Category Archives: Journal

It’s not the pirates…

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Last night’s trip to the local Vue cinema:

£10.25 per ticket, which couldn’t be purchased at the ticket office because that was closed, so had to be bought from the concessions stand and therefore involved a lot of angry people missing the start of their movies because they were queuing behind people who were buying tubs of popcorn…

…But not hot dogs, because they’d run out of hot dogs by 7.40pm on a Thursday night.

Usually the projection at the Vue cinemas is woeful (out of focus, out of rack etc) but this was a digital projection, so they couldn’t fuck it up…

…Oh, except that the projector was a little weaker than it should have been given its distance from the screen…

…Although the weakness of the image could be attributed to the fact that the cinema refuses to bring the house lights all the way down at the start of the movie for “health and safety reasons”. There was therefore a mis-aligned spotlight shining onto the right hand side of the screen for THREE HOURS.

Before the movie started, we were treated to several stern lectures and warnings about film piracy. Apparently it’s a crime to be taken very seriously because it’s destroying the entertainment industry.

Is. It. Fuck.

Cinema exhibition is dying because the big cinema exhibitors are greedy, arrogant, incompetent shitstains who care more about flogging snacks than showing movies and who have been butt-raping the public too hard and too long.

Last night’s outing cost about £30 (double that if we’d needed a babysitter).

Regardless of the quality of the movie, the quality of the cinema experience was shit.

The Blu-Ray will be out in a couple of months and will cost £15. I can watch it at home whenever, with whoever and as often as I want.

Cinema (the place, not the form) is indeed dead. But it wasn’t killed by pirates, it was fucked to death by fat sweaty middle-aged white men who weren’t smart enough to keep one of the simplest business models in the world ticking over.

R.I. fucking P.

What have I been doing?

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Working, mostly – deadlines have been coming at me thick and fast recently.

And losing money. I’ve been doing a lot of that thanks to a film company hitting the skids and finding themselves unable to pay me.

I’m back in the director’s chair (on a couple of episodes of New Tricks, one of which I’ve written) as of January 12th 2010 and I’ve got a bunch of stuff to write before then.

I’ve also been getting into photography. To whit, my first attempt at an HDR (high-dynamic range) image…

HDR street comp.jpg

You can see a larger version of this and more of my pics at http://juliansimpson.smugmug.com

More later…

Taking the red pill…

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Thanks for all your emails and comments. You’ve all been really nice and overwhelmingly supportive of my decision to leave Twitter. When I say “all”, I’m obviously not including @misterdevans, whose comments on the subject have marked him out as the kind of twisted shitbag I’ll be very glad to see the back of. Not that people like this don’t exist in real life but social networks do tend to amplify them, which is unfortunate.

I didn’t quit Twitter because it was nasty or because I didn’t like the people or because Stephen Fry said he was going to(!). I left purely and simply because I have a heap of deadlines coming up between now and Christmas and I needed to get rid of as many distractions as possible. I like Twitter, maybe too much, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to resist spending time on there if the option still existed.

I hope everyone understands and that no one feels slighted or abandoned. I was one of millions of people on Twitter. I had 1500 followers and I followed about 150 people. I’m sure the loss won’t be felt too badly. As I’ve said previously, I’ll still be talking to people via email and in person – it’s not as if I fucking died, people! If you want to get hold of me but don’t have an e-mail address, just leave a comment on here – they come straight through to my email account so I will see them.

Now, pull yourselves together. There’ll be no more blubbing and wailing and renting of clothes; there’s coffee to be drunk, cigarettes to be smoked and words to be written…

Begone.

Enjoying the silence…

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This feels like a Dear John letter. Bollocks. Here goes…

For the past twelve months or thereabouts, I have spent a great deal of my day on Twitter. I don’t regret any of the time I spent meeting people, talking, arguing and joking. But I’m only now realising that I haven’t worked as much or as well as I should have done this year. I’m not blaming Twitter for that (it’s not you, it’s me) but I get too involved with social networking and, hard though it sometimes is to admit, I do so at the expense of real life.

