Now what?

9 March, 2010

A friend of mine recently completed a project he’d been working on for almost as long as I’ve known him. It started as a short film, for which I helped film some of the initial scenes back in, I think, 2006. The idea was pretty much fleshed out at that stage, and just needed filming and editing to put together.

Aside: Filming, by the way, is hard, hot, tiring work. A 30 second scene on film can take hours of work, interspersed by long periods of boredom while various things go wrong or need to be adjusted. And the work itself is repetitive – you don’t just act the scene or control the special effects once, oh no… you have to do it dozens of times until everyone gets it right at the same time. If you think actors have an easy and glamorous job, when it gets right down to what they actually have to do, think again.

Anyway, the project stalled. It was only with the imminent release of a song by this friend’s friend’s band that the film suddenly became highly relevant, as it happened to match the subject matter of the song nicely, and would make a great music video for it. So with a deadline of March this year, I and a bunch of other friends were drafted into more filming. Hard work, but fun when it was all over. For us anyway, because my friend then had to spend long hours at the editing program to cut things into shape.

The result is great: We All Wanna Drive Our Cars. As I said, don’t be fooled. This 3 and a half minutes of video took nearly 5 years, about 20 days of filming involving half a dozen or more people each time, and I hate to think how many hours of editing to put together. It’s a lot of work.

At one point my friend called this project “the biggest millstone around my neck”. The question is, now that it’s finished, now what?

This touches on the core of creative endeavour. Everyone (I believe) has a great creative work inside them, waiting to be released. Some people never get to it, through lack of time, or self-belief. But some people do, and the feeling of creating something worthwhile is wonderful. But then you have to face the question of what to do next. You’ve already shown that you can successfully make something. Just doing the same again seems like much less of an achievement. To justify going to all that trouble again, you want to make something better.

You’ve released a killer album. What are you going to do for a follow-up? Will it be a disappointment? If you go down that road, you might give up and not even start your second project.

But that’s the wrong way to think about it. You’ve shown you can achieve something once. That may feel like a huge step over what you’ve done before. But your second project will be just as big a step, even if it’s not as successful. You don’t need to make a double-platinum album to follow up a platinum album. You just need to make another album. And then another, and another.

Because why are you creating this stuff? Unless you’re literally a rock star, it’s not to be successful and make money. It’s for the joy of creation and of making something that you can share with others. There’s no onus on you* to make your second work bigger and better than your first. In the end, you got fun and satisfaction out of your first project, right? That’s what you want out of your subsequent projects. It doesn’t matter if nothing you do ever measures up to the dizzying heights of your first achievement. The measure of your success in creating is how much work you put in and the sum total of your creative output, not the height of the biggest single pinnacle.

(* If U2 or James Cameron are reading this, drop me an e-mail. Yeah, I didn’t think so.)

After Edmund Hillary climbed Everest, did he stop climbing other mountains? Did he stop caring about mountains and the people who live near them? Did he not go on to found charities and perform humanitarian work? In his own words (and I swear I found this quote after I decided to refer to Hillary in this paragraph):

Why make a fuss over something that’s done anyway? I was never one to obsess about the past. Too much to do in the future!

Posted in Creativity | 3 Comments »

Bodegas Faustino 2007 Rioja Faustino VII

6 March, 2010

Bodegas Faustino 2007 Rioja Tempranillo/Mazuelo
Having tried most of the major international grape varieties by now, I thought it was time to try something a little more localised. Since we were planning to go out to a Spanish restaurant for tapas tonight, I decided it would be a good opportunity to try a Spanish wine.

This wine from the Rioja region in northern Spain is made from 90% tempranillo and 10% mazuelo (also known as carignan) grapes, aged for 10 months in American oak. Tempranillo is the signature grape of Spain, so I wanted to find something using it in our local wine shop. They had a 100% tempranillo rosé, but M. expressed a desire for a straight red, so we opted for this blend.

Having recently read up a little on Rioja style wines and tempranillo grapes, I was expecting a juicy, fruity style of wine, fairly light, with notes of strawberries. But immediately upon sniffing my first glass, I knew this was something different. It was pungent with spicy aromas, reminiscent of my experiences so far with shiraz. Despite this, the first taste on the tongue was indeed light and fruity, and that hint of strawberry came through. It wasn’t juicy though, being noticeably dry on the palate – that dryness I think is associated with the wine term “tannin”, but which I’m not yet confident enough to sling around as though I really know what I’m talking about. I’m guessing this came from the oak.

