On Friday I freaked out, and have many thoughts about that.

On Saturday I finished the rough cut of Guy in the Sky, at 6 minutes and 40 seconds (sans credits), and have 2 spots I would like to tighten, and 2 parts I would like to rework, and one missing (pivotal) shot I will send to Industrial Light and Magic cuz there sure as fuck ain't any way to make a plane fly straight and true at 17 storeys up.

On Sunday I engaged in various acts of thuggery for Boss Eliopoulos, which included (but were not limited to) dragging a guy down a hallway, throwing him into a chair, manhandling my machine gun, and lying dead on a sub-zero concrete floor for several hundreds of hours.

In a surprising number of ways, all three of these things are significantly related. Many, many photos to come. But in the meantime...

Transformers! Best!

G.I.Joe! WORST!

Posted by tederick at 10:44 AM in jedi antics & movies & tederick films
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Last night I had a dream that I went back to 3QF, and found out that half my DVD collection was still there, along with Chris and Human Rights Lawyer, who were a) living there together in connubial bliss and b) surprisingly athletic. (This dream could not possibly be related to current anxieties about career, life planning, or the end of the world). The fact that I can remember this dream seems to demonstrate that I did in fact sleep, which does not tally with my recollection, but there ya go. I do recall shoving my now-22-minute Guy in the Sky assembly cut into a kind of rough order before retiring to the bedroom in a spectacularly bad mood, and after that there was a lot of tossing and turning and accidental punching of Zam. Which is fair, given her behaviour lately.

I watched Rhapsody in August the other day, which I rather enjoyed, and puts me within a single movie of getting to the end of Akira Kurosawa's rather significant body of work. (I do then have to do some back-catchup thanks to that Eclipse set of the postwar years that Criterion released recently.) I also redirected some Christmas Chapters money towards The Sinestro Corps War, which is shiny and absorbing and much more enjoyable than The Silmarillion which, Beren and Luthien aside, just ain't any fun any more. I also, after a treat of a date with my ladyfriend the other day, finally found that goddamned Joker, so I can stop prattling about that. I still wouldn't mind finding myself a pair of the socks, though.

Today, I am trying to ride out what has been a spectacularly frazzling work-week with a modicum of grace, before fading into the weekend. I may walk home.

Posted by tederick at 8:54 AM in 3QF & books & comix & dreams & j-o-b & movies & shinydisks & socks & tederick films & toys! & zam!
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Absolutely no one was interested in letting me sleep last night, though when I did finally nod off at 3 in the morning I had a nice nightmare about funerals. Thanks for that.

Yesterday's shoot went well. Having subjected Daniel and Demetre to forge-like summer heat on Standoff in 2006 and mind-altering, skin-blistering cold all day on my balcony yesterday for Guy in the Sky, we have determined that the third part of the trilogy will take place in a burning house which falls off a cliff into deep water. Then, and only then, will we have thoroughly examined this thematic thread, whatever it is.

I'd say I got about 40% of what I wanted yesterday, but under the circumstances I'd call that a higher achievement than I'd expected. It will be interesting to see if the bits I collected after my brain completely flash-froze actually cohere into anything at all watchable. (Or in focus.)

Oh wait: I'd need a working copy of Final Cut Pro to do that.

Everything's a process...

Posted by tederick at 9:02 AM in dreams & tederick films
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Posted by tederick at 10:22 PM in photoblog & tederick films
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If you had somehow guessed that this is the third day in a row I've been wearing the same underpants, you wouldn't be wrong. They're pirate underpants! You think pirates changed their underwear every day? TRICK QUESTION, DUMBASS, pirates didn't wear underpants. They are the very definition of "free n' easy."

Tomorrow I am shooting my first movie in well over a year, and since I don't really count This Thing Is Bigger Than The Both Of Us anyway (for good reasons, not bad reasons, don't freak out), let's say it's actually my first movie in well over two years. It is, both intentionally and not, close kindred to Standoff, the movie everyone dislikes except me and Daniel and Demetre, who at the end of the day are the only three people who I really wanted to like it anyway. No coincidence that the three of us alone will work on the new flick. I would be pleased if the outcome were similar.

Having now exonerated Star Trek: Nemesis, I will shortly be exonerating The Phantom Menace. Can you believe it's been nearly ten years since that shit? I archived a clip from Global News back in the day, y'know, the one where I notably declare TPM to be my generation's Woodstock... boy. Heady fucking times they were.

In the meantime, I have just absorbed a nice rosewood table into my homely home, and will shortly cast out for dinner parties. My living room smells like basement, but over the course of the coming month I shall make it smell like merriment. (Merriment=turkey.)

