Month: June 2007

General Chaos, the penultimate episode of Infest Wisely, was posted yesterday. A lot of people have cited the talking cat scene in it as their favourite part — which wasn’t hugely surprising, I mean, talking cats are quantifiably awesome. What did surprise me was that Shannon wrote me that her six year old son Willy now suspects their cats Boo and Lucy of talking to each other in British accents when they’re not home. I’ve never written anything that both six and sixty year olds can enjoy on some level, so it kind of blew my mind.

We posted the fifth episode of Infest Wisely, Sublime Algorithm, yesterday. (It’s the one I directed.) I liked the idea of Digger becoming legendary and people spraypainting his image over the city, and after I saw posterchild’s stencil of Alan Turing I knew I wanted him to make it. This led me to the one ethical conundrum of the whole shoot — using public or quasi-public spaces for shooting didn’t bother me at all, but I didn’t want to use real spraypaint to put up the stencil. If the content of the stencil was somehow political, I would have felt fine about it, but I felt that it wasn’t really meaningful outside of the movie context.

So I looked for another way to get it up there. I thought I was onto something with fake hair colour (and Exile stayed open late so I could buy a few cans) but it was way too watery and completely unusable. Then in a last hour save, Susan suggested the fake snow in a can we had from another project. It worked perfectly.
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One of the funnest moments for me on the Infest Wisely movie was getting to see a song I wrote the lyrics for get performed on stage. It was nothing like I imagined it — it was so much better. At the time I was writing the script I had a half-assed idea my pal Maggie and The Republic of Safety might do it. Maggie was on tour, however, but Chris and Anthony stepped up to the challenge: they put together a band from scratch, got them to practise the music Chris’d composed, got them glam-punk wardrobe and tattoos, and then booked the Cameron back room for us to rock out in!

It’s hard to communicate how surreal and fucking awesome it was to see this stranger belting out the words I’d written just two months before:

Get out of our bodies/ you sneaky parasite / if you think we’re your new home/ you’re in for a fight!
Our leaders and rulers our rights have traded/ but I’m fuckin human and I won’t be upgraded!

Download the mp3 here.

Just try not to sing along! (Though if you haven’t watched it yet, it’s better to see it in context in episode four of Infest Wisely, “Spawning Rebellion“.)

It’d be pretty cool, wouldn’t it? Nanotech is going to be able to do all that and more according to the latest ep of Infest Wisely, the lo-fi sci-fi movie I wrote. Early Adopter, directed by my co-producer Craig Macnaughton, follows the story of the voice actress after she ingests a beta version of the new technology. Is it just the stress of her disintegrating relationship or is the EyeSee application a little… buggy?

For the screening I’d offered “nanite-enhanced treats” for attendees, planning something like popcorn with suspicious looking powder, but Susan immediately suggested gum instead — Christina installs EyeSee with a stick of chewing gum. At the time of the shooting we didn’t have any packaging for it but Craig whipped some up and then I hand-rolled 250 of them a few hours before the screening. When people got them at the door they were advised to wait until after the movie to eat them. Click through to see the hilarious package. (more…)