Life, Death And Sport

Making Credits
I've been working on a simple credit-roll for 'Key Psycho' for what seems like days.
I've tried 'Live Type' which just doesn't like big text blocks crawling. It does all sorts of weird things with the path and lay-out.
I tried 'Rolling Credits' but while the scroll looks nice, the text looks crap.
So now I've settled upon using 'Motion' which is like using a battle axe to carve a toothpick. The only problem is that the 3150 frames takes 2 hours to render, so it's a slow, painful process of making adjustments. Yesterday, as I waited for the renders to complete, I watched a lot of the Ashes Day 1 being played in Brisbane.

Hitting Out Is Fun To Watch


Andrew Denton cleverly observed that sport is for people smart enough to understand the rules and dumb enough to think it's important. Well, there's nothing like a pakced Gabba for Day 1 of the Ashes to illustrate the point. Australia came out swinging and dominated on a flat track.

WITH a cartwheel wave of the bat, a dance for joy and a hug with his Partner in Pomicide Michael Hussey, captain Ricky Ponting celebrated a century that may already have turned the Ashes series irreversibly Australia's way.

Of course, there must be no rush to judgement. This was, after all, only the first day of the first of five Tests. But such was Australia's command and England's incompetence - with the exception of their inspirational and inevitably overworked captain Andrew Flintoff - that the Ashes could be won back and lost before Christmas.

It was an eloquent, highly emotional return to Ashes cricket for Ponting, who barely 14 months ago surrendered the urn with a shake of the head and a terse "That's it, boys". Well, this was now.

If he was feeling the pressure of public disappointment over the loss of the Ashes or of its expectation that they will immediately be won back, he did not show it. The Punter took every trick. He won the toss. He correctly chose to bat in near-perfect conditions. And he clinically plundered the English attack, equalling Steve Waugh's record of 32 Test centuries.

He was strongly supported by Justin Langer and, to a lesser extent, Matthew Hayden, who gave Australia a runaway start on a hot, sunny day at a ground where the home side have not lost a Test since 1988.

Little wonder locals have nicknamed it the Gabbatoir.

And so it was. Ponting hitting is actualy a joy to watch. He looks like he's always got immaculate balance and he moves into position so fast he looks like he has plenty of time to dispatch balls to the boundary. A guy swinging and hitting a ball like that is one of those things in life that you marvel at. I haven't paid close attention to cricket for about 3 years, but yesterday's display was a very rewarding experience.

Overall, it was nice to see a contest billed as being tight this time, turn out to be a bit of a master class demonstration on batting by the Australians. If anything I think Matt Hayden is way past his peak and looked it, while Damien Martyn still seems flakey at times as he got out to a flighted ball from Giles - The irony was that the commentators were saying just how easy he made batting look. Jinxed him! All the same, I'm sure it's hard out there, but come on Damien, over the last decade, I've seen you do that a lot. Langer was streaky and Hussey looked jumpy; but then Hussey always looks jumpy.

As for commentator Michael Slater? My goodness, he still looked like he could play. He was bouncing and dancing on the field as he gave a description of what it was like to come in and open the batting. You could tell he was mentally geared up and ready for it with no place to go play. I just wish Hayden showed a bit of that fire.

Dead At 38
About 5 years ago, my friends Konrad and Penelope made an attempt to matchmake for me. They dragged me out to meet this woman who was "into films and stuff". Her name was Fiona, and she was a bundle of nervous energy with a whacked out sense of humour. We didn't exactly hit it off, but she was a nice enough woman - nothing really came of it, we just laughed and parted ways.

Last night, I ran into Penelope at an event in North Sydney and she told me Fiona had died of cancer, and that Penelope had been there holding her hand when she passed away. Needless to say it freaked me out. It kept me up last night as I pondered the 'what ifs' and the weirdness of life. My life feels a little less full knowing she is gone. Rest in Peace Fiona.

Dead At 81


Robert Altman Passed away this week.

Altman died Monday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, surrounded by his wife and children.

He had worked with the disease for the last 18 months, including during the making of this year's "A Prairie Home Companion," the director's Sandcastle 5 Productions in New York said in a statement. The death was a surprise, Sandcastle said.
When he received a lifetime achievement Oscar in 2006, Altman revealed he'd had a heart transplant a decade earlier. "I didn't make a big secret out of it, but I thought nobody would hire me again," he said after the ceremony. "You know, there's such a stigma about heart transplants, and there's a lot of us out there."

Altman was set to begin work on "Hands on a Hardbody," a fictionalized version of the documentary about a Texas contest in which people stand around a pickup truck with one hand the vehicle, and whoever lasts the longest wins it. The film would have been vintage Altman.

While he was famous for his outspokenness, which caused him to fall in and out of favor in Hollywood during his nearly six decades in the industry, he was perhaps even better known for his influential method of assembling large casts and weaving in and out of their story lines, using long tracking shots and intentionally having dialogue overlap.

His most recent example of this technique, "A Prairie Home Companion," starred Lily Tomlin, Meryl Streep, Woody Harrelson, Kevin Kline and Lindsay Lohan.
"I feel as if I've just had the wind knocked out of me and my heart aches," Lohan said Tuesday night in a lengthy e-mail statement. She added, "I learned so much from Altman and he was the closest thing to my father and grandfather that I really do believe I've had in several years."

I have to confess I never liked his technique of overlapped dialogue and his hands-off approach to actors, but the man sure was a giant. Orson Welles once told Peter Bogdanovich that "it only takes one film" to enshrine one's succcess in cinema history. Altman had at least half a dozen films that marked turninig points in American Cinema.

I'm now going to see how my credits have rendered, adjust them, start rendering again and go watch Day 2.