Posted by tederick at 2:47 PM in 1701 & galaxy far & pirates & tederick films
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Adam and I's crack scheme to buy each other do-it-yourself muppets for Christmas was tagged and bagged by the sudden unavailability of the product on the FAO web site, in favour of the same kind of "I.O.U." they used to deal out when the Star Wars figures ran out back in '78. Still, the notion is goddamned appealing, especially since we are entering into the project double-blind (i.e. Adam will design a muppet of me, I will design a muppet of Adam, and neither of us will see the other's designs until the toys arrive). Plus, this saves me the bother of ever having to figure out how to make a muppet of Stanley J. Keramidas. FAO can make the muppet Stanley for me, and muppet Stanley could then co-chair my team meetings from here on out.

Less than 2 weeks out from shooting Guy in the Sky and everything is peppermint paper and rock n' roll. I'll even have lavolier mics this time around - lavs, and no storyboards. I'm flying a whole new kind of plane this time around, and if things go really well, I'm gonna figure out how to shoot something on the Scarlet next year. I even have something like a mission statement, the rules of which I am consistently breaking on a daily basis but regardless, folded up in my wallet right now, alongside a poem that I like quite a bit. Inspiration started small but once it got going it was everything good and loud about the world.

In the meantime, I am Indiana Jonesing one step ahead of the giant rolling ball, until at least Thursday at 3. I have my boots on to help me with this.

"Well if service providers could think, there'd be none of us here, would there?" - me at a team meeting, paraphrasing Obi-Wan Kenobi

"Pickles are ruining my life." - this woman

Posted by tederick at 3:09 PM in ADAM & j-o-b & obi-wan kenobi & tederick films & youtubery
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These stills beg the question, what could this movie possibly be about that doesn't rhyme with "shmomoerotic shmubtext."

Posted by tederick at 10:11 PM in photoblog & tederick films
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Yesterday afternoon Daniel and Demetre rehearsed a few different versions of an idea I had written and now I have Frankensteined together an actual script using sticky tape and initiative. It will be my first movie in well over a year, and might even go to camera before the beginning of December (but barely). After rehearsing we also watched My Best Fiend, which is about Werner Herzog's relationship with an egomaniacal actor named Klaus Kinski, and also Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, which is about Werner Herzog eating his shoe. I am going to be Werner Herzog for Hallowe'en. Daniel, who will be in Germany at the time, will be Klaus Kinski.

I also had banana bread ready when D & D came over, because it does not suck to work with me. I am doing more cooking - honest.

I was disappointed to learn that Sideshow has put their Lord of the Rings 12" figure line on hold, which basically means on cancelled. Apparently sales were weak. Kicking off with a shite Aragorn, charging $70 a head for hobbits, and those goddamned excruciating belt-loops on Faramir and Boromir... they've had some troubles. But boy, this Gandalf is pretty. I wish I could afford it. I'm sure they'll resuscitate the affair come Hobbit season, but I was rather hoping for opportunity for a Gandalf the White. Ah well. Seems rather strange to think that a couple of years from now around this time we're actually going to all go see another (kinda) Lord of the Rings movie... I wonder what that will be like.

Freezing my fingers clean off right now, actually typing with gloves on in my office. I will go home later, more writing, more VHS dumping to data, fixing the Final Cut Pro problem and maybe some editing of rehearsal footage. Getting back on track, big ugly gears, but moving.

Posted by tederick at 11:54 AM in foodin' & movies & pj's playground & tederick films & the process & toys!
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Well, it's that time of year again, the time I become desperately nostalgic for the days of making movies when I was a teenager, back when making movies was a) fun and b) something I did. Y'know, Mark and Adam and Ryan and Caitlin and I made the third stab at Four Royal Flushes ten damn years ago this weekend. Ruttin' Thanksgiving... makes me all shivery. I often miss making movies, but more even than that, I miss making movies as a teenager, which is an entirely different order of experience for me and much more precious. Time to dig a few things out of storage and see if I can't actually make lasting digital copies of the fucking things this time around, in lieu of anything else...

Y'know, for a long time I blamed York for quashing whatever arrogant glee I used to have around spending my weekends shooting flicks in the back yard with Mark, but I think York really just existed around a life change, rather than causing one. At some point, everyone abandons grace for knowledge. And knowledge is a real kick in the pants in terms of that joyous, spontaneous expurgation of self into creativity. Not to lean too heavily on someone else's metaphor, but I used to be able to find my way down ladders in the dark. Now I have to think my way through every single step. But, taken another way, the things I get to do now are endlessly more interesting and enriching than the dumb shit I did back then. I miss the process a lot more than the outcome.

Saying of which, I finished Once Upon a Time in the North, and wanted to do very little once it was done besides sit on the train and look out the window. So I would say any book capable of doing that is a book worth reading, even if it was slight. Some things happened today and over the weekend which made me realize (as though it needed realizing) that I am quite good where I am, right now. Not that I crave stagnation or expect no change, simply that this is a good place, or better yet a good process, and I am goiing to continue on with it and see what does come next.

Posted by tederick at 3:23 PM in books & poetical & tederick films
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Me, to D-Coc, re Doctor Horrible's Sing-Along Blog: I think we just got pantsed.

