birthday preparations

So, last night I went out and saw the people I went riding with in Andorra. It was a good night but I didn't take any pictures at all! I was designated driver so I was on the orange henry's all night, but still managed to have a good dance with all the drunkards. We went out in Cheltenham, started off in the Slug & Lettuce, moved on to some vodka bar just down the street, then went on to be turned away from Thirteen for being too casual for a Saturday night, and ended up in Subtone, where we had a good old boogie!!

I hate the 'shirt and shoes' mentality of most places. If we were in some real expensive, classy and exclusive bar or club, then I think it's ok, but some shitty bar in Cheltenham, where the only shirts and shoes there are fred perry and hush puppies needs to grow up a bit. I fail to see how my casual appearance is somehow gonna bring their revenue down. Meh...it just bugs me.

Today is Domonic's birthday, so soon I'll be going to help Amanda set everything up ready. I took a few pics of the initial set up, but I can't post anything until after the event in case he sees it. It's gonna be good though!


See you again soon

Dave

let's catch up

So, this is my first blogger blog, and I guess I'll just bring you up to date with the past few months of my life, a summary, if you will, of my life so far in '07.

Actually, let's go back a little bit further to the end of '06.

I've been self-employed now since October '05, and doing ok with it, working almost entirely for a company called Snow Business. With them, I go to film and television sets, live events, premieres and all other kinds of setups, providing artificial snow. Visit their site on the link above to find out more about what they do. Anyway, in December of last year things went a little awry, and after a massive misunderstanding and rather unfortunate set of events it became obvious I'd have to start looking elsewhere for the majority of my work. I should really have been keeping my options open all the time, but an easy thing is a hard thing to break away from (for me anyway). I had a few weeks work with SB before it was really time to move on. Sad to do, after almost 13 years of loyal service. I hope things work out between us as I really enjoy the job, but I simply can't wait for that to maybe happen.

Another source of income is the work I do for Suscito. Suscito is a creative group based in Stroud which I helped to found along with a few other people. The big honcho is Domonic. It was his vision, and we are merely pawns in his poorly disguised attempt at world domination. We've worked on some interesting projects since we started, including a health spa promo vid and launch party, a 2D animation about a girl and her sparkling imagination, a Stargate SG-1 convention, and a few short films. Most famous of the short films is Captain Cowbell, which I created the digital effects for, as well as playing the lead role. This wasn't how it was supposed to be, but the actor we had arranged to work with had other paid work at the same time and we had arranged too much other stuff to simply wait. The character has raised a lot of money for charity too, after 10 of us adorned ourselves with beautiful udders and capes and ran the Cobalt Appeal Relay Marathon in April of last year, raising over £800 for the charity. We're running again this year on April 29th, so I'll post our results up when it's over.


Suscito is a great idea, and one which is working well. It's hard for us to operate in a full time capacity, but we're working on it. Visit the site and have a snoop about.



The work which upset things with me and SB was a production called Inkheart, which was filmed on location in Italy, and at Shepperton Studios in England. I'll hopefully be uploading some pics to my Picasa account soon, so look out for a link to all the pics in a future blog. The work was offered to me while I was working on 1408 at Pinewood Underwater stage. The special effects guys had built this huge gimble (a platform mounted on hydraulic rams) and the set builders had constructed the set on top. The set was a hotel suite, which was subjected to all sorts of trauma, before being submerged into the tank. It was a great film to work on, and the gimble set was amazing to see. The gimble had enough power to move 2 rooms full of water and crew about as if they weren't even there! They even had to slow it down some coz the set couldn't take the strain! Some pics below...you'll need 3D glasses for the funny blue and red one!


I'll post a blog about Italy another time. This blog is just to get you up to date.

I think that's pretty much things for now. Oh, I'm helping to organise a birthday event for Domonic, with his wife Amanda. It's this Sunday so I'll try to get some pictures up. Also, tomorrow night I'm going out in Cheltenham with the people I went on a recent snowboarding holiday to Andorra with, so I'll post some pics of that too. I wont be drinking, but they will so should be good!

See you again soon.

Dave


Thanks to _futurism for getting my blog brain switch activated!