Jamie Harrison, Man Is Slapped, Thomas Flipping Truax

There's a dude called Thomas Truax who I've been a fan of for a while. He invents his own musical instruments out of gramophone horns and bicycle wheels and his website introduced me to the word "Steampunk" and he's all sorts of awesome. When I noticed he was coming to York last December I started hopping from foot to foot with excitement, and sent him an email asking if I could film him for posterity. He emailed me telling me to ask the organisers, who told me to ask the venue manager, who stuffed a load of fliers into my hands then told me to ask the organisers and Thomas again. The whole thing  sort of went ahead with everyone expecting everyone else to say no. 

I don't go to gigs as much as I should. It was weird finally meeting someone you are massively in awe of among a couple of people who aren't quite so much; people were setting things up, discussing sound levels, asking where I wanted to put the cameras, and all the time I was just standing there looking like Donald Sutherland in Invasion of The Body Snatchers. 

I'VE SEEN YOU. ON THE INTERNET.

The whole gig was amazing, the supporting acts Jamie Harrison and Man Is Slapped were utterly fantastic, because of it I ended up writing a 2500 word essay between the hours of midnight and 10AM but it was totally worth it. 

And then somehow it took me four months to edit. I mean, I had lots of other things to do in the interim, but I also got into dangerous levels of nitpicking. It's easy to do this with editing live music shows, you think you've got a nice little rhythm of cutting from one camera to the other and back again, then one of the cameras jerkily zooms in to a close up of someone's nostril or a chair leg for two minutes and your silly arty little crossfades pattern falls apart. Then there were actual problems, like one of the cameras of our two camera setup dying halfway through one of the segments. It was all a bit silly. Anyway I've finally declared it done and stuck the whole thing on the internet tonight. I'm not sure what people are going to think of it. The B3ta board has been silent so far, maybe they thought I was trying to sell them something. Maybe it was because I posted it at one in the morning. 

The playlist of songs can be found here, here are some of my favourites:

See? Awesome. You should watch the rest of these. 

Will. 

Sort of interview for this site called NewTeeVee

Right here . I taught her how to Skype.

Jessica Ashman told me I should get Twitter. She said it would be helpful for networking or synergy or something. I'm quite fond of Jhonen Vasquez's Twitter things, much as I'm quite fond of Jhonen Vasquez, but the idea of signing up to a networking group in the hope that a celebrity cartoonist may one day whimsically insult me is kind of depressing. I could just simulate the experience by texting myself with short stories about horribly murdering random collections of nouns using other random collections of nouns.

[edit.] Also some German Myspace video people asked if they could feature our Kill Bill in one of their videos. I hope they're saying nice things about us. Or at least not erroneous things. Does anyone know what they're saying? http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=55939910

Hello Rachael!

You are lovely.

General bragging, Kill Bill/Forrest Gump photos

I was in the university library a couple of weeks ago, throwing away my last few pennies on photocopying microfilm (experts agree this is the least awesome way to throw away your last few pennies). Two people in the foyer were staring at me oddly, I assumed because I'd spilled a ketchup packet over myself at lunchtime and was covered in unidentifiable shiny stains, but after a while one of them asked for my sodding autograph! And was kind of serious! I got her to give me her autograph to prove it:

YEAH!

Since then we've had an increase in the weird, internet novelty fame we've been getting. We had a few new web shout outs, including the next b3ta newsletter, the excellent Cracked.com (scroll down to 03.20.2009), and this thing:

We've somehow appeared in some sort of online Smash Hits type popushow, and a blonde Smash Hitsy sort of lady called us a Rad Farm!

We got in a few more papers, including the Sutton Guardian:

Sutton Guardian, 25/03/2009, p. I Don't Know

And the Metro:

The Metro, 22/03/2009, p.27

[edit] Graaah reading back over these two Rocco and Joe have not received enough credit. I feel like a dick now. To be fair the Sutton Guardian one is trying to localise it, and the Metro just pulled quotes from my blog so it's my fault for not saying their names in gigantic letters when I posted it here. [edit]

And York Vision and the Yorkshire Post and the Telegraph (in the Science and Technology section what the hell), but I don't have scans of those.

Then there was flipping TV!

GMTV, 26/03/2009 (skip to 3:00)

Then we got flipping interviewed on flipping TV!

ITV Calendar, 27/03/2009

My conclusion from all this is that everyone is weird. And can anyone give me some money to make a music video or film for them now? Please? Come on, I've had recommendations from Lorraine Kelly.

I've also found some pictures people have taken of the Bill and Gump shoots, and would quite like to post them here. I like how some of these effectively summarize our summaries, saving you even more time. If you flick your scrollbar down really quick it's a lot like watching the movies in five seconds.

Pics by Caroline Cooper:

More pics by Angela Liu-Wilkin:

More pics by Stuart Lindsay:

Congratulations if you've made it this far! In terms of one minute movies, there will be at least one more, possibly the final one. We have said Star Wars a lot, but we're not sure. Whatever we do, it'll be after a break of five weeks or so. It would be nice if we have time to do one more, if we did we're not sure what that would be. My girlfriend has strongly vetoed Back to the Future, I am not in a position to argue as she bought me food that week I spent all my money photocopying microfilm.

And that's all from me.

Will.