D-Coc, reply to me, re same: WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS
HOW HARD AND FAST AND VIGOROUS CAN THEY EAT MY ASS

Posted by tederick at 12:32 PM in joss & tederick films
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Last night Daniel gave me a Final Cut Pro crash course on some of the VCR9 footage. Since I never kept that test footage from way the hell back in the day when Mark and I were fucking around with our first sound mixer, I kept this instead.

Also did a podcast last night, discussed the more intriguing possibilities Blue Matrix, had fairly excellent Pad Thai, and slept in the arms of an angel who don't take no shit off noisy downstairs jerkfaces.

Pregnant bellies overwhelmed my dreams.

Posted by tederick at 9:30 AM in dreams & podcastery & tederick films & youtubery
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Last night I had a mass-disaster science fiction dream - it was Cloverfield meets 28 Days Later, with some goddamned 9/11 thrown in for extra heart-thumping. I would have been exhilarated at my brain's mash-up power, if it weren't so skull-fuckingly terrifying to lose Sarafina in a crowd of screaming, fleeing Torontonians being relentlessly attacked by wave after wave of dog-like zombies. Natalie Portman was there, too, in a supporting role; wondering aloud (though always with that smug "I'm wise beyond my years" look on her face) why she wasn't an "it" girl any more. Oh brain.

Sometimes it takes my feelings a while to catch up with me. I feel like I'm a step behind a lot of the time. Like, I can go out and do something I really enjoy but not really notice how happy I was until a couple of hours later. This makes me feel strange and backward, and sometimes confuses folk. But when the response catches up with the memories, everything tingles with harmony. It's a good feeling.

It sort of snuck up on me, but I'm rather looking forward to Prince Caspian. It's such a thankless book. I liked Lion well enough under the circumstances though barely enough overall, and I don't like PC as a book very much at all - such a cliché of a sequel. The flick, though... I enjoy rooting for an underdog, is all. It's why I like Willow. (That, and the midgets.)

(Oooh... Warwick Davis is even playing Nikabrik. That's bloody synergy, that is.)

Landscapes are opening up to me, slowly, like a new story is forming at the base of my spine. All the old things are done - I've finished two scripts in my entire life. I discovered that rather bluntly recently when I decided to do away with a bunch of hardcopies of scripts I wrote when I was a teenager - I scanned everything, and made PDFs, and then realized that really, I don't achieve much. It's okay. Something has ended; something new is starting. The new thing will be better than the old thing. This is what we do.

Posted by tederick at 8:53 AM in dreams & movies & tederick films
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Funny how that looks like "sword" to me, given the number of extra letters.... anyways. Springtime. Comic books. Fresh air. It's all happening now; even Big Brown Mountain is melting. I dreamed of whips, blood, and quickening rivers. Glaciers moving, but slowly.

Fortifications: holding. So tired was I of the various off-project interruptions that plague my day, and so delighted was I to find that my trebuchet is finally a useful piece of artillery, that I set it up on my cubicle floor. Then I sent an instant message to my brother: "C'mere, I gotta try something." He strolled through the door and PAZOWWWW!!! there was a rubber eraser flying exactly at his head, launched by the ancient technological powers of ballistics!

This, to me, makes it all worthwhile.

Continuing on with Y: The Last Man, and into the meat. The Wizard of Oz issue was just tremendous. Sex and death, sex and death... Bondage and baptisms and my blood in my ears. All snuggled up reading last night, and then wandering around the rainy streets looking for something to eat... we ended up going to an Ethiopian restaurant at Bloor and Ossington, and fuck-damn, it was awesome and solved the whole night for me. I have bad associations with Ethiopian food, like that time Mark tried to make it and I said (rather memorably) that it tasted like a shirt. Or the inevitable reality that no child of the '80s can hear the words "Ethiopian food" without a single-frame nightmare-flash of Sally Struthers feeding a kid paste. But last night's meal rocked my socks clean off and around the block, and I only wish I hadn't left the leftovers in Sarafina's fridge this morning. I'm hungry as a bastard.

The noises coming out of my big project are finally, officially, the rattles of imminent death. I shall dance into the mist. I'm going on vacation in 20 days. You can't come.

Appropriately (somewhat), my work on Captain Napalm and the Legions of Havoc began with arts and crafts - glue sticks, specifically, and tiny piece of paper.

Posted by tederick at 3:13 PM in blogTO & blood & comix & dreams & foodin' & j-o-b & sex (practical) & tederick films
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Finally, I have a pirate belt to go with my pirate soul. (And heart.) I am now well within my means to actually wear something pirate-emblazoned every single day. Even for me, this feels like taking it too far. (And a trip to Bang On is more than enough to convince anyone that as a culture, we have taken this pirate thing too far.) Still, I'm stupidly happy, and enjoy walking around with my shirt off.

Hey guess what! Sarafina and I would like this. They call it the "cathartic knife holder." It's a silver dude that you stab each and every time you put a knife away. We don't actually have a house to put the knife holder in, it's true, but things like this must take priority over things like that.

