Food and data wrangling at the OK Corral

February 25, 2008 12:03 am gman Family, NewZealand

Jayne and I are down in central New Zealand, taking a little time out of our busy Wellington lives to help her brother Mike, and partner Inge, shoot a western, of the Pavlova variety. When we first got asked to help, I imagined both of us, sitting on the porch of some gold mining town, rocking in the chairs watching some stranger walk into town. Unfortunately our first movie roles would have to take a back seat for another while and we were propositioned to be part of the catering staff for the movie.

Jayne’s done a pretty phenomenal job pulling together the plans 3 weeks worth of food for our time here, with us putting out breakfast, lunch and dinner for a core crew of 18 people, and the occasional posse. It’s been pretty tough trying to find the variety to keep the hardest working crew with satisfied bellies, but we’re getting there, on our second week in. We’ve both lost our appetites, but the crew are liking what we’ve done so far.

I’ve also been data wrangling for them, copying the data off the camera cards onto multiple USB drives. It’s mostly been without a hitch, though did lose one filesystem (HFS+) due to some sort of weird super block error, and didn’t manage to fix it – I bet Apple are looking forward to using ZFS soon.

The shooting has gone really well, and I’ve had the fortune of being able to review most of the shots each evening. Matt put together a quick first cut for a few scenes during the weekend, and the result looked sensational.

We’re now down in Cromwell, housed beside Lake Dunstan, and have full wireless access – it’s been a good chance to catch up on work from the previous week, as Tekapo turned out to be a bit of a melon in terms of network access (though thanks to the lovely Jenny for sharing her house for a few days). It’s nearly 1am here, so time to hit the sack. MI Films coming to a cinema near you – Jayney’s already working on the marketing campaign!

3 Responses

  1. Stu Says:
    February 25th, 2008 at 6:07 am

    Just out of interest, who is the wireless provider in Cromwell?
    What kind of speed/data plan?

  2. gman Says:
    February 25th, 2008 at 7:00 am

    It’s actually just a bog standard Telecom broadband plan and wireless router. Using a Pro Advanced, and getting 1994kbps down, 398kbps up – so, not great, but enough to do some useful work.

  3. Glynn Foster Says:
    February 27th, 2008 at 12:44 am

    Wow, HFS (plus/extended/journaled) is a buggy piece of crap – I’ve had to resync one of the drives twice now because of file-system errors. Roll on ZFS. Roll on getting my sanity back – it’s 2am, and once again I have a hard hang. Joy.