A Savaege Blog?

The Irish civil war film, The Wind That Shakes The Barley, has won the Palme d’Or at the prestigious Cannes film festival. This is the first time that an Irish film has won the award.

The film is an uncompromising look at British brutality and torture and a bloody saga of British against Irish and brother against brother during Ireland’s fight for independence and subsequent civil war in the early 1920s.

Loach told reporters after the ceremony: “We live in extraordinary times and that has made people political in a way they maybe weren’t in the previous four, five, six years. The wars that we have seen, the occupations that we see throughout the world — people finally cannot turn away from that. It’s very exciting to be able to deal with this in films, and not just be a complement to the popcorn.”

“‘It’s been interesting that some politicians say we must apologise for the Empire but I haven’t heard any apologies.

“‘We have to acknowledge the exploitation and the oppression of the British state, but this film is also about heroism and bravery’.

“The Wind That Shakes the Barley stars Cillian Murphy as an Irish medical student who takes up arms against a reign of terror by the Black and Tans, British troops sent in to quell calls for independence.

I wonder if I had applied would I have gotten a role on the crew? I know a few people from college that did work on it… and a lot of it was shot in West Cork and all! ….oh well.

I Bought a K3 on eBay a few months ago and the guy that was selling it said the internal electronic lightmeter wasn’t working. I guessed that this may be down to the fact that there was no battery in the camera.

Like many lightmeters, the K3 was designed to use a mercury cell that is no longer available (the PX640).

To address this problem, k3camera.com created a Battery adapter that allows the use of a zinc-air cell in the K-3. Zinc-air cells are also known as “hearing aid batteries”, are available everywhere, and are inexpensive.

The adapter is sold in a kit that includes the precision machined brass adapter and four zinc-air cells. Instruction Sheet Only $29! (+$4 shipping in the US, $5 to Canada, $8 Elsewhere)

I decided I’d try it out and see if the lightmeter would work afterall. A few days ago it arrived in the post so I put it in to the camera and turned it on, Bingo! the needle appeared in the view finder.

Now all I have to do is get some stock and see what sort of results I get from this baby!

Will post up results when I get them.

Yes, finally I wrote something for My Ball! YAY …now I have something down on paper… now I can start showing it to people and get their opinions. All this time I had this idea in my head which was no good for anyone.

It didn’t take that much effort to sit down at the computer and type out all two pages that the first draft came to. Next draft I may even beef it up to a massive three pages. Three minutes is the most I wanted for this flick so that’s good the way it worked out in my head worked out on paper too.

I want this shot and finished edit and all by mid June so I really need to keep going and find an actor and maybe a camera Op and maybe a few more crew.

I’ve been meaning to up date this with the last few days, even got to writing something only I had to go off before I had time to finish.

This short will be a bit different to what I’ve written before… In that there will be no live sound i.e. no dialogue, although there will be a voice over.

I already know what’s going to happen in the film but as yet I’ve no script! I know the shots I want so I’m currently working out a shot list and hope to piece it all together. The voice over script must of course be written but I do have a few drafts of what will be said I just haven’t yet tied it into a script.

As I’ve said earlier I hope to shoot it on my K3, still untested but should have some idea as what results that can achieve in the next week or so. If it doesn’t work out I have considered renting a Super 16 camera for a day, doing that would allow me to record sound so I could also rent out a DAT recorder or something. But all that starts pushing up my productions costs and you have to draw the line somewhere.

Last night I was thinking over a few new outlines for the short. One that came to mind was:
A film about a man and his relationship with his ball…