I am booked for YVR for the 16th, flying home on the redeye (my first redeye!) on the 18th. I am booked into the lovely Sheraton Wall Centre again, which actually put a small quantity of drool on my desk this afternoon just from thinking about it. All other travel plans are summarily shitcanned, but I read the Napalm script again today so maybe I'll work on that. I am ready for March to be over. I have phantom limb pain where my giddy euphoria used to be.

Posted by tederick at 5:33 PM in hotels & jedi antics & pirates & tederick films
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Merry Kissmas! It's the first day of spring. Kiss someone you like. Kiss 'em because it's sunny out (even if it's not where you are), kiss 'em because evening walks are now in striking distance (even if it's still too particularly cold in Toronto this year to make them feasible). Kiss 'em because a good smoochies are like six bottles of champagne and a pet mouse.

Doooooo ittttttttt. (The kissing. Any follow-up sex is entirely your affair.)

I am sitting in the Starbizzle near my parents' house, stealing wi-fi from yet another unprotected linksys in this whole silly world full of 'em. I have started reading Y: The Last Man. I have been waiting a long, loooooong time for this. I wanted to wait until the series was actually done before I started gobbling up the TPBs, and so I did. (Next: actually watching Battlestar. Yes, I know.) I've been spending more than a little time with the Other Brian (Bendis) of late; it's time to get back to my BKV, because ultimately, Vaughan is a bit more like the Brian I'd like to be (were I a Brian). Balder than I'd like to be, sure; but a Brian nonetheless. Plus: he wrote last night's Lost. And let the clapping start here.

The thing that makes Michael (on Lost) such an interesting character is that at this point, he is such a completely, utterly fucked human. He is a tragic figure of epic proportion; there is no getting out of this. (And I don't just mean that in the old, mouldy "the island won't let you die!" sense.) There is no blaze of glory fiery enough to redeem the haunted wretch we call Michael Dawson. So as such, it's good to have him back and have BKV writing him. The styles mesh.

As for me, I did a quick self-assess last night and realized that really, every single aspect of my life is good, and yet I feel generally blah lately - and that blah is because I am doing absolutely nothing creative, at all. Nothing to write, nothing to shoot. (Well, one expensive complicated thing, but I am thus daunted.) I know I call it back a lot, but I really do miss the days when Mark and I could crank out six or eight movies in a calendar year. I would love a really good, short idea for a really good, short movie. Something fun and summery that I could shoot on a weekend. That'd hit the spot.

Anyways. Return to your smoochies; remember to kiss plentifully and with joy in your heart. Comics are calling me now, and the girl'll be calling me soon.

Posted by tederick at 3:28 PM in 4-8-15-16-23-42 & comix & sex (practical) & tederick films
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Yes, the first thing I thought of when I read that a huge chunk of Queen West has been taken down by fire was "oh fuck, I hope the Snail's okay." It is, but the Queen location of Suspect is reportedly a goner. What a way to start a Wednesday.

Also: if you visit this post, you can see firefighters doing their thing in that awesome bit of alley we used for a shot in Bone Daddy 2. (Which might have ended up in the deleted scenes, now that I think about it.) That was the wettest I've ever been in my entire goddamn life, and I've jumped into a lake with my clothes on. Oh Bone Daddy 2. You were supposed to be easy. I suppose nothing ever is. In spite of this, I have a strong, pervasive desire to actually make Captain Napalm and the Legions of Havoc, even though as recently as a month ago I was pretty convinced I was never going to make a movie again. Just another thing to add into the pot of "where the fuck am I going to find time for this" items.

Still, it feels good to want to make a movie because I actually feel like there's something I could bring to it, instead of just doing something to do it.

I'm trying to de-clutter this week. Selling DVDs, giving away books, tossing a few bins of toys and putting some stuff on the Ebay. Spring cleaning has huge psychological gains for me - particularly when I feel as weighed down as I do right now. Selling stuff always runs at odds with my natural inclincation to put big stickers on things that say "free!" Like I'm going to do with my TV, someday. But in the meantime, I've got two 3-foot columns of DVDs to drag over to Sonic Boom, just to have them snarl at my scratches. February's a rough month.

Posted by tederick at 9:52 AM in blogTO & tederick films
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Apparently a Worf action figure was the key to my heart today. It's a little embarrassing. Star Trek, really? But then I was like "they're gonna make Ezri!!!" and it was all sold. Now I can re-enact Worf and Ezri's awkward post-coital imprisonment conversation from "Tacking into the wind" and oh my god someone just snap my neck, please. Right now.

Still sorta drying out. Actually, more drying in: the next two weeks of my job-life are gonna be motherfuckin' complex, Internet. I've got an all-day onsite development meeting on Wednesday; I'm in a project management class on Thursday and Friday; and then all next week, my boys from Mumbai are in the house. After all that's done, December oughta flatline nicely and I can spend the back nine digging my way out of the holes I'm about to fall into, but yeah... it's psychologically challenging, knowing that you're gonna be fucked sideways for work for the imminent foreseeables, and there ain't nothin to be done about it.

