cinematography
• watched The Deal (2004); interesting but it’s clearly difficult to put oil politics on screen
• watched Loose Change 2nd Edition; a fascinating conspiracy theory doco on 9/11; the problem with conspiracy theories is that they’re just too wacky, but it raised some very interesting questions

Who Says Computers Aren't Intelligent?

26May2006 [directLink] [myth]

Received an ‘Amazon.com Recommends’ email the other day. I haven’t been particularly impressed with Recommends in the past, not because it doesn’t work, but because it keeps recommending things I’ve already got (ie, they’re too obvious). This time there was one that got me interested:

We recommend Back to Bedlam
~ James Blunt
http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/B000301YY8/ref=pe_ar_A1KX37XUJ9HU3Px6B000301YY8

You were recommended this because you purchased or rated:
* Elephunk
* Get Lifted

Now I’m impressed. I’ve made no mention of James Blunt on Amazon.com, and most of my rated music is hiphop — but somehow Amazon.com’s computer decides if I like the Black Eyed Peas and John Legend, I might also like James Blunt — that’s not a link most humans would make, but the computer has enough information that it can see a link.

14-20May2006 :: This Week

20May2006 [directLink] [weekly]

• went to the Reelife Short Film Festival at the Dendy, Newtown; a friend’s short, Brown Trash won the audience favourite
• watched Last Man Standing; loved the sandy colours and the dust everywhere
• finished reading Bernard Cornwell’s Stonehenge; a very creative piece of historical fantasy, and makes me love Stonehenge even more
• watched A Merry War, a rather charming adaptation of Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying; strange though, in that I never thought that story was particularly open to screen adaptation; also realised that Orwell wrote what I now consider present-day science fiction — it’s not really scifi, but it contains all the same dark depressive themes — akin to William Gibson’s works being set in the same near future until finally the real world catches up and he writes Pattern Recognition
• watched Sweet Home Alabama; Reese Witherspoon plays dumb blonde/southern girl and I wonder if she can ever do any different

Looking For Work

14May2006 [directLink] [personal]

I’ve decided to write on this here: I’m looking for work.

I’m currently in my final year of full time study at UTS, and am now in a position where I want to be working part-time, and preferably in short-term positions. I don’t expect this situation to change a great deal next year either. For the first half of the year I will be working on my final film project for uni. In the second half, I will no longer be a student, but hope to continue developing my own film and cross-media projects. Ideally, I want to be able to take short term jobs so that I still have time to work on my own projects, some of which may be more or less commercial than others. So I’m getting into the freelance media market.

I have a (rather non-traditional) CV available at http://petermhoward.com/cv, which is where the latest version of this document will always reside. It outlines some of the work I want to be doing, my history and my skills.

I am available for freelance work in film and video (post-production being my speciality, but can also take various development, directing and crew roles), in similar areas in television and advertising, in web design and development. I am particularly interested in cross media work, whether it’s branding campaigns that utilise video and web, or film promotions online, or websites with video components.

At the moment I have classes on Wednesday and Thursday so can work part-time or with flexible hours; my final day of classes is June 8, after which I have 7 weeks holidays, so can temporarily take on a full-time load; from late July to early November I will have two or three days a week at uni (days TBC) and can again take a part-time work load.

To get in contact, follow the Contact Options link, available at the top of every page.

Shooting Bombsites in Melbourne and Sydney

13May2006 [directLink] [film]

Went to Melbourne with the family a couple of weekends ago. I took the video camera to get some footage for an experimental film I’m putting together this semester. Got really lucky: Sunday morning The Age carried an article on ‘Melbourne’s bombsites’, abandoned properties that were just falling apart and, well, making the city ugly. So I wrote them down and trammed around to shoot a couple. The best was this abandoned warehouse; didn’t feel like jumping the fence but walked all around it and shot plenty of footage.

A week later I took the camera through Pyrmont to get some more footage: lots of work sites, train lines, empty streets. Snapped a few nice photos while there. Pyrmont’s really been done up in the last few years though; it wasn’t as run down as I hoped; but it does make me want to live in there, it’s a beautiful area.

