My Steam List

I took advantage of the Christmas Steam Sales to pick up a few games for my list and felt so proud that I thought I'd share:

Favourites:
Battlefield 2
Braid
Far Cry
Left 4 Dead
Mass Effect
Mirror's Edge
Red Faction: Guerrilla

Installed:
Defcon
Deus Ex: Game of the Year Edition
Deus Ex: Invisible War
The Dig
Earth 2160
Geometry Wars
Half-Life 2: Episode Two
Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
Indigo Prophecy
LOOM
Portal
Rainbow Six 3: Athena Sword
Rainbow Six 3: Gold
X3: Terran Conflict
Portal: Prelude

Not Installed:
Audiosurf
BioShock
Condition Zero
Condition Zero Deleted Scenes
Counter-Strike
Counter-Strike: Source
Day of Defeat
Day of Defeat: Source
Deathmatch Classic
Grand Theft Auto
Grand Theft Auto 2
Grand Theft Auto III
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
Grand Theft Auto: Vice City
Half-Life
Half-Life 2
Half-Life 2: Deathmatch
Half-Life 2: Episode One
Half-Life 2: Lost Cost
Half-Life Deathmatch: Source
Half-Life: Blue Shift
Half-Life: Opposiong Force
Half-Life: Source
Manhunt
Max Payne
Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne
Midnight Club 2
Railroad Tycoon 2: Platinum
Ricochet
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl
Sid Meier's Pirates!
Team Fortress 2
Team Fortress Classic
Wild Metal Country


Well, that's my list as it stands - if you have any recommendations, please send them my way :-)

Wave Notifications!

Right! So I've figured out how to get certain updates from Google Wave pushed to my phone. Very simple!

1. Start a new wave
2. Fill it with the usual crap - typing, some files, whatever
3. Add the recipient/s
4. Add XMPP Bot (wave-xmpp@appspot.com)
4a. The first time you do this, enter the details of your Google Talk account

5. Install any IM client on your phone with push notifications...Beejive, Palringo etc. I recommend Beejive, it's a little expensive, but it's really solid and fast.

6. Voila! Whenever any changes or replies are made or added to the wave, you'll get an IM telling you about it!

Nice, eh? Let me know if you try it and have any hassle, or if you try it and it works!

Cork!

I'm no good at this blogging lately - a lot's been going on, some good, some bad, all of it pretty big.

In more...practical news however, The Chronoscope shall be showing at the Cork Film Festival the first Saturday of November. Be there or be square!

For those of you who don't know The Chronoscope, it's a fantastical romp through history, directed by Andrew Legge, starring Serena Brabazon and Jeremy Irons and co-produced by Morgan Bushe and myself. If you're around Cork at all, please do pop along, we're really proud of it and were very happy with how well it went down in Galway.

If you see me there, feel free to come up and talk to me, unless you:
a) smell bad
b) look bad
c) are bad (killing kittens etc)

Also, please check out the trailer here.

3.5% Of What Google Wave Can Do

So, those of you who know me (and some of you who don't) know that I now have a Google Wave account. I'm beyond impressed with it right now, but there are a couple of drawbacks.

1) Nobody else is on it
I only have a couple of friends on it at the moment, and as interesting as it is talking to strangers, it's hard to gauge the usefulness of the platform/product without being able to use it for real life uses, like conversations, organising nights out, work-related email on logistics or just even general communication.

2) Nobody really understands it
Possibly to a lesser extent, considering I've been using it, this also applies to me. I saw this entertaining video though:




It really does sum it up in a pithy and effective way, but my concern about the future of Wave comes from the certainty that "real people", meaning people who aren't techie geeks, are going to find it either overwhelming, or will look at it as a solution to a problem that, to them, doesn't exist...or at least doesn't warrant such a radical change in thinking.

Please do what you can to get an invitation - when you have one, play with it, add me to your contacts, drop me a wave...let's see what this baby can do and how useful it is.

Embedded Google Wave Test

Hi there

If you're into technology at all then you're probably aware of Google Wave. Thanks to my friend John, who hooked me up with an account, I am now testing and playing with this impressive new tool. If you can see the below wave then you are also using gWave! Please feel free to comment or otherwise interact with it. If you don't see it, and haven't got an invitation coming your way, please leave me a comment and I'll see if I can allocate you any of my remaining invites.