So for the last hair's breadth of interim, I'm gonna go see Beowulf with Matty Price in a couple of hours and then go over to Kimba's for some board games. Right now I'm going to try to get another dozen pages of Spyglass done... and yes, there will be a burrito. I'm at the Starbucks right now trying to get the most recent Terra draft read and maybe do a bit of notemaking on Snapdragon. I sheltered at the Snail for a while. It was when I noticed that the air on the second floor was actually calming me down that I thought to myself, "hmmm... this may have gone too far."

Have added a Secret of String page here. Still have not seen this year's One Minute Film & Video Festival, at T+68hrs. As procrastination goes, that's solid.

We're 12 days out from the Compass flick, which is sort of owning me at the mo'. Oh, I do ever so much hope it does not thoroughly suck. Remember: the big betrayal that the Master prophesies for Lyra isn't what happened to Roger, it's what happened to Pan. Because we can betray others all we want, but it's when we betray ourselves that's the stuff that prophecies are written about. I could not have stated that any more awkwardly! But there you go.

Posted by tederick at 2:18 PM in 1MFVF & books & j-o-b & movies & tederick films & toys!
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Me and the Cannonball have a plan, and that plan is: survive the apocalypse. Further to this, there are some things we figure we need to train ourselves up on in the years leading up to the collapse of human civilization:

• How to skin an elk
• Archery
• Killing a man in a fair fight
• Marriage brokering
• Defending a small encampment in the wilderness against the vastly superior numbers of the plague-ravaged American zombie hoarde.

Further to that end, yet in fact entirely unrelated, I have finally cottoned to the fact that everybody - everybody - calls me Matt Brown. Not Matt, not Matthew, not His Excellency, but Matt Brown. As such I am thinking of changing my professional name to reflect this. After all, when legend becomes fact, pring the legend. It's too late to change the credits on The Secret of String (too late by way of "I'm too fucking lazy"), but it's an idea for going forward.

I see death in Jin's future. Grim, salty death.

I've just come back from a rather large Chinese dinner in celebration of Felix's birthday, which was quite an excellent thing to do, actually. Before I left, I read this, and on the way downtown, I was thinking about how much I hate Bill Donahue. I don't think there's a word in my language derogatory enough for Bill Donahue, so I decided to make one up. The first one that came into my head was unart, pronounced "oo-NART." I thought that sounded pretty good and then I wrote it down and realized that its subconscious origins might be a tad on the obvious side, but I'm keeping it. An unart (noun) is a person so vile and despicable that they are, on any objective moral scale, unworthy of the right to call themselves a member of our species.

Look: it's Wonder Woman!

I am wearing a hat.

Posted by tederick at 10:41 PM in 4-8-15-16-23-42 & movies & tederick films & the apocalypse
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Well, it's the next-to-last mail day before the party, and the crowning element of my Hallowe'en costume has yet to arrive. Which is pretty disappointing. But of all the elements of this thing to have to improvise, this is the one I've got covered off regardless, so I guess there are worse things. Still - !! You would not believe how cool this one particular thing was going to be. (I will show you next week, whether it arrives or not.) Oh well. I guess it could still arrive tomorrow.

Otherwise, I bench-tested the rest of the motherfucker just now, and god damn. As I think I've said before, there is absolutely no one who is going to be impressed by what I've done here, other than me. But I am so fucking proud of this deal. And I've got the strut down cold.

What else happened today? Well, we shot Daniel's second and last segment of VCR: The Ninth Gate for one thing, and Daniel taught me a new word: defenestration. Oh, I love it. I think it is one of the loveliest words I have ever heard. I wish I had known of this word from the moment we first conceived of this VCR decalogue; it might have been the title for the whole deal. At the very least, I'm going to have to slip it into the credits for VCR10y. And possibly every other thing I ever write for the rest of ever.

After giving it some more thought, I realized vis a vis the Dumbledore situation that I agree with this guy, at least on the macro scale: there is something morally cowardly about what went on here, and not just the after-the-last-minute outing. But after even more thought on the subject, I also realized that for all my desire to have Dumbledore be the perfect queer icon that the fantasy universe deserves to have, the pieces don't really fit. I didn't give one passing thought to Dumbledore's entire lack of a sexual or romantic life when he was (de facto) heterosexual; I don't see why the sex life of a 115-year-old man should suddenly need to be foregrounded when that sex life involves other men instead of women. This is all part of a very complicated idea, but at least part of this idea bears the veneer of reverse homophobia. So I think a) we had better leave this alone now, and b) Rowling shouldn't have bothered in the first place. Putting this on the table just showed how desperate the table is. It would be nice if any one thing could ever just mean one thing, but that'll never happen. Forcing mandates upon icons just makes them fall down. And good lord, Michael Gambon must be getting weary of his picture being the very meaning of "THIS MAN IS GAY!" this week.

