Monthly Archives: January 2014

Filmshelf

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DVD Shelf

My collection of DVD’s and BluRay discs… probably obsolete by 2017 :p

I generally think I watch a lot of movies… more than the average person anyway. I’ve also, since 2002, purchased a large amount. I’ve met a few people who buy more, but the majority of people I know rent, borrow, and probably download most of what they watch. I generally have a backlog, and I always have a list of things upcoming I want to see. They see my shelf and just don’t quite get why I have so many discs, especially when they’ll likely all be obsolete in a number of years.

The above image is my current shelf, barring a few other DVD’s and boxsets on a shelf to the right just slightly out of shot… I listed over 900 items, including that many boxsets have multiple items – it’s probably over 1000 films… and I’ll probably not get to watch most of it again for a few years at least. It’s staying behind in storage in NZ while I take off overseas.

I started, as mentioned above, with my first DVD in 2002… that purchase was the special edition of Die Hard. For the first three or four years I watched everything I purchased in full, generally including all of the extra features… which was my main incentive for the purchases a lot of the time. These days I don’t tend to watch all the extras like I once did, but on films I’m a fan of I tend to watch as much of the bonus features as I can.

It filled a thirst for film knowledge that I’ve always had, or can at least always remember having. I used to, when very young, always look out for those “Behind The Scenes” specials of upcoming movies, filled with fluff press kit material, but interesting regardless and watch programs like Entertainment Tonight when it was actually mostly about film and TV show production rather than gossip to catch how movies were made.

In the late 90’s I managed to see a few Laserdisc films, and it was here I first saw the extra materials some filmmakers were filling their discs with. The best couple of ones I saw were Peter Jackson’s Director’s Cut of The Frighteners, and without a doubt the most packed for a number of years – James Cameron’s Terminator 2: Judgement Day release. I would later buy both of these on DVD when they were released, yet the amount of special features are still a rare event.

And so my collection expanded. I got access to a program called DVD Profiler and have been logging them all. If you’re interested in seeing a full list from the program, then check out this link for them. However in recent years I’ve cutback heavily on my purchases, both for lack of space, but also to help save money for my travels.

I will still watch a lot of film once I leave no question, but my future will be rentals and digital purchase downloads. By the time I do return to my stored collection, I suspect a lot of new films might not be available in any other way. It might be sad thing, but it may also save me space in my home and money in my wallet.

Work

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Avalon Studios - Stole this from Ric's goodbye post!

I’ve been working at my current job at Avalon Studios for over 5 years now, and aside from the odd moments, I’ve never disliked it. I also had the luck of training here at the school (which closed in 2007) back in 2003 years before working here. I joke sometimes all I do is push buttons a lot, and I do, but what we’re doing is either live content, recorded shows, archive materials, and lots more. I’ve learned a lot and got to teach people too. It might not be in my original plans of working more with field shoots and camera and lighting gear, but as a full time job it’s been great to still be involved in the industry.

Avalon Studios is an amazing facility that sadly for more than half it’s life just hasn’t been used the way it deserved to. I’ve said it to plenty of people, both who work here and others asking about my work, but if it was located elsewhere in the world the place would be always humming along. Instead, outside of contracted company staff, the core company that now owns Avalon runs on only around 30 staff. For a building made to fit hundreds (and did at it’s peak) that’s insane.

Built by the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation (NZBC) in the early 70’s, Avalon Studios opened as a purpose built facility for the main hub of New Zealand television. And that’s what it did when it opened in 1975. Any NZ made television between then and 1990 probably either was made at, shot by Avalon crews, or had begun in it’s halls. And if it wasn’t any of those it was instead being transmitted or retransmitted from the facility. The NZBC was split in the 70’s, radio and TV into separate entitles, and TV became “Television New Zealand” or TVNZ and under the focus of a new “state owned company” things were going to slowly change.

By 1989 the face and shape of TV had indeed been changing as a drift towards Auckland over the years finally reached a flow over and Avalon’s future would be forever changed after 1990. Less and less was produced over the years, and through into the 2000’s TVNZ looked at selling the facility, which it accomplished back in April 2013. And while it’s never fully stopped producing content, come this October 2nd when Trackside, operating two racing channels, finishes broadcasting after almost 22 years of doing so at Avalon (the full run of it existence so far, it too also moves to Auckland), almost 40 years of broadcast operation comes to an end as well.

I’ve spent a good chunk of last year editing a reel to be played in the lobby of around half of the almost 40 years of content made here. And it’s just been crazy to think not much more prime time TV would be made here. The facility will go on as a dry hire site for commercial, film and some TV productions which come in from the outside… but the staff I work with on a day to day basis will sadly be let go. The knowledge and experience of these people, some who’ve been here since before the place opened, shouldn’t be left to go to waste.

I will be leaving this job at the end of May, before I end up being another one who is in October, and yet I would have loved to have been leaving knowing that the facility was going to have a future with a well crewed team. I will miss the location, but I will miss the people I’ve worked with even more. The fact instead in a few months it’ll be mostly empty is criminal… people in this country just don’t know what we’ve got right in front of us.

Travel

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Dunedin Harbor Basin

In around four and a bit months from now I will, all things going to plan, be traveling overseas for the first time. Why it’s taken me so long is due to so many reasons not worth writing into this because… well it would take days to write and read no doubt… but it’s been that I have wanted to leave my country and see more parts of the world for a very long time.

For around 15 years I would stare out of my parents front window to a view, not that different than shown above, wondering what was outside of my hometown of Dunedin in New Zealand’s South Island. Until my late teens I didn’t even really venture outside of my own city however, and neither me or my parents could never afford any real travel barring a couple of trips around Otago or into Central Otago in the early 90’s.

I don’t know when exactly my viewpoint really changed on wanting to visit more places, especially given when I was younger I was the type of kid who would really want to stay at home overnight. Not being at home was rare for a while. Sometime around 11 or 12 or so I guess that changed and I would do the usual sleepovers at friends watching movies and playing games (usually stuff beyond our age range we probably shouldn’t have been watching) and having pizza and other junk food. But sometime around high school, and with outside access to the world via the internet in the mid to late 90’s I guess I got more keen on the idea. And so I spent more time thinking about places I wanted to see and things I wanted to do…

It wasn’t until a year or two after high school that I finally went to see a more distant part of my own country, visiting our capital city of Wellington and my good friend Andrew for 3 weeks at the start of 2002. That was my first plane trip, my first visit outside of the South Island, and I had a great time. After this I studied in Wellington for 6 months in the second half of 2003 and it became my second home over the following three years (I went between the two at least a dozen times) until in late 2006 I moved there once more and have been living there since.

I’ve been lucky though, between work and other trips I’ve managed to see a great deal of my own country in the past 12 years or so, probably almost 80% I guess. Most people don’t even see that much of their own country before travel overseas I’m often told and New Zealand is so varied and interesting I feel lucky to have seen everything I have. One day I will return and see the other 20 or so % I’ve missed out on, but currently it’s time to look forward to seeing new places overseas…

First

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Hello there internet.

Sorry about the mess, or more specifically the lack there of, for this is the first post while I get a hang of this whole WordPress thing. So for now the site is in a basic look… I’ll get on to changing this up in time.

This is the first post for the new year, and hopefully I will soon be filling this with the sorts of pointless to the world guff that everyone else does. But simply with major moving travel and job changes in the future I hopefully will post the occasional nugget of something actually interesting.

Until then…