Dalibu's Xanga

Sunday, October 29, 2006

Sun, 29 Oct 2006 02:07:09 GMT

I wrote up a detailed explanation of what happened the day of the 'my father is a bastard' comment, but it's really emotional and 'heavy' so I need to go back and edit it a bit… no, a lot. I'm not sure I even should post it at all!

the FREE HUGS campaign

Sun, 15 Oct 2006 12:35:37 GMT

I LOVE this. Every country, every city, no every street should have someone like this. Although I have to point out, it was started by an Aussie! Go son!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dn0AVpGNhOs

Friday, October 13, 2006

Fri, 13 Oct 2006 05:32:40 GMT

My father is a bastard. That's all I'm lucid enough to tell you right now.

Other than... xanga is definitely dying. Is anyone actually reading this?

Saturday, October 07, 2006

Sat, 07 Oct 2006 00:42:03 GMT

Hmmm. I know I should be updating but I'm not really sure what to say! A lot has been happening but it's always so much of a hassle to arrange photos and so on that I never post it.

Last semester was INSANELY busy, mainly coz 8 out of our 9 assignments were pratical group work, AND I was working on a feature film - which means 3 months of continuous work, that started off as weekends but the last month and half was every day of the week. In May we did night shoots and I had my university projects to film so I had a lot of days when I'd film all day for uni and all night for the feature. It shouldn't be humanly possible! No, honestly, I don't know how I survived that.

End of June and beginning of July I went to the States. Family-wise, it was the best trip out there ever. It really felt like Eric was trying not to have an argument/fight. The last news I had heard before heading over there was that Ali was clean and vastly improving so I was really looking forward to spending proper time with her again but when I got there I found out she'd relapsed a month before and was barely living at the house again so I only saw her about twice in the whole trip. America-wise, this was the worst trip. I flew Brisbane-LA-Salt Lake City-Minneapolis and by the time the plane touched down in Minne, I'd had as much 'America' as I could stand. When I was living in Bahrain, going to the States was a little like going to civilization (broadband, movies released on time, shopping, TV) but now I'm in Aus and we have all that. And then some. And without the added annoyance of Americans. Last year I didn't notice as much coz I was still new to Aus when I went to the States (for 10 days only!) but this year I've got so used to the Brisbane way of life that America was really awful.

Despite the good family vibe of the whole trip, Eric still pulled the rug out. We're at the airport and I'm about to go through the security checkpoint. I hug Tricia goodbye and then hug Eric goodbye and pick up my bags and Eric says: "Well I guess the next time we'll see you will be at your wedding!". What was that?! He then says that he won't pay for me to come out and visit him anymore seeing as I obviously don't want to. Oh dear. Now I still do have reasons to go out there: Eric got me a green card but I have to enter the USA once every year in order to keep it, plus my laptop is a Region 1 DVD player and I prefer to buy my DVDs in the US (cheaper too), and I really like spending time with Tricia. But, obviously, I don’t (and won’t for the next decade probably) have enough money for a trip to the States. Even Tricia seemed shocked by what he said so he obviously hadn’t talked it over with her. And what a time. I had to go coz the plane was boarding and we had to leave it like that! Since then I’ve had about three emails from them in as many months so I don’t know what will happen with that.

After all the hustle and bustle of last semester, this one is really laid-back. Or I’m really laid-back about it, one or the other. I’ve had to catch up a list of To Do things since February but I’ve finally had some free time! I got the Halo PC game for my birthday (in theory, my mum sent me money for my 20^th and I bought the game) so I played that twice, plus finished FF8 on the PC and started FF7 (I’m in Mt Corel on Disc One). Great use of time, hey? Oh, and for anyone interested or even remotely aware of Halo, there is an absolutely fantastic online machinima series: www.redvsblue.com. I have all 4 seasons, and they’re just starting Season 5!

I met up with Chris, David and Jess McGloughlin last week to go to Seaworld on the Gold Coast. I have loads of pics which I might upload if I can get some time at uni – the home computer is on dial up and just takes too long. It was a good day though, great to catch up with everyone!