Moving over to the next franchise, I read the end of The Golden Compass today and am now into The Subtle Knife; whoever hypno-whammied Phillip Pullman into supporting the excision of the last three chapters of Compass from the film that shall shortly bear its name should be cast off the highest cliff on all of Svalbard. The bear fight is not the climax of Lyra's arc in the first book. Good fucking lord. Basic screenwriting, people.

Anyways, based on how much finishing Compass got to me today, I am going to be a snivelly, weepy mess when Spyglass dwindles down, a few hundred pages from here. Doing this in the fall might have been a grand, beautiful mistake.

Posted by tederick at 10:36 PM in books & h-pot & movies & pirates & sex (theoretical) & tederick films
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I'm feeling that. It's all stirred up thick and muckity and I'm just a kid! I don't know from corporate negotiations, bedside text messages, midnight parking arrangements or unlooked-for power brokerages of the personal or the arcane. And I certainly don't understand love. I know from action figures and THAT'S IT. I'm just keeping to myself and being watchful; it's enough. But these times, man. These times.

I'm tending to my garments in the meantime. I'm pleased to say that this winter will not be the last season on earth for my beloved Raiders jacket; the good folk at Wested are going to be re-lining and refurbishing the ratty old thing for an astonishingly small figure of money. At the same time, I'm looking for more hoods; I think I even want a hooded jacket. I came across no less than three hooded items over the weekend and will probably end up buying at least two. Hoods are integral to success.

This Thing Is Bigger Than The Both Of Us: The Secret of String, the longest title I have ever had for anything, will be screening at this year's One Minute Film & Video Festival. It's on November 22nd at the Bloor Cinema. I look to be in Vancouver right up till the morning of the show, but I'll redeye it back if I have to. Attend, won't you?

His Dark Materials is throwing me into near-paroxysms of joy this time through. I haven't read it in - what? - two years? Yeah I might become like Christopher Lee for Rings and just read this annually; I am just so freaking happy as I turn every single page. And making connections and asking questions and writing things down. I love this part of the story, where all the random characters just sort of ball up together, totally unaware that about seven hundred pages from now they're all going to save the world. Just think, the people currently collecting around you like lint might be your Scooby gang for the next apocalypse. Wild, huh? Except no one ever knows it at the time. Nobody ever says "the eight or nine of us right here, who didn't know each other from nobody ten minutes ago, we're gong to save the world." Well, since the only downside is that I might be wrong, I'm putting it out there: me and mine? We're going to save the world. Why not?

Posted by tederick at 4:36 PM in 1MFVF & books & hoodies & poetical & tederick films
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And c/o Adam's shutterbugly fingers, here's your first look at the production of VCR: The Ninth Gate, a.k.a. VCR 9.

I started cutting the flick tonight and yeah, it's gonna work out juuuuuuuust fine. Got a spine now and all sorts of dangly bits. More news as the situation develops...

Posted by tederick at 10:19 PM in photoblog & tederick films
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"He grabbed me and said, 'YOU DO NOT HUG A COP!!' And I just thought, 'what a sad rule.'" - Seth Rogen

There, now you won't be able to get "Love will tear us apart" out of your head any more than I've been able to. That fucking thing has been playing intermittently in my mind since the seventh of September. Does that seem fair to you? Well, it is awesome. I finally knuckled to the Costanza pressure and bought a whole bunch of Joy Division from the iTunes music store. Did it legal, cuz I'm no asshole. And yet, I self-identify as "pirate." Clearly, something is amiss.

So what happened today: FUCK ALL!! Well no actually plenty happened, I had a fairly solid object lesson in how and why I do not want to go back to the mental space at work that I occupied prior to TIFF, and I think I did a pretty good job of wrestling out of that. But more important is the yesterday factor, wherein we shot the exteriors (and some of the interiors) for VCR 9. I scheduled the shoot for the Thanksgiving weekend because I wanted a bleak, cold, near-apocalyptic look. What did I get? 31 degrees and full sunshine, the hottest October 8 in the history of the world. How's that for being born under a bad star.

But anyways, the shooting was fruitful. We even... well, we went somewhere that we could technically have gotten in trouble for but we got our shots and got the hell out. I now have enough of the skeleton to actually start editing the thing, and I can spend the next few months picking up the other elements. Only one frame of the 9 feels week to me; I might come up with something better, and that "something better" might involve finger puppets, if I can find a way to tie those same puppets into the theme. We'll see.

I was totally going to drop myself on the couch and watch a couple of French flicks tonight, but the gorramned bloody film festival from hell is invading my DVD player yet again. Next apartment: no sharing. Sharing is wrong and causes cancer. There, I bet you didn't know that before you came here today. Tederick.com is all about the learning.

Posted by tederick at 6:52 PM in 1MFVF & j-o-b & tederick films
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The goblin dances here:

Posted by tederick at 11:15 AM in tederick films
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This morning I wrote pretty much the entire third issue of Snapdragon... I just couldn't stop. Again, being as that I'm doing this with no plan whatsoever I thought that was pretty impressive. Plus, being a comics reader myself, I suspect this is the issue where - if this thing ever sees print - the readers will go, "oh, NOW he knows what do with it." This is the one where the possibilities of the concept overtook the requirements of the genre. I file it under "yay me."