And then after about 5 seconds in the mouth, the flavour exploded in a burst of spices. It was quite something. That aroma of shiraz came back in the flavours which included just a hint of black pepper and other spicy flavours I can’t yet quite assign more specific descriptions to. It felt controlled though – balanced and not overpowering like some of those full-bodied shirazes can feel to me. It was a bit of a shock, but not unpleasant. After a few sips, I really got into it and enjoyed this wine a lot. It complemented my dinner nicely (tapas of fried potatoes in a spicy tomato sauce and fried whitebait, followed by veal in a peppery mushroom sauce). We normally barely manage half a bottle over dinner, but we almost finished this one.

At home now and in range of my wine book and Wikipedia, I see that the 10% mazuelo may be responsible for the stronger, spicier flavours in this blend. I’ll have to try to find a 100% tempranillo red somewhere for comparison. A very interesting and eye opening excursion to Spain!

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Posted in Wine | 2 Comments »

Getting excited about Star Wars again

3 March, 2010

Over at Darths & Droids my friends and I are approaching the end of our treatment of Episode II: Attack of the Clones. Which means it’s time for us to sit down together and watch Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, so we can prepare for the writing ahead.

When we announced this on our Facebook page, we suggested that readers might like to join us in watching the movie at the same time, making it into a global event of sorts. Someone responded that we should host an IRC chat during the movie and, not being people to shy away from an intriguing idea, we decided to do so. (Not that this was intended to be an ad, but it’s at 09:00am GMT, Friday 5 March, on the Freenode IRC network, channel #darths, because I know someone will ask.)

It’s hard to say how many people we’ll actually get, but there are some fans making very excited posts about it. Now I’m stopping to consider what this really means.

We may have a significant number of people excited about being up at times like 1am (West Coast USA) or 4am (East Coast USA), on a Friday morning what’s more, to watch a Star Wars prequel movie. I’m not sure if that’s happened since 1999.

If you put your mind to something and share it with the world, it’s amazing what you can accomplish. Darths & Droids began as just something we do in our lunchtimes. We do it because we like creating something new and hopefully interesting out of the cultural legacy of Star Wars. We genuinely like Star Wars, and want to be able to say we did something positive for the community of fans out there, whether they be loyal and as enthusiastic as ever, or somewhat jaded and disappointed by recent(ish) additions to the canon.

Getting people excited about Episode III, either again, or perhaps even for the first time. That’s just cool.

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Posted in Media, Star Wars, Webcomics | 1 Comment »

On creativity

28 February, 2010

I, with the help of some of my friends, generate a good deal of creative stuff. Some of it is sprinkled across a handful of websites (linked in the sidebar, so I won’t repeat them), some of it can be found elsewhere. My friends say to me quite often that I am the driving force behind our group – the one who gets things done.

We all come up with ideas. That’s the easy part. In a single lunchtime we often come up with a dozen or more ideas for things we could do. It’s an aphorism I’ve seen repeated several times in various contexts that “ideas are easy, execution is hard” – I saw it again the other day in an acquaintance’s blog. It really is true. Not to take any credit away from my friends – several of them also put in a lot of hard work behind the scenes to make our collective ideas come to fruition. I believe they just see me as the spur to get them going. :-)

Because as clichéd as it can sound, it really is true. Ideas are a dime a dozen. It’s doing something with them that is the hard work that few people can manage.

We have a sort of rolling conversation in our group about xkcd. There is some professional envy there, of course, since our own webcomics are nowhere near as popular, and it would be cool if they were. But that aside, we do have a genuine respect for Randall Munroe and what he does. it’s very easy for critics to say, “Huh, stick figures and geeky reference gags, anyone could do that.” But the point is anyone didn’t do it – Munroe did. He got off his butt and actually made the comics and made a website to put them on. And he’s continued making them – he didn’t quit after 3 weeks because it was taking too much time or effort.

There are a lot of failed creative ventures out there, where people had a cool idea and tried to do something with it, and gave up after a while because it was too much work. And there are even more where people had a cool idea and simply never got around to doing anything at all with it.

My determination is to actually put in enough effort to see an idea to fruition every now and then. Some of our ideas are non-starters, and some we put some effort into and then more or less abandon. But we keep trying, and some of the ideas do manage to reach a point where we can sit back and say, “Yes, we’ve done this idea.” Or even, “Yes, this idea is now up and running, and we are happy to dedicate some of our effort into maintaining it into the future.”