A more self-disciplined person might just resolve to spend less time online, to see Twitter as a little treat once work is done. I am not that person; I check Twitter in between sentences and, when I go outside for a cigarette, I break my chain of thought by checking Twitter on my phone. I don’t enjoy writing enough to avoid distraction, yet it is writing that pays the rent at the moment, not Twitter.

I have to go cold turkey. I have to delete my account. Maybe I’ll be back in the future, who knows?

To be clear: I’m not saying goodbye to the people, just the network. I’ll still keep in touch with the friends I’ve made on here, I just won’t be doing it through the timeline.

I’ve loved Twitter and I’ve met some amazing, brilliant, funny, talented people on there. But it’s time to move on. I hope I’ll blog more (watch this space) and spend more time socialising via phone and email. Those of you who have become friends will, perversely, get more attention than you do now!

We’ll see how it goes. At least I’m getting out before lists take over!

If any of you feel like your world has become a less sweary place for my absence, I suggest you follow @luceKD…

Julian

What the… Who the… Where the fuck am I?

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The answer is Hargrave, Northamptonshire, a tiny village on the way to the in-laws’ place. We were encouraged to stop off at Hargrave because they’re mounting a ‘Scarecrow Festival’ this weekend. I had no idea what to expect…

These pictures tell the story. Bear in mind that much of the village was deserted, lending a John Wyndham feel to proceedings. Every now and then you’d look over at a manicured lawn or step into the empty church and this is what you’d find…

I may never sleep well again.

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I’m going back to London tomorrow. The countryside freaks me out.

A day in the life…

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I thought it might be interesting to journal a day in the life of a writer-director (me!) during the last days of a TV edit. It turns out it wasn’t interesting at all but I’ve written it now, so you can damn well read it…

07.00 – What? What time is it? Who am I?

07.15 – Coffee. Toast. E-mail. Twitter. RSS feeds. Plenty of time…

08.01 – Crap, now I’m running late!

08.03 – Jana and Edie wake up. I change Edie’s nappy.

08.15 – Bath. Try not to fall asleep again.

09.00 – Into car, hoping there won’t be any traffic as I have to be at Pinewood for ten for a music-spotting session on two episodes of “New Tricks”.

09.15 – A406 is a car park. Crap. Listening to Amanda Palmer album and smoking.

09.55 – Don’t know how this happened, but I’m actually at Pinewood on time!

10.00 – Composer not here yet. Bloody musicians.

10.15ish – Music spotting session starts. This is where we show our composer, Warren Bennett, the two edited episodes and discuss where music should go and what kind of music it should be.

13.15 – Spotting finished. Warren had already seen one of the episodes so, mercifully, we didn’t have to watch both in their entirety. I think they’re both good eps, but I have an appallingly short attention span and there’s only so many times I can watch the same episode before my eyes start bleeding.

13.30 – In the car, heading home. Nothing more to be done in the edit until we know what the executive producers thought of the latest cut and what changes we need to make or argue against.

14.00 – Arrive home. Jana and Edie are out, so I fire up the desktop and start making notes for an outline of another New Tricks episode for the next season.

15.00 – E-mail flurry from exec producers. They love the episode. No changes. We’re “locked”. I call Ben, the editor and tell him the good news. I’m not out of contract until the end of the week so I’m now being paid to sit at home for a few days. That would be great but I suspect the production will try to squeeze in a few post-production meetings to save having to pay me extra to go to them when I’m out of contract.

17.00 – Still making notes for new New Tricks episode.

17.45 – Read “Each Peach Pear Plum” to Edie TWICE! (She insisted on an encore)

Now – Taking a break from writing (I won’t officially down tools until about 8pm). Sitting on the sofa in front of the news, with laptop. Will post this now so I can get back to work.

Go away.