We're having fun, thanks for asking
 Saturday. 12.March.2005 | Comments (2) | Permalink 709

So I spent most of last week editing the short Weltschmerz. Now that I'm taking care of colour grading and special effects, there are a few scenes which I already consider final. Part of the Smart Pills project, Weltschmerz is a sci-fi short taking place in a near future in which people enhance their brains with nanotech computers delivered with the simple ingestion of a pill (similar to the concept of 'neural nanonics' in Peter F. Hamilton's Night's Dawn trilogy). However, many aren't able to deal emotionally with the overflow of information.



So they go to the doctor. In scene 1, Catarina (played by Isa Magalhães), the main character, awaits impatiently at the lobby of the doctor's office. She's despaired and impatient and carries an old suitcase with no particular reason, only that it is a prop (and it's actually mine) that makes an appearence in all Smart Pills shorts. Because it's fun for us directors.



Rita the office attendant (played by my colleague Joana Gaio, who directed a Smart Pills chapter herself), greets Catarina with a "just sit down, wait, and leave me alone" attitude.



Scene 5 is a flashback of creepy and strange stuff that happened during the testing phase of the nanodevices. I chose to shoot it with my crappy tourist-grade handycam (image destroyed further by a dirty black diffusion filter) and - even worse - with my toy Benq photo camera set to 320x240 video mode - of which you are looking at an example. Then I pushed the saturation and added glow and grain, fucking the picture to bits. Which is nice.



In scene 6 Catarina wakes up the following morning and discovers that unconsciously she took the 'sadistic pill', the proposed treatment for people too smart to be able to cope with an evil, evil world. ···

Microsoft to include new fonts in the next Windows releases. Which look good, apparently: I can imagine myself using Calibri, Constantia and Corbel a lot more than I do use Arial (yuck) or Times New Roman. But why do all fonts' names start with a 'C'? ···

DIY design contest winners. Weblog design*sponge held a competition of do-it-yourself design items, and the results are indeed interesting and inspirational, featuring classics such as the record bowl (I happen to have made a couple of these myself) and innovative items such as a cardboard chair. I expect some of these items to be picked up by the trendy merchants and to be on sale in 'alternative-chic-expensive' shops soon, along with the usual record bowls and ashtrays (yep, at ten euro each - yikes!), A4-sized inkjet prints of cult film posters (which I've seen being sold in cheap glass frames for 25 euros - double yikes!) and women's purses made from recylcled coffee bags. ···

Fliker.com (Shockwave required). An image search engine that 'flicks' results as you type. ···

Museum of Bad Album Covers. What do we love? That's right, there are never enough examples of bad album art. And the top ten in this one is downright scary. ···

Skip blogging was an unintended consequence of my decision to go AWOL at college therefore staying home for a week. I needed some time to mourn and stay away from certain relationships, and most importantly, to focus on work that needed to be done, as lately classes were becoming time-consuming though unproductive spaces, as it seems to be the routine in the weeks before Easter, which took away all motivation. Therefore, I spent a week without setting foot on college, at home, working for college. The wonders of the procrastination-bent portuguese educational tradition. I thought I'd have plenty of time for blogging, but I ended up procrastinating on blogging so I worked on the stuff that hopefully will bring me bread and a career. Proof will follow, after I clean the desktop clutter. ···