So the government has pulled AU$20,000 of funding for the Jakarta International Film Festival because of the presence of 4 Australian films critical of the Australian or Indonesian governments, including a showing of the documentary The President Versus David Hicks, 24 hours before the festival was due to start.
The fims will still be shown, although a workshop by an Australian investigative journalist on documentary making has had to be cancelled.
Well we’ve just come back from seeing The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill, and I’ve got to say it’s a great little film.
It’s the story of Mark Bittner and his curiosity for, friendship with and care for a flock of wild cherry-headed conure’s who lived around and about Telegraph Hill in San Francisco over a number of years, as well as about his history and what happens to him during the making of the film.
I thought he held his own really well against the parrots, who occasionally tried to steal the show – especially Mingus who set up home under his fridge and oscillates between being very cute and attacking his shoes, forcing Mark to put him outside to cool down for a bit.
If you like birds, wildlife films, documentaries about interesting self-effacing people and a nice gentle warm feeling after a film then this is one for you.
Mark has also written a book about his experiences, and there is a FAQ about the parrots that you see in the film.
KDE DOT News has an article on the release of QT4 which includes a link to an Ogg-Theora (open source) version of their silly music video to go with the launch..
Interesting times at the moment!
Donna has some good news about the film rights for her best-selling autobiography Nobody Nowhere.
I encountered a wonderful, funny, fountain named Beverly Nero, and our email conversation turned to film writes and the fact that Nobody Nowhere was once again up for option. Bev picked up the option, and supported my belief I might actually be able to write this. Just as Nobody Nowhere was written in 4 weeks, so was my first draft of the screenplay. The book went on to become an international best seller.
The film is now in development, with a target date of May 2006 to begin filming. The movie will be filmed in the UK, throughout England and Wales, over to greater Europe and tell the Australian side of the story from Donna’s perspective.
Believe me, those 4 weeks were hectic and she’s done the first edit on the script too now!
The thing that gets the highest hit count on this website is not any of the blog entries, none of the photo galleries nor even the URLs that those damn accursed referrer spammers try to go to, but this photo:
Unfortunately I can’t find any attribution for it – the best I’ve got is that it was first mentioned in this story by Alec who pointed to this URL that went 404. I managed to track down a copy via some method that escapes me and added that as a comment to Alec’s article, which he then posted about here.
The EXIF information isn’t much use, it just says:
$ exif Cat.jpg
EXIF tags in 'Cat.jpg' ('Motorola' byte order):
--------------------+-----------------------------------------------------------
Tag |Value
--------------------+-----------------------------------------------------------
Orientation |top - left
x-Resolution |72/1
y-Resolution |72/1
Resolution Unit |Inch
Software |Adobe Photoshop 7.0
Date and Time |2004:05:19 12:49:44
Compression |JPEG compression
x-Resolution |72/1
y-Resolution |72/1
Resolution Unit |Inch
Color Space |Uncalibrated
PixelXDimension |434
PixelYDimension |377
--------------------+-----------------------------------------------------------
EXIF data contains a thumbnail (3764 bytes).
My guess is that as Photoshop is involved it’s a fake.. But I’d love to find out who did it so they can get proper credit!