Galway Calendar

Yo - so if you're going to Galway you've probably realised that there'd a pretty packed schedule of films and events going on, so for your pleasure and ease, please feel free to use this calendar I made up based on the programme:

You can also get this calendar on your iPhone by subscribing to this link: http://www.google.com/calendar/ical/hhhjqrpjirhnf8cder1s4n8t84@group.calendar.google.com/public/basic.ics

Or with your own Google Calendar by putting in the same link.

Any questions, leave me a comment or send me a mail: ben.keenan+blog@gmail.com

Savage Poster

As you'll see from the posts below, I'll be down in Galway this weekend and will be catching this film again tomorrow:

I can't wait to see these posters all over the Town Hall Theatre since I made it (the poster, not the film)!

Films at the Fleadh

Leave for Galway in the morning, will be seeing the following:

Zonad
Savage
New Irish Shorts 2 (incl. Chronoscope, If I Should Fall Behind, The Mill and others!)
Short Shorts | Signatures
Swansong - Story of Occi
His & Hers
Identities

Anyone else going to any of the above? If you're reading this a few days after I posted, what'd you think of them?

Don't Copy That Floppy!

Unbelievable.

No, I'm not joking, Not even a little bit. This is real.

You know, anti-piracy has always been lame and still is, but Jesus, i mean...Jesus. At least they've given up trying to be down with the kids and are trying to appeal to our social conscience...right?



Wrong.



The same group (SIIA) are rehashing the campaign now, seventeen years later. The trailer for the new compaign is below, more after the jump:

Telling the story of a young man whose life falls apart all because he copies a game, the new campaign is designed to show the darker side of the concept "it's-not-a-copy-it's-a-crime".

It's not quite as insulting as the original, but that's like saying that being punched in the face isn't as bad as being punched in the balls. I have no sympathy for an organisation that uses dirty tactics to appeal to the ignorant masses. Not sure what I'm talking about? This is a summary of the events in the new campaign (Down and then right, not right and then down):

Galway

The Galway Film Fleadh's rockin' on this coming week - anyone coming up to it? I'm going to see Identities, Zonad, Swansong, His & Hers and check out the reception to a short I produced called The Chronoscope, and another of our shorts called If I Should Fall Behind.

Sorry guys..

I've been twittering a lot lately, it's taking away my already low motivation to blog - sorry about that, gang. I've a big post about Cannes still in my drafts I intend to put up soon.

Cannes Photos

Some pics from my Cannes Trip can be found here.

Avatar: The Game - Be Excited, Be, Be Excited!

That crazy cat has gone and done it again. An interview with James Cameron above on the new Avatar game at E3. Looks like it's going to be pretty damned good, though I question the use of 3rd person and his reasoning behind it, I'm not comfortable totally second-guessing The Cam, so I'm happy to wait and see how much it sucks/rocks. Cameron is taking his sweet time, but after making the most successful movie of all time, fuckit, he can afford to be. I'm glad that he didn't just go out and make the first paycheque that he could, or embrace some vanity project. The geek in me is in awe of his quest for technical magnificence and you betcha I'll be sitting in the middle of the cinema about 20 rows back (best seat usually) with my 3D glasses and a big stupid smile come Avatar release time. Who's with me!?

aNTIchriST

Be afraid, be very afraid.

Just saw Antichrist, the new film from Lars Von Trier, a truly horrific ordeal, I didn't know much going in, but I'm glad I didn't, so I won't spoil it for anyone else either, except to say that my hands are still shaking a bit.

Antichrist

Hi folks, going to see Lars Von Trier's Antichrist tomorrow morning. The film was produced by the same guys what did Kisses, so we have an in - I hear good things.

Peace out y'all.

B

Fish Tank

I'm drafting my big posts for my proper blog and account, but until then, here's another mini-blog about the electric and wonderful Fish Tank.

Powerful performances, gorgeously shot, confidently directed. Michael Fassbender is mesmerising, as is his younger counterpart, the sensual but niaive Katie Jarvis. I can't recommend this film highly enough. Sitting in the warm palais, tummy full of food and wine, wearing a stuffy tuxedo and having been awake and travelling for approximately 20 hours on an hour's sleep, there was NO question of me nodding off. It had me from the opening and never let go. It feels its length of two hours and five minutes, but in the best possible way - a rich experience rather than a laborious waste of time.