I’ve been to quite a few performances this year, Nickelback I did post about before but I also went to… Vicky is going to be so jealous… a Boy From Oz performance starring Hugh Jackman! It was really, really good – not so much for the Peter Allen biography and songs, but for Hughie’s performance. Sometimes in the middle of a song he’d stop and start improvising stuff. I went on the afternoon of the Queensland General Election and he started to talk about that – making jokes about the Coalition Party. Peter Allen was a bisexual and I think Hugh should play a bisexual in a film coz he was just so perfect at it. By the intermission I’d forgotten that it was Hughie coz he played the part so well – all through the improves it was ‘Peter Allen’ talking and not Hugh. Case in point: he was talking about Aussies in Hollywood and people in the audience were yelling out names, someone said ‘Hugh Jackman’ and Hugh-Allen said “Oh yes, that hunk with the claws and the spandex. I luuurve the spandex.” It was a great night! One particular bit he did where he came down into the audience right before the intermission (and lapdanced a guy) was just so hilarious that I had tears streaming down my face!

Hmmm… I think that’s a good enough update for now, but I’ll leave you with a pic from Boy From Oz!

Hughie opened the show by descending from the ceiling on a white piano in this outfit.

Steve Irwin Dead

Mon, 04 Sep 2006 04:35:12 GMT

Wow. This warrants an entry after so long.

"BREAKING NEWS: Steve "The Crocodile Hunter" Irwin is dead after being attacked by a stingray during the
filming of a new TV series.

The 44-year-old's chest is believed to have been pierced by the stingray barb. He was filming an underwater
documentary about 32 nautical miles off Port Douglas when the accident occurred.

According to a Queensland Ambulance Service spokesman, a Cairns ambulance chopper made an emergency
flight to an island in the area at midday today.

An intensive care doctor and a paramedic attempted to revive the popular crocodile wrangler without success.
He was pronounced dead on the island, and his body is now being flown to Cairns.

Mr Irwin - known worldwide as the Crocodile Hunter - is famous for his enthusiasm for wildlife and his
catchcry "Crikey!". The father of two's Crocodile Hunter program was first broadcast in 1992 and has been
shown around the world on cable network Discovery. He's also starred in movies and has developed the
Australia Zoo wildlife park, north of Brisbane, which was started by his parents Bob and Lyn Irwin."

As far as I can work out, this happened at about midday today, and I found out about it at 3pm coz someone in the hall of the editing suites was talking about it but very few people know right now and it's such a strange concept that a man that became famous for wrestling crocodiles and surviving is dead. And he's all over Queensland: on billboards and ads everywhere - he's our biggest celebrity! - and now he won't be...

Thursday, June 29, 2006

Thu, 29 Jun 2006 02:52:23 GMT

Seeing as EVERYONE is suddenly updating, I thought I'd join in! Well... just about. This is a new post but I won't be writing about the last few absolutely insane months just yet: I'm still recovering from the lack of weekends - actually any time off whatsoever - but I thought I'd let everyone know that I'm in the States right now.

Just struggling through dealing with Americans, Eric and a re-lapsed sister... yet again. And I really thought she'd make it this time.

I'll be back in Brisbane on the 18th of July so I may have enough time while I'm here to do a full update of life since the end of April but then I am trying to catch up on over 2 months of sleep!!

Ciao!!

Friday, May 12, 2006

Fri, 12 May 2006 05:46:34 GMT

Hello everyone.

Sorry for the lack of update, trust me its not coz there's nothing happening but "life" just hasn't stopped!

For the last month and the next three, I have sold my weekends away. And I won't even be getting any money for them! The feature film I'm working on, Epiphany, is shooting every single weekend - all day Saturday and all day Sunday and quite a few night shoots too. I've made a pretty big committment to them so I can't flake out now just coz I'm not getting a life outside of film. I'm already going to miss the next three weeks of shooting coz I'm DOPping a short film and a music video as part of uni that are also shooting on weekends! Plus I've just come down with a cold which isn't helping matters.

I will update more fully on all those happenings when they're finished and/or moved on but I really wanted to tell everyone what I did last Thursday (4th May). I went to a NICKELBACK CONCERT!!

It was AMAZING. I never, ever wanted it to end and it was the best concert I've ever been to. To put this in perspective, Bryan Adams came to Bahrain a few years ago and he really knew how to work the crowd, a fantastic performer (he even burst through the security guards to come back for an encore!) but Nickelback were way better.

They were performing at the Brisbane Entertainment Centre which is twenty minutes north of the city - most people take the train coz traffic afterwards is horrible so when I was waiting for said train it was really interesting how varied the audience was - although 98% of them were wearing jeans! At BEC, the security guards were very very serious about not letting cameras in and they searched through my whole bag before taking away my dinky little camera. Which really pissed me off.