There are a few extra images in the album: Shooting Bombsites in Melbourne and Sydney

Ladies and Gentlemen, We Have A Winner (White vs Beige)

13May2006 [directLink] [wishlist]

Back in Round 4 it looked like White was coming out on top with the 17” iMac. Well the final results are in; I’ve just bought (well, using Dad’s Amex — thanks!) said iMac, upped to a gig of RAM and a 250GB hard drive. Somewhat limits my expansion capabilities, but figure it’s going to give me enough until I can afford a real editing studio (and perhaps a home to put it in). There’s one free RAM slot so I can up to 2GB down the track; a firewire connection lets me plug my external 300GB drive in (and can easily add more storage later); could even, theoretically, plug a DV deck in that way; and a mini-DVI connection means I can add another video output if I want; am particularly interested in plugging an old TV in for colour-checking. And thanks to Apple’s Bootcamp I can load up Linux or Windows as well for any other software (or games!); word on the nets is that Apple is working on virtualisation technology too — an abstraction layer of some form will allow Windows to run inside OS X without a reboot, meaning my Windows version of Studio MX 2004 might come in handy (neither it nor Studio 8 run natively on the Intel Macs yet).

Also got Final Cut Studio while I was at it; Final Cut Pro alone is going to be useful, but it comes with soundtrack, titling and motion graphics software as well. Now I’ll be able to do some work on the editing projects I’ve been putting off — still have lots of footage I shot last year that I want to cut into something watchable.

7-13May2006 :: This Week

13May2006 [directLink] [weekly]

• watched The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen; a mistake; can now see why Alan Moore is so ashamed of the adaptations; worst line ever: the old dying British hunter says to the young American sharp-shooter: “May this new century be yours, son, as the old one was mine”
• finished reading Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis; the book is still not a great read, but it all came together really well in the last twenty pages
• started reading Bernard Cornwell’s Stonehenge

On Being Marketed Down To

11May2006 [directLink] [myth]

Went to a couple sessions of Adobe’s Fully Loaded tour on Tuesday, the first on Video and the second on Web. Now I wasn’t expecting too much - it was a free event and basically just a marketing thing, but I was surprised by how bad the marketing message was, and how badly targeted it was.

I expected the Video session to be a matter of Adobe saying: This is why you should use our tools, to assist you to do what you want to do. Instead, the message was: Look at all the things our tools can do. Old school one-way marketing at its worst. And because it was simply a matter of showing off their tools, the session was run by a guy with only a basic knowledge of the programs and very little knowledge of video production. Making things stranger, they were showing off Pro features — the bundle in question costs a few thousand dollars. Then the language he was using was all about “clients”, seemingly targeted at people who simply wanted to get the job done (ie, rather than at creatives, first surprise). And then the actual content was targeted at the lowest common denominator: to home users and hobbyists who, one would think, would be in the market for Premiere Elements and similar home-editing systems costing only a few hundred dollars. So a little confusing.

What doesn’t make sense is that, even though many of the people in the room were just home users, the fact that they were there means they are interested in serious products. So why wasn’t the message at least targeted at people with artistic aspirations.

In any case, I’ve been put off Premiere with the discovery that it doesn’t run on Mac, and as I’m still leaving my options open I certainly don’t want to lock in to Windows. Annoying though, because it integrates so well with After Effects, which is a de facto standard (and does run on Mac)

30Apr-6May2006 :: This Week

06May2006 [directLink] [weekly]
This item was changed on 06May2006

• started reading Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis; Edit: actually only read the first third or so and put it from my mind; it feels too much like it’s ripping off William Gibson’s portrayal of the city, but doesn’t actually bring any understanding to it; I have to finish the book for class, so I’ll try do so and see if it goes anywhere
• watched Mission: Impossible 3
• read Ultimate X-Men Vol 3: World Tour
• watched Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet
• read Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451