Please check it out as soon as you can!

Celeb Spotting

Celebs spotted:

Martin Scorsese

Neil Jordan

Michael Fassbender

Celebs not spotted:

Francis Ford Coppola (he passed right by me but I didn't notice)

I'll keep y'all posted...

The Tools of My Trade

I'm going to be blogging from the festival this year, and to facilitate this (as well as general productivity) I have borrowed a netbook from my dad, hip techno-geek that he is...being restricted to occasional laptop access last year was less than ideal.


In preparation for this I have been readying my suite of software and services to make the netbook as useful as possible. This is what I plan to use:

• Evernote - Desktop Client for Windows

Evernote is a dream, I used it earlier this year to keep a production diary on the Storyland project I was producing. The notes are geotagged and the free clients for PC, Mac, Web, Phone & iPhone make it cabaple of ubiquity. The premise of the software as a service is that it's designed to externalise your brain. It's extremely useful as a research tool as well as a tool for diary-keeping, note-taking and blog-drafting. I plan to use it to collect thoughts, pics, web clips and voice notes to enrich this blog.

• Remember The Milk - Web Client (Google Gears for Offline Access)

Reinventing the to-do list, RTM is brilliant - anyone who uses GTD would love it, though it takes a little tweaking to set up properly, it uses Google Gears to provide Offline access and has a BRILLIANT iPhone client.

• Movie Magic Budgeting

Movie Magic Budgeting just released an open beta for MMB and the Movie Magic Scheduling. These are invaluable tools for film production, but are exceptionally expensive. This Beta'll only last for a couple of months, but it's brilliant to have fully legal free access until it expires.

• GMail

This one should speak for itself. I run our company mail through Google Apps, so I have offline access enabled for my work mail and use it extensively - I spent the plane reading and replying to mail, which then all synced up when we landed.

• Dropbox
  

Speaking of syncing, this is a WONDERFUL service. Dropbox puts a folder on your desktop and everything that you put in syncs to your online dropbox. The free version is 2GB, paid is 50GB, which you'll get for about 70 euro a year. The beauty is that you can put dropboxes on all of your computers, so when I update a word doc on my home computer, it updates on the netbook and my work computer instantly, and will be available online with a username and password via a slick AJAX interface. It also has very robust sharing options - a boon for collaboration.

• Chrome
  

Google Chrome is the dog's - it's fast, simple and just WORKS. I didn't think a search engine giant could make decent software, but they know what they want from a browser, and one look at other big browsers like Safari and Firefox will show a swift proliferation of their ideas.

• Google Docs
  

We're running things like schedules, contact lists etc through Google Docs - it's great not to have to worry about versions and e-mais...someone in Ireland changes something, it's instantly updated everywhere that has that document open. A collaborator's dream!

Now, all that's left is to get some work done! Cannes, Here I Come!

T-Minus Two Hours Twenty-Five Minutes

In 2 hours and 25 minutes I leave for Cannes. I'll be tweeting from Twitter and photos will be posted to my Dropbox, I'll do my best to post here at least once a day.

You can contact me here : ben dot keenan plus cannes09 at gmail dot com for anything private or direct, otherwise, please just leave a comment.

I'll be going Taxi, Lift, Airplane, Train, Cannes. Yay!

I love to travel, it always feels like a big deal, no matter how mundane or significant, it's always the same, an adventure. With an American fiancée and the Cannes, Toronto and London Film Festivals, last year saw me taking a quite a few flights, I consider myself quite the traveler (not like that) but I still make a big deal of checking and double-checking everything. I've yet to miss a flight, but I can only imagine how horrible it feels, especially as I've had a few close calls.

So now, to nap and then rise, and then I'm off.

Catch you later.

---
Enjoy this topic? Blog posts on this topic will appear in edited form on the Film Ireland website: www.filmireland.ie

Cannes - D-15

T-Minus 15 Days and counting...

Flights -booked.

Accommodation -booked.

Meetings -In Process.

It's Cannes baby!

Storyland

Just remembered that RTÉ's Storyland set of second episodes goes live today. Forgot that they don't go live until five. 

www.rte.ie/storyland

Check back around 6:45 PM GMT I reckon...