My ticket was for the "pit" right in front of the stage and they took our tickets off us so that we couldn't pass them back to people in the proper seats - there were no chairs down here so everyone was waiting on the floor. The warm up band - Small Mercies - came on and though the balance on their speakers wasn't very good so that the vocals disappeared in the guitars, they seemed like a good band - and shocked me quite a bit when they said they're from Brizzy! After the concert I bought their CD and all four of them signed it which was cool.

When they finished (5 songs!) there was a really long break while the stage crew set up for Nickelback but no one wanted to leave the pit - especially not me coz I'd found a spot less than 10 metres from the stage!

The band came on singing "Animals" from their new CD which I love and was a great song to get everyone warmed up really quickly. Near the end there was loads of pyrotechnics - like fireworks indoors and huge jets of flames which were incredible from such a short distance. The three guys on guitar had what seemed like hundreds of spare picks stuck to their microphones and they kept chucking them out into the crowd - and I got one!! It's a signature Nickelback pick so that was great.

When I read reviews later, apparently Chad wasn't as chatty as he normally is but I thought he was great. At the beginning he said that Brisbane was the last leg on their Australian tour and they had a 12hour flight the next day so they were just "going to kill each other tonight" so that we had fun! He also said that seeing as their reception call the next day was at 9am, he didn't see the point in going to sleep and the band were all going out clubbing in Brisbane after the concert. ') Another interesting thing he said: "Rock on Melbourne!" then his drummer corrected him, "Shit, my brain is fucked! Sorry, Brisbane! What day is it today? Thursday? Well tonight in Brisbane it's party-all-night-day, (quieter) it's also legalise marijuana day, but only in this building!"
A girl in the front row snuck in a banner saying "Brisbane Girls are Easy" and "Chad, can I buy you a drink?" and Chad saw it and borrowed it for the concert, draping it on the drummer.
Also, later on after a short break where everyone thought it was over and was chanting for an encore, Chad came back on and said "You know what I love about Australia, that very few countries have and none have one as cool as yours? The CHANT!" And he started up the Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, Oy, Oy, Oy chant a few times! He was loving that, and he added a bit on the end as his Canadian contribution and said we could keep that.

The drummer, Daniel, had an incredible solo in the middle. He just went on and on for over ten minutes and near the end he was flipping his sticks after every beat and going really really fast and he never dropped 'em! It was fantastic drum work that had the entire audience hushed.
When Chad came back after that he had his fly open and a guest piano player, Timmy, whispered to him and he burst out laughting and said " First time in 10 years...", one of the guitarists was was pissing himself! haha

The tracks were the same as the rest of the tour, apart from two songs that were added to the Australian tour ONLY: savin me and see you at the show have only ever been performed live in Australia so that was a nice little treat!

The only thing that spoilt the show was not being able to take pics but I've been searching the web and have some pics of it from people that were there and from the NB site that I might as well post here:

At the very end, in teh middle of the last song, Chad screamed out "this is how Nickelback say GOODNIGHT!" and then they did this HUGE crescendo of guitar and drums and pyrotechnics were going mad. it was absolutely fantastic. Afterwards I really didn't want it to be over so I didn't want to leave but the last train was in twenty minutes so I had to. Got my camera back, bastards, there were people in their with camera phones that weren't confiscated!! My throat didn't feel sore, but did feel like someone had punched me in the throat (I was screaming a lot and singing along). My ears were ringing sooo much (well I was right in front of the speakers) and I really didn't want to go home. Actually, what I really wanted to do was go hang out in the valley and hope that Nickelback turned up to party but that area is pretty dangerous at midnight so I decided not to. I definitely didn't want to go to sleep though so I put Nickelback on my MD and went and sat on the road outside my house staring at the stars until I started to get a little tired (2 hours later at 2am!).

Oh man, overall a great experience and soooo glad I got a ticket. I really want to go to another of their concerts! Unfortunately when I'm in the states this June/July they won't be in MN!

Friday, April 21, 2006

Fri, 21 Apr 2006 23:54:23 GMT

Wow. I can't believe how much has happened this month already!

I really can't go into too much detail on here so I shall summarise:

* Wed 5th: Shot a video drama in my kitchen/living room
* Mon 10th: Filmed a TV commercial on colour 16mm film - incredible experience
* Tue 11th: Picked up our processed film (that i dropped off mon) from the Warner Bros studio on the Gold Coast - yup I was actually there were they shoot films like some scenes of Superman Returns!
* Mon 17th: Production meeting for a FEATURE FILM that i will be CAMERA OPERATING on. How I got this incredible opportunity here: www.incidentfilms.com/news.htm
* Wed 19th - Fri 21st: On the Gold Coast. An aussie friend that I haven't seen for a decade and who has been in England for the last three years got back a month ago so I used our mid-semester break to go down and spend some time with her. Basically we spent two whole days down on the beach where the waves were incredibly rough with a very dangerous riptide that the lifeguards kept reminding us of. But the weather was perfect right up until I got back on the train to come home! hehe, when I got back I had 119 emails and only 36 of them were junk!