Someone once asked Harlan Ellison where he got his ideas from. He flippantly replied from a mail order business in Poughkeepsie. If he’d bothered to answer seriously, the real answer is that everyone has ideas. What people don’t have is the drive to do something with them. And because most people don’t do anything with their ideas, they end up thinking they don’t have any good ideas. That’s just wrong. If you have an idea for a story, or a blog, or a piece of artwork, or whatever, invest some time into making it happen. Get someone to goad you into it, if need be. It is hard work, but if you put that work in, you might get somewhere, as opposed to merely ending up envious of other people’s work and saying you could have done the same.

I didn’t intend this post to end on an accusatory downer. I’m sure some of you have put effort into creating something, or even started and then realised just how much work is required to bring an idea to fruition. You should be proud that you’ve achieved something which few others even bother to do. The external success of creative endeavours is determined by whims and the way the wind blows. But the internal success is determined by you and your hard work. Just because your stuff doesn’t become as popular as xkcd doesn’t mean it’s crap. Go! Create! And be proud of the effort you’ve put in. The hard work is what counts, not the success.

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Posted in Creativity | 3 Comments »

Portrait of Audrey

25 February, 2010

Audrey Hepburn by Michael Ochs Archives, copyright Getty Images
This is a great photo. No, I didn’t take, I only wish I had.

Besides the fact that the subject is Audrey Hepburn, and therefore it would be difficult to take a bad photo, this shot in particular is awesome. I came across it because my wife buys a fancy picture calendar every year, and for 2010 she chose to get one with portraits of Audrey Hepburn. So for the month of February I’ve had this gorgeous photo looking at me from the kitchen wall. With a quick flip through, I determined that none of the other photos in the calendar are as good as this one.

I don’t consider myself a very good portrait photographer. I prefer subjects that don’t move around, like buildings and trees and stuff. If I do take shots of people, they’re mostly candids of strangers, simply engaged in whatever they would be doing anyway, as part of an overall scene. I know good portrait photography when I see it, and appreciate seeing it, but I find it difficult doing it myself.

Focus on the eyes, capture an expression, don’t have the subject stare into the camera. Knowing the rules is the easy part. A portrait is a moment in time when you have to capture the essence of a person in a single still image. I don’t know what Audrey is looking at in this shot, but she’s happy and natural and her eyes are clear and bright. There’s a bit of a tilt to the image to give it some informality. The perspective is fairly flat, indicating a mild telephoto lens was used to avoid exaggerating depth features (producing a bulging nose, for example) – although this is standard practice for portraiture and any photographer should know this. The subject fills the frame, leaving no doubt that this is a photo of a person, not what the person is doing or where the person is. The lighting is soft and flattering, with no heavy shadows on any side, but there are sparkles in her eyes. This is difficult to achieve without a professional studio lighting rig. The background is nicely blurred and non-distracting.

Yes, it’s a beautiful photo of a beautiful woman, but technically it’s an absolutely drool-worthy piece of photography. I hope to make a portrait half as good as this one day.

(Photo by Michael Ochs Archive, copyright by Getty Images. Low resolution version included here for editorial and critical review purposes only.)

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Left turn on red

23 February, 2010

I was very nearly in a car collision on the weekend. Firstly, remember for context that we drive on the left in Australia.

I was approaching a crossroads intersection intending to go straight ahead, and had a green light. Normally this means nothing should be getting in your way – all of the traffic in the cross street should be stopped at a red and waiting for the lights to change. Except one of the cars on the left side of the cross street wasn’t. It was creeping out into the intersection. As I was about in the middle of the intersection (with my light still green) and about to enter the ongoing street, the car on my left suddenly accelerated and made to turn into the same street I was heading into. Into the same lane I was in (two-lane street, with the leftmost lane was full of parked cars).

This was so shocking I didn’t have time to do anything. I had no time to brake. I couldn’t even reach the horn fast enough to sound a warning blast. Fortunately the driver of the other car must have (finally) spotted me and screeched to a stop, it must have been millimetres from crashing into the passenger side of my car, and my wife.

There’s absolutely no doubt the other car was facing a red light at the time. The only question is why did it attempt to make the left turn? I know that right turn on red is a common permitted action in North America, and the local equivalent would be left turn on red – but left turn on red is illegal in Australia. Except at a few quite rare intersections where it is explicitly allowed by a sign.

The number of intersections where left turn on red is allowed in Sydney is minuscule. I can think of only two intersections that have the relevant signs, in all of the intersections that I regularly or occasionally drive through. (That number is now three, assuming the intersection in question actually had such a sign and the other car’s driver wasn’t doing something completely illegal.) But the thing is, this is not the first time I’ve been in a near collision at one of those intersections, caused by another car attempting to turn left on red and not paying enough attention to the oncoming traffic.