Wrong move, Celtx

Film software is EXPENSIVE, or at least it used to be. Some of it still is, that's fine, Final Draft and Movie Magic/EP Budgeting and Scheduling will probably always be expensive, and there'll always be big productions willing and happy to spend money.

With the digital revolution, film budgets plummeted, and smaller, lighter film productions started to spring up. Productions with less gear, less people, less money. I personally have found the internet to be invaluable, and really enjoyed the options offered by Celtx.

We have a couple of seats for Movie Magic in the office and I've used it before. I really like it, it's very well-designed, but it costs a fortune, and these days paying that much for software just isn't really heard of. Enter Celtx.

Intended to replace Final Draft (screenplay writing) and Movie Magic (scheduling and budgeting), Celtx is a pre-production and development suite. It doesn't handle budgeting (yet, anyway) but is very effective at both scheduling and scriptwriting. It's nicely laid out, reasonably fast, open-source and (this is the best part) it has strong web integration.

With Celtx 1.0 you could sign into your Project Central account and all of your projects would be up there - you could easily share them with other Celtx users (signup takes about 30 seconds) and it's designed to make collaboration a breeze.

Now, the system wasn't perfect...only one person could be updating at a time, it wasn't really scaleable over three people in my experience, but it was still an attempt at a solution, and a free one. It was designed to avoid all of the inevitable e-mails that come with script and scheduling revisions, meant to take some of the pain out of it, and even if you only had three people updating the files - director, writer and 1st AD, you could have some passive users like Art Dept, Costume, PM, AD Dept. and producer, who could still benefit from having one central place to check up on the project. The pages looked like this:

Quite nice.

If you had the client, you could download the project file and make changes. It was all a little kinky (not in the good way, in the way that there were kinks to be worked out) but it was a start.

Celtx 2.0 has just been released and now the online service is paid subscription only. This is such a stupid move - especially in an industry that's so focussed on getting the most out of any situation. People would sooner pirate a copy of MM or FD than pay for Celtx, doesn't matter if it's a fiver or fifty - it's still not as good as Movie Magic or Final Draft, and if you're going to spend money on a software package, you may as well spend it well.

I really hope that they go back and change their minds on this one, they showed so much promise! If they don't then they'll be sunk by someone who steals their ideas and does it better, for free.

The End (For Now)

Well, we didn't get a second episode of Storyland. I'm not entirely surprised. My crew and cast were excellent, our concept was sound and I was really happy with our project, but it wasn't meant to be.

Cannes Mk. II

Cannes, here I come, baby.

I'm going to be flying into Cannes on the 14th and out around the 19th. This will mark the one year anniversary of this blog. I decided to start the blog at Cannes last year when it occurred to me that occasionally interesting stuff does happen in my life, stuff that I would have been interested to read, had I not known me. Or been me.

Sorry, I don't know what happened there.

I will probably be FAR too busy to write much, but I'll do my best. There'll be pics and tweets though, so by all means, check me out on Twitter and Twitpic. I'm not sure what kind of crippling data rates I'll be held to by O2 *shakes fist* so I might be dependant on WiFi, in which case I'll be communicating from the Irish Pavilion.

Let's hope they have that massive bowl of free carambars this year. The cold Guinness was also a nice touch.

Storyland

Well. There we have it. Storyland is over...for us, anyway. We didn't get a second episode. I kept a diary during the production so I'm going to edit that soon and put it up. I was really pleased with the whole project, all of the crew and the cast, but it must be said that it wasn't a great fit, and perhaps that's why it suffered. We're going to take away everything that we can and apply it to a couple of other projects we have in development. 

For now, goodbye www.tinact.com, you served us as well as you could.

Thanks to everyone who voted, your support is really appreciated and I'm really glad we had the opportunity to produce what we did when we did.

To all of the others who got through (Hardy Bucks, Rental Boys, Psych Ward, Happy Slapper, Jenny Was A Friend of Mine, Pubworld and Running Low) I wish you all the very best of luck, it was great to meet those of you that I did and I look forward to meeting the rest of you in the future.

The Phone

Emmett Scanlan, or for those of you who've met him, Scan, is in this very promising-looking show called "The Phone". This terrific trailer came out yesterday. Come April 21st I'll be checking this badboy out (well, the 22nd over here). The show is being produced by Freemantle Media with Justin Timberlake EPing and MTV showing.

