Films watched: 20 (total 110). 8 cinema, 8 BluRay/DVD, 3 tv, 1 stream, 1 LoveFilm.
Confession
22 Jump Street
The Descendants
The Legend of Tarzan
Rear Window
Ghostbusters
The Neon Demon
Maggie's Plan
Appropriate Behaviour
The Woodsman and The Rain
The BFG
The Way Way Back
Star Trek Beyond
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeousie
Caesar Must Die
Jason Bourne
Finding Dory
The Commune
Napoleon Dynamite
Tower Heist

Gigs etc: 4 (total 31)
Shit Faced Shakespeare (comedy, London)
The Horne Section (gig/comedy, London)
Twelfth Night (theatre, Cambridge)
Millennium Mills, Aino Tytti (sound, Cambridge)

Millennium Mills was very interesting - a chap spent a year recording various sounds in a derelict mill in Docklands - wind, internal noises, mechanical, birds, water, traffic, singers echoing through the spaces. All layered to powerful and sometimes eerie effect, presented with stills of the area fading into each other to play with scale and texture.
EDIT: Now with pictures (on Facebook) here

I saw a lot of films at the cinema in July, I did the radio review show twice. Maggie's Plan was good (I've not been a Gerwig fan before, but the scene with the toe is one of the funniest I've seen this year), and I enjoyed Star Trek and Ghostbusters. BFG is sweet and dark and creepy, lovely details and design. I am having no end of fun comparing Jason Bourne and Finding Dory, as my twitter followers will know - an amnesiac tracking down secrets about their family! He's from the C.I.A., she's from the S.E.A.! When in a tight spot they look around, assess the situation, and use whatever is to hand - a biro, a chair leg, a fountain. Chase scenes!

Lots of good DVDs too. The Woodsman and The Rain is a good one to show friends who are becoming obsessive about filmmaking (I wonder why London Gigging Buddy showed me it?), wrapped up in the excitement and urgency of the shoot, also a subtle tale of father/son relationships and growth of confidence, all in a natural environment rather than Hollywood.
Caesar Must Die is filmed in a prison, with the inmates taking the roles in a production. It's the most affecting version of Julius Caesar I've seen.

On Saturday I was filming in Ely Cathedral.
"You'll be on the camera up in the niche by the clock. It's quite high up. Is that ok?"
Bridget looks down the nave. Can't see a clock. Looks up. And up. And up. Argh!

Really non-scary though, a yard-wide walkway set a foot deep into the stone, with close-ish pillars behind and that wall in front where the clock is. The wall is a yard thick and the solidity is reassuring, I didn't turn green at all.

Films watched: 16 (total 71). 11 cinema, 1 stream, 3 BluRay/DVD, 1 tv, 1 LoveFilm.
Histoire(s) du Cinéma
Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice
Barton Fink
Eddie the Eagle
Run Lola Run
Eye in the Sky
Runaway Jury
Stalker
The Sacrifice
Midnight Special
The Jungle Book
In the Heat of the Night
Mapplethorpe: Look At The Pictures
Louder Than Bombs
Sci-Fi London Shorts 5
Fireworks Wednesday

Gigs etc: 4 (total 15)
Rob Beckett (comedy, London)
AKDK (gig, London)
Bridget Christie (comedy, Cambridge)
Bank of England museum

And watched the last 16 episodes of Breaking Bad over a week.

The Godard Histoire(s) was pretty hard going, 3 DVDs (from Lovefilm), juxtaposition of images, also of multiple voices and printed text. It felt like it ought to be profound in an expressionistic or Jungian way while watching, but I remember little of it. The last two Tarkovskys were easier, but it will take a second watching (in my Copious Spare Time) to say anything much intelligent about them.

Films watched: 20 (total 55). 12 cinema, 1 stream, 3 BluRay/DVD, 4 tv, 0 LoveFilm.
Waitress
Ivan's Childhood
Hitchcock/Truffaut
Hail, Caesar
Watersprite Award winners (shorts)
The Mirror
Andrei Rublev
Taxi Driver
High-Rise
Zodiac (rewatch)
Zootropolis
Nostalgia
10 Cloverfield Lane
Marguerite
High-Rise (rewatch)
Pacific Rim (rewatch on friend's New Large Telly, vg)
The Adjustment Bureau
Time Bandits
War Horse
Bad Teacher

Gigs etc (8-11)
Alice in Wonderland (exhibition, British Library)
Of Montreal (gig, London)
Akhnaten (opera, London)
Bo Ningen (gig, London)

I think I filled March with interesting things to take my mind off work! Akhnaten was amazing, stunningly staged, I was gripped throughout even though it was nearly 3 hours of hypnotic music and slow slow movements.

My film watching was driven by Bums on Seats radio show and a Tarkovsky season - I'd only seen Solaris, and the Picturehouse were showing all seven films, one per day. They're repeating them in batches to mid April and I hope to complete the set. I need to not pick my favourite seat though, it's far too comfortable, and in the snug cinema I found it hard to keep awake, which was a massive waste of the experience. I watched High-Rise, Marguerite, 10 Cloverfield Lane and Zootropolis for the radio - High-Rise twice as I wanted to catch more of how the edit and sound worked. The kaleidoscope motif used in the posters appears in the editing too; the jumble through of close living. Marguerite was just lovely, but with an interesting darker undercurrent of deception running through the whole piece, not just people kindly mis-praising her singing. I enjoyed watching the elements of that unfold and entangle. Hail, Caesar was good fun. No, I had never seen Taxi Driver or Time Bandits before March.

