Today I met Martin Kemp

And what a thoroughly nice bloke he seemed. Very professional, and great fun to watch. He is playing a shady character (of course), and it was great fun to watch him work.

I also met Billy Murray (who is a producer as well), and a very nice bloke called Ian Virgo who has been in alsorts of good stuff. He stayed at our crew house one night and bought us all Chinese. A sure fire way to make friends! lol

Filming in Central London tomorrow. Down Fleet Street. Hmmmm! lol. Wish me luck!

PS. Here is a couple more pics of the coin boys geek toys lol.

We've been getting some press

And our production office is shared with some guys who run a online coin company. They have the best and most expensive geek original toys, you would not believe! lol. Behold Han, only 1 of 150.

:)

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/7660268.stm

http://www.echo-news.co.uk/news/3768531.Gangster_movie_filmed_in_Basildon

http://www.echo-news.co.uk/news/3769291.Big_screen_stars_film_Brit_flick_in_Basildon

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/noscript.shtml?/radio/aod/essex_aod.shtml?essex/saturday_breakfast

http://www.thisistotalessex.co.uk/go/Big-screen-thriller-starts-shooting-Essex/article-412183-detail/article.html

http://www.southendstandard.co.uk/news/echo/3769291.Big_screen_stars_film_Brit_flick_in_Basildon/

http://www.echo-news.co.uk/search/3806135.On_location_in_heart_of_Basildon

http://www.theenquirer.co.uk/Enquirer%20Online/enquirer%20news/enquirer%20newsmain.html

http://www.thisistotalessex.co.uk/searching/Billy-brings-big-screen-Essex/article-423263-detail/article.html

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23588413-details/Kemp+brothers+in+new+movie/article.do

Busy Busy

So damn busy! lol

Had 2 and half hours sleep last night - Lovely!

But I hit the jackpot when tomorrows location fell through at lunchtime, and by 3pm I had secured the below church for the next day.

Gold star me!

Must. Sleep. Soon!

PS. This film is going to ROCK!! lol

The Rapture

I have a new job.

I was asked by a friend of mine, the fantastic Nigel Albermaniche, who I know through my film work in Yorkshire if I was interested in doing some scouting on a feature film being filmed in Essex.

It is a biblical, Da Vinci Code, End of Days sort of film and stars a load of great British actors including Danny Dyer, Gary & Martin Kemp, Billy Murray, and Danny John-Jules. http://us.imdb.com/title/tt1274646/

They didn't have anyone sepcifically looking after the locations, so various members of the crew were trying to sort things out, so no-one really knew where they were with the locations (including Trafalgar Square, 7 churches, and all sorts of interesting places).

Things seem to be going well so they have asked me to become Location Manager for the whole film! This really is a promotion for me, and gets me on a rather nice career arc. And as an added bonus, this film is the first of 4 FILMS so if all goes well, it seems I may be busy with The Rapture, and the following trilogy The Destiny for who knows how many more months.

The director is a fantastic bloke called William Steel (who also happens to be Sir David Steel, founder of the SDP party's son).

It sure is hard work, and I really have my work cut out, but I couldn't be working with a nicer and more dedicated team of people. So really, this is most certainly a turn up for the books. Wish me luck!

New Star Trek trailer!!!!!!!!!!!

ZOMG!!!!!!!1!!

Ahem! lol. Dodgy camcorder copy, but it'll do for now!

Final Watchmen trailer

This is the last post I will do on Watchmen. Here is the latest trailer, and it finally shows where they are going with it. I looks a real adult piece of entertainment. I hope it gets some decent box office. It really looks great!

Childhood fears (part3)

More Watchmen posters

I'm really getting excited by this one!

Astronomy update

What's happening at the center of active galaxy 3C 75? The two bright sources at the center of this composite x-ray (blue)/ radio (pink) image are co-orbiting supermassive black holes powering the giant radio source 3C 75. Surrounded by multimillion degree x-ray emitting gas, and blasting out jets of relativistic particles the supermassive black holes are separated by 25,000 light-years. At the cores of two merging galaxies in the Abell 400 galaxy cluster they are some 300 million light-years away. Astronomers conclude that these two supermassive black holes are bound together by gravity in a binary system in part because the jets' consistent swept back appearance is most likely due to their common motion as they speed through the hot cluster gas at 1200 kilometers per second. Such spectacular cosmic mergers are thought to be common in crowded galaxy cluster environments in the distant universe. In their final stages the mergers are expected to be intense sources of gravitational waves.

Located just 500 light-years away toward the constellation Scorpius, this star is only slightly less massive and a little cooler than the Sun. But it is much younger, a few million years old compared to the middle-aged Sun's 5 billion years. This sharp infrared image shows the young star has a likely companion positioned above and left - a hot planet with about 8 times the mass of Jupiter, orbiting a whopping 330 times the Earth-Sun distance from its parent star. The young planetary companion is still hot and relatively bright in infrared light due to the heat generated during its formation by gravitational contraction. In fact, such newborn planets are easier to detect before they age and cool, becoming much fainter. Though over 300 extrasolar planets have been found using other techniques, this picture likely represents the first direct image of a planet belonging to a star similar to the Sun.