Sorry for all the masturbation on the blog lately, but I am feeling uncommonly calm, clear, and focused right now, and with that being the general state to which I am always striving, I'm just sort of trying to make sure I don't miss it while it's here.

Key among my current joys is the degree to which I am enjoying Dividadero. Holy sweet crap, am I enjoying Divisadero. Ondaatje's writing remains near-narcotic in its effect on me... to say nothing of its equally respectable near-erotic effects. It's been a long time since I've read a (non-Harry Potter) book that literally fell under "can't put it down." I've got a stack of Iron Fist comics that ain't gettin' any smaller cuz I'd rather be in novel-land right now. Been a while for that one, too.

I am on a strict diet of Evanescence and Coldplay right now; not sure why. It's like a 2002 musical wonderland in my head, following the 1987 musical wonderland that was my Appetite for Destruction haze last month.

In the next week I've got Nuit Blanche, a departmental offsite, a team day, three working dinners, a soccer game, yoga, and a Mamo. I've also got minor VCR 9 prepping to do: our first shoot date is booked for the 8th of October, at the vacant lot near my office. Sending out the sides last night I finally began to understand what Adam meant when he said there was no way I was ever going to make this. It seems un-possible, I guess. But it all makes sense in my head...

At work today someone told me that I'm a catch, and I actually took it as a compliment instead of as an incendiary like I usually do. Times have sure as fuck changed.

Posted by tederick at 9:26 AM in books & tederick films & the process
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I started a new scheme this morning - a new, crazy scheme! Owing to the fact that I am always too tired to write when I get home from work, I am now waking up an hour earlier, and writing before I go. Holy madness and balls-ass shit that's clever. And the really good news (in terms of behaviour reinforcement) is that the first time out, I smacked it out of the park - six pages on Snapdragon including the key beat for the second issue and one sweet motherfucking My So-Called Life hommage on page 17. I'm using Snapdragon (comic) as the warm-up lap before starting Pandaemonium (screenplay). The latter has been knocking against the inside of my head rather fiercely since I thought it up a month ago, and yeah, it's time to put the rubber on the road.

And incidentally - Bendis is right, Final Draft is awesome for writing comics. One of my major challenges writing Terra and now Snapdragon was the sheer quantity of time it took to format everything as I went along in Word, which is not the friendliest program ever; it was seriously cutting into my mental flow and dropping my page count to a snail's pace. Well not so much any more, my people; I'm flying through the setups now. Oh Bendis. You have earned your egg.

Once again for soccer yesterday, nobody showed up, but after we had defaulted to the other team we had a rather rousing just-for-fun game, and fun it was. The Red Queen was in play, Stacey was teasing me relentlessly for everything, and Crazylegs... well, that man's got some crazy legs. I love my team. I know I say that a lot, but damn, it is just so freaking rare in my life to see a group of people who are just out to have fun and be decent.

And then Jessi cooked us a mighty dinner - she's handy to have around, that one - and we watched some of my flicks, including Bone Daddy 2 which I haven't watched in forever. Oh, and watching a total non-Star Wars person enjoy Far, Far Away as much as she did? Warms my wookiee-lovin' heart.

It is definitely time to move the catalogue forward, though. Looking at my tapes last night, I was struck by how old it all felt. I've finally got a shoot date on VCR 9, but I'm looking forward to moving stuff that is really not of the order of the rest. I've got a hunger on in a big way right now.

Posted by tederick at 10:59 AM in sockey & tederick films & the process
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Wait a minute - if Tatooine is supposed to be the ass-backwards middle of nowhere in a galaxy of ten thousand star systems, how the fuck does Tarkin know what that guy is talking about when he says that the Falcon blasted its way out of Mos Eisley? Isn't that like me recognizing the name of a coffee shop in outer Mongolia?

Well gang, in spite of my best - and if I may say so, heroic - efforts, there will be no 10th anniversary sequel to Fuck: the Documentary, which was to be titled Fuck 2: Fuck You!. Instead, Adam and I will be collaborating on a film about Oshawa. It will combine fiction and non-fiction elements and be called You, Me, the Cannonball, and the Shwa. We aim to go to camera in November, when the Shwa will be at its most Shwa. More details to be confirmed at the latertime.

Meanwhile, I'm getting an awful lot out of the Stephen Prince book, The Warrior's Camera. It's a little annoying that I can actually hear Prince's didactic monologue in my head as I'm reading his words, but that's my own fault for listening to so many Criterion commentaries. I remain intensely distrustful, however, of any analysis that makes it seem like a filmmaker put so much damn work into the pre-thought of his movie. Diagrams and schematics and ethical projects and so forth. Surely nobody actually breaks a film down to what essentially amounts to a masters thesis in philosophy, before he even begins writing it? Surely one just has an idea, sees some themes or concepts that can be articulated through that idea, and then just tries to make the flick as best as one can?

