All James Aylett's blog entries

Beautiful animation

Sun, 13 Sep 2009 06:05:38 -0700

Who says you can't tell a story in two minutes?: Pandore.

Josh Olson will not read your f---ing script

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 02:11:59 -0700

He goes so far as to tell us in the Village Voice. And it all makes a lot of sense; except that if read too broadly, no one would ever ask favours of anyone for anything, and then where would we be?

(Via Alex Epstein or Amanda the Aspiring TV Writer; I think I saw Alex's post first.)

Also from Alex Epstein: Japanese insanity where schoolboy unearths fighting fish robot breast explosion. All under a moonlit sky.

Comments

Mon, 20 Jul 2009 06:21:05 -0700

Apologies to anyone other than James who actually reads comments. Because usually there aren't any.

This isn't, however, because there aren't any being submitted. Many, many comments are submitted on this blog, usually with a subject such as "WxjofieSDJDIj30". We don't publish those. In fact, we usually forget to publish any of them, and sometimes we reply to ones that we can see any no one else can.

Sorry about that.

At some point I'll get round to upgrading the creaking old platform this site runs on, and maybe we'll get better comment moderation. Or just better comments. I'm fed up with reading about WxjofieSDJDIj30.

Web website sells book books

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 07:17:28 -0700

I hadn't noticed before, so perhaps it's new, but our book is proudly advertised by Amazon as coming in an "illustrated edition edition".

I'm also entertained that someone is trying to sell it new for £41.08 plus shipping. I'll do you a copy for a round £40, p&p included.

If she can't, I pity her

Thu, 02 Apr 2009 11:26:02 -0700

I seem to be getting a lot of spam these days asking the question "can she have multiple orgasms?". Or rather, a variant of some sort where one of the words is spelled incorrectly: "cann she have multiple orgasms", for instance, or "can she haves multiple orgasms". They always spell "orgasms" right, but then that's probably all they're really thinking about.

I don't look beyond the subject line, because it's functionally equivalent to those terrible panel sessions they have at some of the conferences I go to where the name of the session is a question, and the answer is one word long and obvious (or at least "obvious to those skilled in the art", as IP lawyers would no doubt put it). I'm pretty sure if I start looking at the main message of the spam I'll see that it's been written by a creative director for Razorfish.

If they must start their spam with a question, surely there are more interesting ones in the same general area? "Is she getting multiple orgasms?" for instance. Or even "why isn't she getting multiple orgasms?", if we're going to be pessimistic about her sex life.

Or just skip the question and be honest: "you're rubbish in bed, buy stuff from us so you'll still be rubbish but can blame us instead of your inability to find the clitoris".

It shouldn't be this hard

Wed, 25 Feb 2009 16:55:17 -0800

Sometime around 5pm I started upgrading the computer we edit Talk To Rex films on so that we can get stuck into post-production our new project. It is, as I write this, almost 1am, and I'm waiting for the final task to complete.

It shouldn't be this hard.

In fact, it doesn't have to be this hard, and I'm beginning to regret not just throwing this computer away and buying a shiny new one. Like the one Bing edited the video diaries on (the third part is up now). That was nice. And portable. And didn't take eight hours to prepare before you used it.

Or for that matter we could have shot the entire thing on Super 16, and edited it as film instead of all this pissing around in non-linear editing software. Even taking into account finding my old notes and screwing up a couple of test rolls of film and cleaning the damned thing, I'm pretty sure we'd be editing by now on a Steenbeck. Although admittedly we'd be a bit stuck when it comes to compositing.

As it is I'm waiting for a hard drive to format. Witness the romance of film-making.

"New to this country!"

Sat, 31 Jan 2009 06:39:12 -0800

One of the things I get annoyed by is improvisation groups thinking they're the first. The first whatever; first group doing student improv in their town, first group doing an improvised musical, first group improvising a play entirely in gibberish. It's never the first.

In particular, one thing that happens is that a group of actors and comedians start doing some improv games (in a Whose Line Is It Anyway? style), then go to Chicago, or LA, and come back full of ideas about doing long-form improvisation, saying things like "this kind of improvisation is fairly new to this country". (Yes, there's a specific group that's sparked this rant, but since I haven't seen them perform I can't pass judgement so I won't bother linking to them.)

Usually, by "fairly new", they mean in the last five years, which isn't true. (The latest wave of improvisation started 5-10 years ago in this country, and there were various people doing full-length improvised shows, one way or another, around in the first half of that, and indeed before it, bucking the trend.)

Sometimes, by "fairly new", they mean in the last twenty years, which isn't true. Keith Johnstone was playing with this stuff in the 60s, for instance. (Although he's often better known for things like Micetro these days, which is a shame.)

