Monday, 8-Feb-2010, NZ local time
They always say that the SuperBowl is watched around the world, but I never really took that seriously until Monday. I was walking past a bar today and watched a few minutes of the game. I'm about 10,000 miles away from where the game was played, and spent a few minutes on Monday afternoon watching a game that was being played live back home on a Sunday afternoon. Just contributes to the sense of surreal of this entire awesome trip has been.
On a completely random observation, it is both comforting and disturbing to see so many brands that I recognize on the store shelves back home. From Schick razors to Kellogg's cereals, to everything in between. There are some brands I've not seen before, and just for fun we've tried to stick with those. Pam's is a common brand, and seems to be the local generic for foodstuffs. They have shelf-stable milk and eggs here too. It was a bit weird at first, finding chicken eggs and cow milk on the aisles away from the coolers, but then I remembered the tech to do that was invented ages ago. They have to be refrigerated in the US because of the bacteria (well, that and we just like cold milk). In the US, pasteurization (using heat) stops short of killing all bacteria, so the refrigeration is used to inhibit bacterial growth. If it is heated more, the enzymes start to break down and it loses flavor. We haven't tasted the milk or eggs (lacking a kitchen) but I'm sure they're fine. One way to kill all bacteria is irradiation. It's perfectly safe, but in America at least we freak out immediately jumping to wrong conclusions like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl or “Night of the Living Dead” and other dippy bits like that. Face it, Americans just like to freak out. (For the record, Three Mile Island and Chernobyl were political disasters, not technical disasters – by that I mean a political environment existed to allow unqualified people to monitor nuclear energy facilities, and then those people chose not to act when something went wrong because they were afraid of getting in trouble for being ignorant or letting something go wrong.)
In the evening, I got to view the daily editing that Kristi did, hear her stories about how she and Paul S. got along very well (they have completely compatible editing styles). Kristi showed me the 5-minute cut on Monday, and that was superb. Then she explained how they'd made the 5-minute cut using bits they liked, then had to go all ax-murderer on it to pare it down to the required 3-minute limit. It's still a fantastic piece, and she has a copy of the 5-minute “director's cut” that she can take home. (It's not really the “director's cut” and I don't think she'll get to keep any of the raw footage to ever make a “director's cut” but we can always ask.)
Kristi is still very worried about music because it is very important (Barrie himself stressed this, in the category of things we already knew, but when Barrie Osborne stresses something – you listen!). Fortunately, Park Road Post has a music composer – Dave Whitehead – in-house who is world class, and as soon as he read Kristi's piece, he started writing music for it.
The production team back in Queenstown shipped over a DVD and two CDs with 700+ songs for Kristi to listen to and see if there might be something she could use, and due to time constraints we split the burden of sampling them to see, but nothing at all fit. The story of why these only arrived on Monday is that the production manager for one of the other finalists gave his iPod to that finalist so she could see if there was music she liked. This created – let's call it an imbalance – in the resources available to that finalist. As I understand (or choose to understand, because that's how I am and there is no evidence I have heard to believe otherwise) this was done completely innocently and without any malicious intent to give that finalist an unfair advantage, but it did create a real scramble to copy the iPod and provide it to the other four finalists (including Kristi). Tim, the first finalist to shoot his film, was practically finished with post-production when the matter arose, and fortunately for him, he had come into the project already having selected his music and artist (being a Kiwi, he already knew the Kiwi bands very well). Major shout out to Jill and Catherine for scrambling on zero notice to get this music up here. I feel a bit bad that Kristi won't use any of those songs, but she did get ideas from them that she was able to share with Dave and help define the direction of the music he is making, so as far as I'm concerned their effort was well worth it and is very much appreciated by Kristi and myself.
This evening, around 7 PM, there was a Brazilian Capoeira school doing a demo in the public square. Capoeira evolved from dance into a martial art and is very beautiful to watch. These were students and they had moves that were easily part kung-fu, dance, gymnastics and break-dancing. One of the students was wearing a t-shirt with this link - http://www.fotolog.com/crolinfight but I'm not sure exactly who they were. As best I can figure, Crolin Gracie is a Capoeira team in NZ.
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