Posted by tederick at 11:22 AM in books & galaxy far & movies & tederick films
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I understand French. I understand Spanish. I stopped reading the subtitles five minutes into Chaotic Ana. The realization made me sick - made me want to put my head between my knees and think of my grandfather who is gone. I proceeded to have a massive artistic epiphany, and connect many lines in my head, even as I fought and weaved with a film that was as ugly as it was beautiful, as smart as it was stupid, as right in its every detail as it was in every single mistake it made. I don't know what the fuck any of this is any more. I went to the quad at Victoria College to have my traditional Tuesday afternoon freak-out, and promptly discovered that I didn't need to have one. That the thing deep down inside myself that is going to make or break the next 12 months of my life before ruling the next 120 years, was in fact ready and waiting. That I am, entirely, myself. And then the page turned again, and now I need to know exactly who is going to walk with me next. Are you ready to begin?

Last night Alan Ball somehow guessed I was a filmmaker and asked what kind of films I make... as usual I started with the "well, I guess you could say fantasy" line that I've been using forever but then I just switched it over and said, "actually, I guess I just make movies where weird shit happens." That's the new line.

Posted by tederick at 5:48 PM in poetical & tederick films & tiff 2007
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So as I've known for a few months now but somehow didn't quite trigger the "do something about this" part of my brain until people started asking me about it, the One Minute Film & Video Festival is participating in this year's Nuit Blanche with an all-night screening of the first four years of the festival. Which means - yes - you the people will have yet another opportunity to see my three one minute films, Sensitivity, Leap, and E-Watchamacallit Un-amation, a.k.a. my three most perversely successful films ever. What a life these three fuckers have had. Sensitivity has played five festivals worldwide, Leap has played eight festivals worldwide, and E-watch... well, that runty little bastard ain't played nowhere but it's my favourite. Like how you love the retarded kid the most.

Nuit Blanche is happening on the 29th of this month, all night long. And thank Jebus I'm at least tangentially involved, because it will mean no excuses for missing it like last time.

Meanwhile, keep a weather eye on blogTO for the various TIFF 07 coverage in which I shall be participating. And I hopped back to Tn'O this morning to write about Red Tent Sisters, which just opened on the Danforth. There, I've just told you about every cool thing I've got going on.

Posted by tederick at 9:43 AM in 1MFVF & blogTO & tederick films
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Hello Internets. Guess what? I got to carry a hot schoolgirl's schoolbooks today.

OK so "schoolgirl" is pushing it a bit, but let me have this one. I have so little.

Hey I'll say this: there's nothing like actually starting work on your Hallowe'en costume to really focus your life down to a laser point. This one is going to cost a damn fortune, mind you, but whoa... so worth it. Also because there were certain... um... "time sensitive" elements, I'm glad I got going now instead of post-TIFF. Post-TIFF would have been bad. Because then it's fatigue and birthdays and whatnot and before you know it it's Nuit Blanche and then the October offsite and then where are ya? Huh? You're on October damn twentieth with not a stitch stitched, that's where!

If only the same get-up-and-do-it-ness applied to my filmmaking projects. In the plus column, I finished VCR 5.1 on Friday. In the minus, VCR: The Ninth Gate pretty much has to start going to camera this weekend, or it's not happening. Man when this is all done and you see the madness I have wrought, you are going to split your unmentionables right down their vie en rose.

Otherwise it's all about the grid right now. I live and die by the grid. I put the "musts" and the "midnights" in the grid first because it made sense to do that, and then I took the first picks from the Vanguard programme (because for whatever reason, there ended up being a really nice corridor in there of flicks I'm really excited about). Already had to knock two first picks down to second picks just due to time conflicts, so it's been a rough road already. But that's all right, it's fun as fuck and I've got plenty of time to move things around.

Four down, and the timing's uncanny. Summer's over.

Posted by tederick at 2:36 PM in pirates & tederick films & tiff 2007
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You know what somebody called me today? (Besides "awesome," "terrific," and "sexually anarchic," which happens every day) I got called Leviathan Brown. How is that not a Bone Daddy name??? I mean now that Vesuvius is dead and Slick Willie's out of the picture, that is totally the name of BD's new sidekick.

You know, as far as I'm concerned the unproduced Bone Daddy 3 script (Bone Daddy in Egypt) is the closest I ever got to actually achieving on the whole premise. It'll never happen now, obviously, not least because I'm down both my lead actors and videotaping on the streets of New York is about to become almost impossible for non-professionals, but maybe I oughta hook me up a graphic novel outta that shit or something. Not quite as much fun, because if you can just draw the costumes there's no challenge, but still.

I also got called Batmrown, but I'll leave that one alone. It's hard to say.

Hey listen: I have to go now. Don't burn anything down.

Posted by tederick at 5:04 PM in tederick films
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