From JT's site:

Sounds good, doesn't it? Go on, despite yourself, despite your strong moral standing on reality tv, it sounds like you might just watch it, doesn't it?

Anyway, I'll be watching it the morning of the 22nd - come, join me!

Housekeeping

I've made a couple of changes to the blog - have a widget on the site now so you can talk to me if I'm online.

That's about all the housekeeping, now the juicy stuff...

The voting fiasco seems to be under control, more or less. We can all make the best of it now and hope that we get a second episode. Story meetings and such coming up this week in preparation of next week's announcement. Even if we don't get a second episode with RTÉ we're going to start looking at other ways to get the series completed.

I'll also be reading a couple of Short Shorts scripts, as well as catching up on Kisses stuff.

To all the people who commented and linked to my post, I appreciate it! It's great to get a hand putting the word out.

An open letter to all particpants and managers of the RTÉ Storyland Scheme

It is with a heavy heart that I must blow the whistle on a situation that represents yet another stumbling block in this competition.

As a pilot scheme, I suppose its function is to work out problems and test solutions, and in that spirit, I would like to draw attention to an issue that was drawn to my attention this evening after the RTÉ website launched.

The website is here:

http://www.rte.ie/storyland 

This scheme is designed to promote talented filmmakers through a system of monthly knockouts. We began today, after some trials and false starts, with nine films open to a public vote, limited to one vote per person.

A very serious problem was brought to my attention after a couple of hours. The polling system is cookie-based. For anyone who doesn't know how this works, it means that it ensures that you only get one vote by leaving a small text file on your computer so that if you try to vote a second time, it checks for the file and upon finding it, does not allow you to vote.

There are numerous ways around this security measure that require little computer experience. The simplest, most user-friendly way is to use a browser like Firefox or Google Chrome with privacy mode on which instantly deletes cookies as soon as they appear.

The consequence of such a simple exploit - and there are many, many ways to obtain the same result - is that anyone with only a little computer savvy could completely skew the entire voting system in an entirely untraceable way. I am bringing this into the open because I have tried to contact RTÉ, but as the competition launched at the close of business, I have been unable to speak to anyone and I feel it is unfair that we are all driving people to the site when in all likelihood the counter will have to be reset.

This is a real shame, but I simply couldn't sit on the information. Please feel free to contact me - all of my fellow competitors should have my contact details.

Best,
Ben Keenan

EDIT: I've just spotted that this could have been prevented for $200: http://polldaddy.com/signup/

EDIT: After a night and a day of wildly and rapidly varying voting tallies during which all of the results were open to easy manipulation as detailed above, the exploit seems to have been fixed, or at least partially patched. However, the current standings are still compromised and have not been reset.

Widgets

It's hard to know sometimes what's useful in this life. What do y'all think of this thing?

See?

This is me posting more. Good, isn't it?

Storyland goes live today. Probably.

www.rte.ie/storyland

The Project

I felt bad about posting the below without saying something else about the relative silence and stillness on this blog. I haven't been avoiding you, I've just been up to my eyes with this RTÉ thing and I've had some things to wrap up on The Chronoscope and Kisses that've been taking up all of my time.

I'll post more, honest! :-)

Conspiracy Theory or something more?

Well you know I like being part of things on the web (or maybe you didn't, but you do now). I was there when Stephen Fry got stuck in the lift. I was there when Christian Bale's outburst spread across the net. I was there when, well, you get the idea.

I saw the above video a couple of days ago. It may turn out to be nothing, but it looks like he's a notch above the usual nuts and wankers and he does his thing on Friday. I really like how live internet video has proliferated since Obama's inaugeration. I watched The Oscars online as well. This is all taking a big step in the right direction, and there's something more immediate about live video on the net for some reason.

Oscars

Well, that happened.

I have to say, I really enjoyed it - I had to bow out around half three in the morning, the trouble with living at GMT and having to be up early in the morning, ironically, to make movies! Well, broadly speaking anyway.

Hugh Jackman was a lot better than I expected - and despite what Mark Kermode said, I really loved his skit on The Reader in the opening number. I do agree that the decision to have five past winners for the actor/actress categories present the nominees and winners was...ill-advised.