Why would Saturn show such strange colors? The robotic Cassini spacecraft currently orbiting Saturn has beamed back images showing that the northern hemisphere our Solar System's most spectacularly ringed planet has changed noticeably since Cassini arrived in 2004, now sporting unusual and unexpected colors. No one is sure why. Although the cause for many of Saturn's colors is unknown, the recent change in colors is thought to be related to the changing seasons. Pictured above, the unusual colors are visible just north of the dark ring shadows. The razor-thin plane of ring particles is visible nearly edge-on across the bottom of the image. The cloudy moon Titan looms large just above the rings, while close observation will reveal three other moons. Cassini arrived at Saturn in 2004, sending back data and images that have not only led to a deeper understanding of the Jovian world's atmosphere, moons, and rings, but also raised new mysteries.

On September 30, a spectacular bolide or fireball meteor surprised a group of amateur astronomers enjoying dark night skies over the Oklahoma panhandle's Black Mesa State Park in the Midwestern US. Flashing past familiar constellations Taurus (top) and Orion, the extremely bright meteor was captured by a hillside camera overlooking the 2008 Okie-Tex Star Party. Astronomy enthusiast Howard Edin reports that he was looking in the opposite direction at the time, but saw the whole observing field light up and at first thought someone had turned on their car headlights. So far the sighting of a such a bright bolide meteor, produced as a space rock is vaporized hurtling through Earth's atmosphere, really is a matter of luck.

Nineteenth century science fiction author Jules Verne wrote visionary works about Extraordinary Voyages including tales of space flight and the story of a journey From the Earth to the Moon. Fittingly, the European Space Agency's newly developed Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV), a robotic spacecraft intended to deliver cargo to the International Space Station (ISS) was named in his honor and successfully docked with the ISS earlier this year. When the Jules Verne ATV was undocked and deorbited last month, its safely controlled reentry over the Pacific Ocean was followed by astronomers in order to make detailed comparisons of the actual event with computer models of spacecraft reentry and breakup in the atmosphere. This dramatic image of the fragmenting, 13-ton spacecraft is a high definition video frame recorded from NASA's DC-8 Airborne Laboratory.

Imagine a pipe as wide as a state and as long as half the Earth. Now imagine that this pipe is filled with hot gas moving 50,000 kilometers per hour. Further imagine that this pipe is not made of metal but a transparent magnetic field. You are envisioning just one of thousands of young spicules on the active Sun. Pictured above is perhaps the highest resolution image yet of these enigmatic solar flux tubes. Spicules dot the above frame of solar active region 10380 that crossed the Sun in 2004 June, but are particularly evident as a carpet of dark tubes on the right. Time-sequenced images have recently shown that spicules last about five minutes, starting out as tall tubes of rapidly rising gas but eventually fading as the gas peaks and falls back down to the Sun. These images also indicate that the ultimate cause of spicules is sound-like waves that flow over the Sun's surface but leak into the Sun's atmosphere.

The Wedding

What a fantastic day!

It was so great to see my friends all dressed up and in good form for Barrys wedding. I had a reading to do in the Chapel, so I chose Corinthians 1-13 from the Bible. Not for its religious connotations, but because it is a beautiful passage. Its the one about Love - "Faith, Hope, and Love. And the greatest of these is Love" :)


Lizzy looked stunning in her dress, and Barry and Stuey didnt half scrub up well lol Plus a good excuse for us all to get dressed up for once. And of course Lois had to get a new dress and hat for it ;)


And boy, did we get drunk later on! Photos in my Picasa photo album.


I haven't been so drunk for ages. I even went to bed fully clothed when I finally staggered in, and woke up a few hours later still wearing shirt and trousers! lol. So we've all been a bit delicate today. I've just got back from a quiet evening with them and everyone of us has a similar story!


So all in all, a very good day! Ladies and Gentlemen, please be up standing for Barry & Lizzy. The Bride and Groom!

Up trailer

God, I love me some Pixar! :)

Hail to the Chief

Only now you've got to deliver! I hope that's not a hill too high for you. Good luck, Mr President. The whole worlds watching.

Modern working

One of the locations I have to find for the BBC Learning Zone programme is an ultra modern environment that one of the modern readings of the classic poems can be done in.


To that end I have been scouting around Leeds and come across Bridgewater Place, Leeds tallest (currently) building. A very new building, it was only occupied by its tenants in 2007.It is a very modern building with all sorts of futuristic touches about it. Within it live GHB Hair, Eversheds Lawyers, and Ernst & Young accountants, all of whom agreed to let me come in and photograph their places to maybe film there.

Visiting such a building and work places really shows how far the corporate environment has moved on since I worked in various 1970's concrete buildings working for the Government. The de



These offices are state-of-the-art, with modern thinking on open plan work spaces, and hot-desking driving the design of lay-out. Talking to people in Ernst & Young and Eversheds, all of who were very reluctant to start working open-plan and hot desking, they absolutely love it; and things like teamwork and communication have all improved.


Meeting rooms are mini works of art, and architectural flourishes are everywhere. All in all they all seem very cool places to work. So a lot of thought has gone into the design of these places, and it seems to be working. Either that, or its a lot of arty-farty nonsense! lol

1st: GHD Hair, 2nd: Ernst & Young, 3rd: Eversheds