As well as these 'events', other things have been happening.

* The Incident Films website is being updated very regularly and there are some new features to it as well
* A script that I have been working on since November 2005 is blazing ahead full force. Last weekend I sat down and brought all my notes together so onw I have full-detail character descriptions, plot outlines, subplots and tensions fleshed out. Plus, in terms of the physical amount of pages I have now written 18% of the film! (based on the 120 page norm)
* I did a very naughty thing and installed the FF8 game on my computer and bought a playstation-looking-controller that works on a computer so within a week I was half way through the second disc. tut tut tut
* on Tuesday I went clothes shopping!!!! might not sound like much but I was living on such a strict budget last year that I couldn't get anything for myself (things like DVDs and books included) - not so this year as I have lots of my own money coming in from a very nice aunty!
* for our TVC I have been doing soooo much running around - back and forth to the Gold Coast Warner Bros Studio, visiting the Cutting Edge post-production studio a few times to go over what we need from our telecine appointment, collecting equipment and trucking it around at 6am for locations, plus I had to get 8m squared of black fabric together to cover the windows in our location...
* dubbing my projects from last year (some of which the university LOST, can you believe that?)
* there have also been three fantastic 'moments' this fortnight that I won't be telling you about...

plus! a friend from one of my compounds in Bahrain who moved to England a few years ago is doing a round-the-world trip for her gap year and is right now going through Australia. She's just been through NZ an, at last check, was in Perth so she'll be coming through Brizzy soon and it'll be great to see her again!

Hmmm.... I think that's everything. It's certainly enough from me! Ah yes, photos!

I had to take this pic: this is our Film Production lecturer, notice the tropical shirt, boardshorts and lack of shoes! This is pretty normal in our lecturers - everything is so casual down here!

The only two pics I had time to take of the filming on the TVC but our producer, Ian (by the camera in these 2 pics) took a few more that he should be emailing me soon. The girls were all professional models too!

the lovely Halo, on my windowsill, though I have no way of explaining the country landscape in her eyes!

Finally, I love this pic: Brisbane city at night (with a 400ISO on my crappy little digital camera - i only just discovered that i can do that!!) and yes, the bright light in between the two buildings is the MOON. very cool

Friday, March 31, 2006

Fri, 31 Mar 2006 10:14:50 GMT

I guess most of you will know this by now. At roughly 9pm yesterday (Thursday 30th March 2006), a dinner cruise dhow capsized off the coast of Muharraq, Bahrain with 150 passengers. As of now, 57 are dead - all expats - and quite a few are still missing.

Now this seems to have shaken Bahrain quite a bit - not only is it a small community but a few years ago we had a serious plane crash that killed everyone on board when the pilot misjudged the sea level. Both of these disasters have occured in the same area of seawater and both have used scubadivers to search for survivors and bodies. Eerie echoes of the horrendous plane crash are now being felt.

For me personally, I am even more worried. The cruise company, Island Tours, that was running the dinner party on board is owned and run by my best friend's boyfriend. And I haven't heard anything from either of them. Do any of you remember Brittney Bartholomew? She's an American girl that was in our Year 4 and 5 at St Christopher's School. I've known her since then even though now we're both studying at uni (her in Bahrain by distance learning) and can't keep in contact as much. I'm really really worried that she and Kingsley were on board when it happened. And I have no way to tell right now!!

I really really hope that they are both okay, and that they find more survivors and less bodies out there.

Sunday, March 26, 2006

Sun, 26 Mar 2006 01:25:23 GMT

Hello there everyone!

Now most of you will be somewhat aware that in 2003 I created my own production company: Incident Films 
(remember when I showed you all 'Equilibrium'?).

Well, you may also remember that I promised a website that day - one that has unfortunately been a long 
time coming. I did have a preliminary test site that three of you saw (along with some of my family) 
but there were lots of problems with it.

The website has now been given a major over-haul so it can finally be 'released' to the world! hehe

So I would like to cordially invite you all to visit the brand-spanking-new site for Incident Films at:

www.incidentfilms.com

Enjoy!