It snowed! All of a sudden we have a winter wonderland... okay so it's not stayed but it's added a lovely sugar frosting to everything. I really like winter. I guess I'm more of a winter person. Summer is hot and sticky and sweaty. And in winter when you're cold you can always get warm, but in summer if you're hot sometimes it's impossible to get cool.

I've started work on my book proposal, and it's coming along quite nicely. I came up with the idea of the top of my head a little bit, so now I have to deliver on my promises. It's not that I have no ideas for things to talk about, topics to go through and powerful tips to impart; it's more like I have too many and don't really know where to start. I need some inspiration. I need a hook to hang all this stuff on. I'm probably going to start with the question who is my target market? And try to make that as broad as possible to increase the sales potential. I could make it a specific geeky book intended for a few individuals who use 3D software in movies to do special effects, but that would severely limit the market. I have to broaden the appeal so as to maximise sales. Yeah, I'm just all about the money, me. And why not, I say? I've been broke in my life more times than I've been loaded, so I figure it's about time someone showed me the money. :)

The short film's still shooting. I haven't had as much time to hang out on the set as I would have hoped, and the folks on the movie are speeding towards the end of their shoot without me. That's a shame as I would have liked to have been around more to see them putting it together. But I'll perhaps be about for the edit, and that's just as much fun.

Next week I've got another bunch of teaching coming up, this time having covered still photography and gathered that there are almost no photoplegics (people with a photographic disability) in the whole first year, we stand a good chance of turning out some really good films this year. I was going to try and give them the plan for next term's video project before Christmas to give them time to develop good scripts before we start shooting. But it turns out from a meeting I had this morning with the head of the 1st year that they are all going to be in different groups next term so they can't work on anything for next term this term. Bummer. I said I'd have to give them at least a couple of weeks between commissioning the films and starting shooting just to give them time to write something coherent. Our scripts in the past, with one notable exception, have all been hasty and not really much cop. But these films are exercises, and as such needn't be the best movies ever made. But it's a huge bonus if they are good too.

The exception to this rule is one movie we made last year with one of the groups, a film noir with an Autumn theme. All the characters had tree puns in their names, and the script was wittily peppered with tree or leaf references. In a great number of shots dry leaves were scattered around, and it was generally accepted to be one of the best shorts we've made here at the school. It was all black and white, it had romance, suicide, murder, and a private eye in a trench coat, a femme fatale, all the stuff you expect from those kind of movies. But it was made by complete beginners on zero budget in 6 days end to end including editing, so it was pretty damn good considering. I'm really hoping we get stuff that good this time around. Apart from anything else, that was one of the nicest shoots I've ever run, and I liked everything about it, the people, the places, the work, the end result and although I didn't get a lot of credit for how it turned out, the praise they got for it in the end. Ah the magic of cinema.

Ok, more of this later, but I got smaller fish to fry right now.