Rarely, by "fairly new", they mean "after Palestrina", which is possibly true but still seems unlikely (think: bards). Certainly people were improvising narratives back in the Middle Ages quite happily in the UK. If you look farther afield, semi-structured narrative improvisation (where aspects of the story are familiar to the audiences, either using tropes and archetypes, or by using base stories) have been around since before the Romans. Long, long before the Romans.

So stop trying to claim you're new; just be interesting, and exult in that.

(While we're here, can lazy reviewers stop comparing every impro group with Paul Merton? KTHXBAI.)

PRESS RELEASE: Monday 26th January 2009

Mon, 26 Jan 2009 10:31:00 -0800

You may have noticed that Talk To Rex is not carrying the DEC spot asking for donations to help the people of Gaza affected by the recent Israeli military action. We believe to do so would undermine our impartiality, not only with Britons thousands of miles away from the Middle East, but with our international audience. We cannot throw away the reputation we have carefully built up across the years as the world's premier source of unbiased sarcasm and sniping at Russell T Davies. While the plight of those in Gaza is not to be underestimated, we feel that not carrying the advert is important in underlining our commitment to mindlessly preserving our ante-bellum reputation in the changing world of the 21st century. Bring us an appeal for everyone affected by the ongoing events, be they Arab, Israeli or Western observer and we can talk.

We will sleep soundly tonight, secure in the knowledge that more people are aware of the campaign due to our action than would have bothered to watch another film about deserving others voiced by bloody Jeremy Vine.

Response from Nick Raynsford MP

Wed, 21 Jan 2009 05:14:03 -0800

Following my previous post:

Dear Mr Aylett

Thank you for your email to Nick Raynsford MP, I am responding on his
behalf.

Nick has always supported much more transparency and less scope for
abuse, and indeed has claimed lower expenses than most other MPs for
many years. Nick does not claim any expenses other than the employment
of staff and communicating directly with constituents.

Most of the media coverage on this issue has focused on the ability of
MPs to claim expenses on the cost of maintaining and furnishing a second
home. This element in the allowances does not apply in Nick's case, as
an Inner London MP, he does not need a second home and does not qualify
for the allowance.

Nick has not signed EDM's, regardless of the merits of the case, for
some time as he feels they have been devalued by trivial and excessive
use.

Yours sincerely

[redacted]
Senior Caseworker & Research Assistant

Note that the claim about transparency doesn't really sit with his voting record on transparency, although I'm prepared to concede a point here as he has generally abstained and so hasn't really shown his colours, and in any case publicwhip.org.uk has a tricky job actually gluing this stuff together helpfully.

Note, more worryingly, that this is a form response that fails to give any indication what he's going to do. (Although to be fair, with talk earlier today about a three line whip, he might have simply been hoping the issue would go away rather than have to face expulsion from his party over doing the right thing.) At least, though, it is a form response that talks about him specifically, talking about why I as his constituent should be happy with his attitude towards expenses. And I am, but that's not what I was worried about in the first place, because I already knew that he is a low claimant; nor am I interested specifically in the second home issue. My letter actually talked about the need for transparency to foster trust in government (not dissimilar to what President Obama said yesterday) — this part has not been addressed in the response.

Nick last signed an EDM on 17th December 2008 (calling for a vote on the third Heathrow runway over environmental impact), suggesting that either he or his office has a very short memory, or a different definition of 'some time' than I have. (He hasn't signed any other EDMs this Parliamentary session, so he's probably against them in general, but the above claim is a lie.)

It now looks like this won't go to a vote, and certainly won't in its current form. This is what we wanted, really; however I'm still left with the bad feeling that Nick Raynsford is another bloody weasel.

Let's get to work…

Mon, 19 Jan 2009 07:32:47 -0800

Parliament (or something that works on their behalf) has been busy getting ready to comply with the High Court ruling from 16th May 2008 that it must publish MP's expenses under the Freedom of Information Act. Seven months of compiling the data, and nearly a million pounds, later and they've decided a better route would be to change the Freedom of Information Act to exclude the data. The vote's on Thursday (you may have missed it around all the Heathrow runway kerfuffle).

This, frankly, is taking the piss.

There's more information from mySociety, the charity that runs TheyWorkForYou and others. Start with their overview, which includes helpful links to things you can do, including writing to your MP to ask them politely to vote against this rat bastard approach to transparency.

(I wrote to mine, but Nick Raynsford MP is against transparency in government to start off with, so I'm not hopeful he'll pay attention. Mind you, I'm not hopeful he'll bother to vote at all, since he generally abstains on transparency issues.)