The problem is that Sydney drivers are not used to this rule. It’s illegal at something close to 99% of the intersections in the city. So when it does appear, it’s unfamiliar, and leads to not being fully aware of all the relevant traffic conditions when attempting the manoeuvre. I’m aware of it myself, when I am caught by the red light and permitted to turn left by the sign – I’m trying to watch the oncoming traffic to see if it’s safe to turn, while also keeping an eye on the light in case it actually goes green, and trying to ignore the idiot behind me beeping at me for being too slow. It’s a combination of attention factors that never occurs at any other intersection in the city, and it makes it difficult to judge when you should go. With the inevitable result.

I’ve felt for years that these intersections are accidents waiting to happen. Now that my near misses at those intersections have gone from 2 to 3 in the past decade or so, I’m convinced of it. Perhaps in jurisdictions where turning on red is normal, drivers are more used to it and so better able to avoid problems – although a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration report might indicate otherwise. It finds an average of 84 fatal collisions per year at “right turn on red” intersections across the USA.

The report stresses that the data don’t include details of whether the turning car had a red or green light and wants to claim that the “right turn on red” crashes may therefore be as low as zero – but really, when are you more likely to have a crash, turning right on red when there is a good chance of oncoming traffic getting in your way, or turning right on a green, when there should be nothing else in your way? Weirdly, the report then goes on to say that 84 fatalities a year is peanuts compared to the overall road toll anyway, so “the impact on traffic safety is small”.

I hope someone has a nice job telling that to 84 families a year.

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Posted in Opinion | 6 Comments »

Getting up before dawn

21 February, 2010

Fire and Water
This is the right time of year to get up before dawn and take photos of the sunrise. The sun is rising later as autumn approaches, but we haven’t shifted the clocks back to compensate yet, and the pre-dawn air is still not too chilly. The last two weekends however it was pouring with rain, so I caught up on sleep instead.

Not today, however! We got up at 05:10, gulped down enough food to tide us over until a proper breakfast, and drove out to Dee Why beach and ocean baths. Traffic is really good this early on a Sunday morning! We arrived just before 06:00, a good half hour before sunrise.

Although ocean baths are very photogenic, the problem for dusk photography is that all the ones in the Sydney area are lit by sodium lamps. The ghastly yellow colour plays havoc with your colour balance. I took a few shots with the pool and surrounds in the foreground and the dawn colours on the horizon, but the better shots largely skip the areas close to the sodium lamps. Undeterred by this challenge, two other guys had arrived even earlier than us and were staking out prime territory with their tripods and cameras. As the morning progressed, we gave each other nods, but didn’t stop to chat – there was much more important stuff to do!

After a while, as the sky turned on a gorgeous light show, the first swimmers began to arrive. It’s almost always retiree-aged people who hit the water at the crack of dawn. That’s pretty cool. When I retire, I’m planning to take a sunrise swim every morning. If I’m not out taking photos that is. Because dawn really is the best time of day to take pictures. The light is wonderful, and somehow it always feels fresher and more vibrant than a sunset at the end of a day, when the light is kind of worn out. I know that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but it’s true – for some reason sunrise just is more beautiful than sunset. Anyway, it’s good to get out and exercise the shutter finger a bit. As with everything else, I never have enough time to do all the photography I want to do. But sacrificing a sleep-in for a sunrise is well worth it. More photos from this morning here.

After the sun started climbing into the sky, we headed to a nearby cafe for the decadence of a bought breakfast. To me, breakfast is a simple meal you eat at home. The idea of going out and buying breakfast still smacks of overindulgent luxury to me. Which is why I enjoy it on the very rare occasion we do it! Mmm… poached eggs, bacon, hollandaise sauce… And by 08:00 we’d finished this excellent breakfast, witnessed a gorgeous sunrise, got some exercise, taken some (hopefully) good photos, and we still have the whole Sunday ahead of us! Getting up early rocks!

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Posted in Photography | 1 Comment »

Mystery Creek 2008 Sauvignon Blanc

19 February, 2010

Mystery Creek 2008 Sauvignon Blanc
I swear this isn’t a wine blog – I just happen to have tried another new wine tonight. I was excited about this one because so far I seem to have more of a taste for whites than reds, and I’d read a bit about New Zealand Sauvignon Blancs. Apparently they make a top class example of this grape style.

