Thursday 19th 2006f October 2006

Still Here, Relax

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A , posted by Anthony around mid-afternoon.

Ok, ok, settle down. I’ve been busy, all right? Sometimes I just don’t have time to sit down to write a blog entry. Even now I don’t really have time, but I seem to be doing it anyway. The site is a bit topsy-turvy at the moment – posts with pictures embedded a certain way are causing the whole thing to crash, so there’ll be no pictures in this entry even though I have a few appropriate ones. It looks like I need to go back and re-edit old posts which will take a while. All the movie reviews are offline at the moment, among other things.

Among the photos I would put up if I could is one of my new first-cousin-once-removed Shannon, born to my cousin Catherine and her husband Barry in Kentucky. Congratulations! They got married within a few months of Eleanor and Jim and it’s good to see they’re keeping up in other departments too.

So what have I been busy doing? Well, no sooner had Shea returned to Bristol than my friends Thomas and Cathal showed up to stay with me for a while. Cathal’s brother lives in Manhattan and is also named Anthony, which was somewhat confusing to me, but I muddled through. His aunt was also in the city so he was hanging out with family a fair amount of the time he was here. Thomas has always been a bit of a classical music enthusiast so they spent a number of evenings going to various operas and concerts.

We went to see The Departed along with the rival Anthony. It’s a fairly startling film. I’m going to go see it again tonight to see if I can figure out what I think about it. Maybe I’ll report back about that. I had a good time hanging out with the guys when I had a chance to. They’ll each be providing guest entries in time, hopefully with fuller accounts of their days. Maybe I’ll have it together to add photographs at that point.

After they left I had a few days before another crowd of visitors descended, although on this occasion their presence had nothing to so with me. They were a bunch (there’s probably a better collective verb) of foley artists come down from Canada to perform live at the Lincoln Centre as part of the New York Film Festival. They were with Brand Upon The Brain, directed by Guy Maddin. It’s a silent film to be shown with an entire soundtrack created live alongside it. In NYC there was an 11 part orchestra and narration by Isabella Rossellini as well as the foley provided by Andy Malcolm, Caoimhe Doyle and Goro Koyama.

I’ve known Caoimhe for years. She worked at Ardmore Sound at the same time I did. She was an assistant on a couple of films I worked on and then went on to become an accomplished foley arist. Andy is an incredible foley artist with a list of credits as long as your arm. He’s an old friend of Patrick Drummond’s and used to come over to to Ireland whenever we had a big budget Hollywood movie to do foley for, sometimes bringing Goro with him. Also along was their mixer Don White who I had met when he came over with Andy and Goro to do the foley for The Good Thief where as the foley editor I worked with the lot of them and was able to take credit for all their hard work. This is not a joke.

Tickets for this performance were completely sold out almost as soon as they went on sale, so I wasn’t able to get one. Luckily myself, Maeve (who had assisted alongside Caoimhe on the movie On The Edge back in 2001) and Maeve’s fiancee Jordan were allowed to sit in on the full rehearsal the morning of the show. A personal performance! It was incredible – a unique experience to say the least. Here’s a review from the Toronto performance.

The previous day I had met with the crew for lunch and dragged them around from Ground Zero all the way up to the West Village – a lightning tour of some of New York. I had lunch with them again after the rehearsal and I was invited to the closing party of the festival, but by the time they had finished and gone there it was nearly miodnight. I had to be in work the next day so I had to decline. It was a flying visit – hopefully it will be longer next time.

Now available to buy is the fruits of some my recent labour, the PS2 game Bully. I think it comes out in Europe fairly soon, although it’s called “Canis Canem Edit” there (any definitive word on how to pronounce this is welcomed). I believe Tony Blair was asked a question about it yesteday, which seems like a strange mangling of priorities. It’s pretty tame, but it does have a current score of 90 on Metacritic, which is nice. As well as cutting a chunk of the dialogue and generally managing the production audio assets I also provide the voice for the character “Chuck”. So if you’re wandering around the industrial area of town and you see a construction worker who appears to have an incongruous Irish accent feel free to give him a belt. I’ll let you know if I feel it in a mysterious voodoo like fashion.

I’ve been pre-qualified for a mortgage so soon I will start looking at one bedroom apartments in Brooklyn to buy in earnest. Wish me luck!

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