... is perhaps not the best day to start telling people "I left my job and now I'm making films" but it is true! That's what's been going on in the friends filter for the last couple of months, my last day was Thursday.

I had probably the most thoughtful leaving gifts ever - a book I'd had on my Amazon wish list but the colleague didn't know that when he picked it, a director's chair with my name printed on it, and one person gave me an amazing gift - an 8mm camera she'd had lying around forever. 1960s but in great condition. Need to figure out how to work it now!

I've got a good head of momentum up and am rushing straight into doing sound recording this weekend for Sci Fi 48 hour challenge, then learning and doing sound design for a short that someone in my filmmaking group made. It's a good film so I have high standards to immediately acquire and live up to...

After seven years, four months and three weeks, it's time for a change.

I'm having a bit of a patchy holiday to use up some annual leave - thought I would get lots of study in, but filled it with social excursions instead, then ate a bad food (when I say my meal needs to be dairy free and you discuss how the dish can be adapted to make it so, please follow through on the sides and accompaniments! I assumed the tiny dish of coleslaw would be ok) and have been fairly laid up. Starting to recover though.

Last weekend I went to London on Sun/Mon - a very full couple of days.
Art gallery first. I tweeted: "John Hoyland paintings: succulent raspberry and watermelon colours, with uncompromising bright rectangles. Soft edges, like distant poplars." I was less keen on the later works, with their sharp edges; they felt less made somehow, and I'm sure I didn't properly understand any of it. My new shoes made comedy creaking noises as I walked up and down the vinyl floor.

Cinema for Chronic, then Bone Tomahawk. Reviews below cut. ( reviews )

The main draw to London for me was that Sunday evening with the London Sound Survey and the Museum of Soho, featuring location sound recordings from the 1950s and earlier, with technical notes about how recorder miniaturisation in the war allowed a lot more street noises to be captured. Colliers with horse-drawn carts, market sellers with jellied eels and lovely vi-lets, and an excited posh chap reporting from a fire station as a (false) alarm went off - "I'm going down the pole now! I'm running across to the fire engine!" In 1888 there was a massive Handel event at Crystal Palace - someone brought a top end wax cylinder recorder, and a mighty funnel, and the massed hordes singing could be very faintly heard like ghosts whispering. There was no amplification, they picked this event as being as loud as they were likely to be able to find. Have a link because it is 2016 and these days they have it on YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEhAjcz_iYI

Off to my Mum's after that, for an overnight and then spending much of Monday together. We went around the nearby Manor Farm which is Very Historic and has remnants of a motte and bailey and stuff https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manor_Farm,_Ruislip then to her church, which I'd never been to before. She bumped into a couple of people she knew en route and I think was quite glad to prove that her daughter exists :-)

Then into London with Mum for a pootle round the redeveloped King's Cross area, Old St Pancras Church with the Hardy Tree, Camley Street Natural Park, then along the pontoon tow path to the new build stuff - The Granary? Lots to look at, and lots of talking.

Finally headed over to Senate House for a philosophy lecture that I understood little of, a nice dinner and good conversation (mostly me saying "but I don't understand the philosophical concept of redness how is it different from science and/or reality") with good company, an unnoticed poisoning, and home to a bed in which I awoke a few hours later with strange pains...

Films watched: 16 or maybe 15, includes one third of a multi-part thing. I'll say 15. 9 cinema, 3 stream, 3 BluRay/DVD, 0 LoveFilm.
It Follows
Joy
The Danish Girl
The Hateful Eight
Bottle Rocket
Prisoners
The Squid and The Whale
The Revenant
Room
The Big Short
The Assassin
Babel
Creed
Spotlight
While We're Young

Loads of good films - top few are Room, Spotlight, Creed, The Big Short.

As before but interior photos. Smaller this time but you can click through for full size.

( many photos inside Leper Chapel )

I should make a template for posts like this which begins "It's very short notice but..."

A couple of my Cambridge filmmaking group are looking to film a historical piece for their showreel to support a proof of concept for another historical filming project.

Are you any sort of historical re-enactor and free on Sun 10th Jan or do you know people?

They/we want to film a really short sequence about 1-2min, a few actors with historical re-enactment of some kind at an interesting location. We have some location possibilities but are open to any ideas. A small crew would plan, storyboard, shoot and edit the entire production free of charge. We would supply a professional looking video which you could use if your group has a website etc.

We need to get it shot by Jan 10th as the deadline for the showreel is Jan 13th...

Books read (16)
Ready Player One, Ernest Cline (2011)

Films watched (192-204) (7 at the cinema, 1 DVD, 1 LoveFilm, 5 tv)
Rope
The Prince of Tides
Flirting with Disaster
Shooter
Side by Side
Hanna
The Lady in the Van
Steve Jobs
Strawberry Shorts Commendations (shorts)
The Dressmaker
Carol
A Fistful of Fingers
Gremlins (rewatch)

Gigs, comedy, clubs etc (20)
Suuns/Jerusalem In My Heart (gig, London)

Loved The Dressmaker, and Carol was very good.