Being a Friday, we went out for dinner up the street at the local restaurant strip. We went to Garfish, which is a moderately upscale seafood place, with fish bought fresh at the market that day. M. had the grilled salmon with chips, while I opted for roasted barramundi with polenta. These seemed to complement the wine very nicely.

It was a pale straw colour, nothing too exciting there, and very fluid in the glass – as opposed to the thick streakiness I’ve seen in some wines. It took a while to identify the aroma, but once nailed down, it was quite definite. Tropical fruit – a hint of pineapple, and a stronger touch of banana. Yes, banana. In the mouth it was very different. It was acidic and citrusy, with a touch of lemon, developing into quite a powerful herby flavour. Nowhere near as strong as a herb-based liqueur like Jagermeister, but certainly heading in that direction.

I really liked it, but M. preferred the Chardonnay we’d had a couple of weeks ago at the same restaurant. That one was a touch oaky, which is still a flavour I’ve not yet grown to appreciate. It seems clear I prefer my whites in this clean, fruity, acidic style. Very nice.

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Reality and unreality

18 February, 2010

A while back I ran a roleplaying adventure for some of my friends. It was a scenario I wrote myself, with a sort of X-Files vibe to it. The PCs were FBI agents, investigating what at first appeared to be an ordinary case, but which turned a bit weird once they uncovered what was really going on.

At this point the game bogged down a bit. I was ready and waiting for the agents to start kicking butt and attacking the problem with guns blazing. After all, Mulder and Scully would leap right in. But my players didn’t. Instead they did the considerably more realistic thing of sneaking around and trying to gather evidence. It was only when I finally threw a rampaging Unseelie horse at them that one of them fired a shot in self-defence. From there the cat was out of the bag and all Hell broke loose, as I’d been hoping it would for about an hour of game time.

The chaos that followed was a lot of fun. But I was just a little mystified as to why the players took so long to get there. Then when the game was over, a couple of them explained that they went into the game taking their roles as FBI agents seriously, determined not to step out of line and to do things by the book. Which was fine and understandable from their point of view, but not what I was expecting.

My assumption was that the PCs would be “TV style” FBI agents, not realistic ones. I expected them to ignore the rules and get their hands dirty to get the job done. The problem was I hadn’t told the players that. I hadn’t run a game for some time, and it felt really bad to have made such a fundamental mistake. But I’ve learnt the lesson now. Make sure your players know what you’re expecting of them. Surprise and secrecy about what is going to happen in the adventure are vital to a roleplaying game, but more important is making sure everyone’s playing under the same assumptions before you begin.

If I’d just said up-front, “You’re flamboyant, TV-style FBI agents who get away with breaking the rules when necessary” as opposed to “realistic agents who do their work silently and never fire a gun,” the game would have run much more smoothly. Ah well. Here’s to experience, and not making the same mistake twice.

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Posted in Gaming | 4 Comments »

Ketu Bay 2008 Pinot Noir

17 February, 2010

Ketu Bay 2008 Pinot Noir
I really discovered wine only about 4 months ago. I’ve had a few glasses in the past, but never really got into it until I took a long weekend trip with my wife to the Hunter Valley for our wedding anniversary. We live only a couple of hours from one of the world’s great wine regions, and it was the first time I’d really been there. And being a wine region, I decided it might be time to actually sample some wines and attempt to see what all the fuss was about.

More about that trip later. Right now, and what really prompted me to start this blog, is the desire to record my impressions of the first time I ever tried pinot noir. Pinot noir, as I’ve recently learnt, is a cool climate grape, and makes a wide range of wine styles, but tending towards lighter and fruitier. Marlborough in New Zealand is a cool climate, and apparently produces some decent pinot noir.

My first ever pinot noir is this Ketu Bay 2008 vintage from that region. I was at first surprised by the colour, a lighter, more scarlet red than the merlots, cabernet sauvignons, and shirazes I’ve tried over the past few months. The light passes through this wine like through a raspberry jelly, clear and luminous red. The dominant taste is one of fruitiness, with definite notes of strawberry. It was light and pleasant, and it worked well chilled down a bit. (I’m also learning how to describe wines, so my vocabulary will be simplistic and restricted to begin with.)

From my reading about pinot noir, it seems I still have a lot of variety within this grape to look forward to. I’ll seek some more types out and be keen to compare them. And those, along with all the other things I learn about wine, I plan to record here. (But this blog is also going to cover far wider topics, lest anyone think this is going to be just a wine blog.)

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Posted in Wine | 2 Comments »

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