Okay, I lied, but it should be at least funny.

A bit.

So this is what happened:

So after my last post I spent some more nice days in Berlin, got treated unfairly by Air Berlin and spent eight more hours than expected at Tegel Airport but met a nice couple from Salzburg that just got engaged in Berlin. In fact, I was just fifty meters away when Stefan proposed to Julia in the Mauerpark. I was busy looking for presents for me, my friends and myself. So one woman got a ring and I got some games for my Atari 2600 — everybody was happy.

Back in Salzburg I had a shower and the next day drove to my lovely and talented digital-artist-girlfriend in Tyrol where she stayed with her parents for a couple of weeks. Whereas Berlin was cool and rainy, Tyrol greeted me with hotness and sunshine. And Conny and I walked and even hiked quite a bit. Her family was super-friendly and it was a nice vacation from my vacation.

Not so long after I had my birthday, my very good friend Jot, the game designer finally moved out of the campus with his girlfriend. Not long after I witnessed with Conny the last few of her colleagues’ Bachelor exam. It was that day when Joey, head of the animation department at the Salzburg University of Applied Sciences, asked me to manage the students starting this year in the animation master course, since “you are in the project-management master class anyway.” I agreed and so the semester started for us a bit early but creatively.

Hey, and I bought my dream-woman a shiny ring with a shiny stone and asked her to move in together when we’re through with our Master’s degrees. And — yaaaay! — she agreed!

And before we knew we were sitting amidst about a hundred people in the biggest lecture hall for the introductory presentation of the Master’s curriculum. I am not afraid to say: Finally! As a student at the FH Salzburg I’m as happy as a lark and started out way too keen to do well, taking notes, reading up on topics and managing the animators. Hell, even the night-shifts at the Red Bull Media House in conjunction with very early courses the following days don’t scare me, they just exhaust me a little. But hey, I can sleep when I’m dead, right?! Which may happen sooner rather than later if I keep up this lifestyle.

Gadgetwise

Yeeees, this is the part where I let my electronic bling shine: As said before, Berlin was a retro-computing kick-starter and I returned with an Atari 2600 Jr. plus some cartridges in my hand luggage. The Atari still works, as Jot and I found out in one heavily documented gaming evening. It was a load of fun, despite the very noisy TV-picture which made it hard to make out what was noise and what was a bullet.

Then, of course, Propellerhead put out a new release of Reason wich now integrates Record plus at last a studio-grade mixer and 64-bit support. Sugoi! But the most awaited gadget arrived a few days earlier, something I had waited for almost two years since I first saw it in a YouTube video. It finally shipped to my address from Hong Kong and despite the odds (UPS’ inability to find my address for four years, UPS’ finally calling me with the instructions where I should go to retrieve my package, plus UPS’ invoice charging me additional fees to the already royal amount that customs already took from me) I had it in my hands: The Misa Digital Instrumets Kitara, a fully digital guitar with built-in synth behind a multi-touch panel running Linux. Yes, the awesomeness was oozing from every inch of its black and shiny polymer body. As soon as I had some time I plugged it in and realized that I had neither a clue nor innate talent in playing this instrument. But DANG! I’m looking gooooood with it!

Recently I grew increasingly annoyed with HTC’s Android distribution on my mobile phone, the Desire Z or G2: Buggy audio profiles, promoted applications like Amazon MP3 you couldn’t delete and an insatiable hunger for memory. Once I was fed up enough I posted my misery on Google+, asking for advice on how to flash the device with a custom ROM. I got the answer, got it up and running (I might lay out the details of it some time since it was way harder than anticipated) after four hours and was so happy that I also flashed the firmware of my Canon 5D Mk. II with Magic Lantern. My recommendations for both ROMs.

Anything else?

Well… no. Not really. But at least I got some little creative stuff done, like a SNES-music track for a boss fight in a game my dear friend Jot, the Game Designer is working on. I thought my piece is sub-standard, mediocre crap but he likes it. Poor fella. Lost his mind obviously.

Another thing I always wanted to try was programming apps for my Android phone. Installing the development environment was so tedious and complicated that I really congratulated myself when I got it to work, because I thought that it was the hardest part of my career as a successful programmer. Oh, how wrong I was: After two or three days of heavy research I was at least able to code an “app” that force-closed when you tapped any of its sparse user-interface widgets. A few days later I realized that it might be a good idea to properly learn Java before attempting to code The Best App In The World. I got me a book (thanks Conny for advising me in the bookstore!), I got my head wrapped around that whole object-oriented crap (hey, at least no pointers, headers and memory management like with C++) and I even managed to code an arrow that one could control like a car from a top-down perspective. That’s where I stopped for now.

But I got back to my Android phone, but this time more on a creative side. When you got root-access of your phone and a custom ROM, there’s not much you can’t do — gawd, I love Android for it’s openness…

So?

So that’s it in a nutshell. If there’s any possibility that you might have read it all and not just clicked the photos in half-hearted anticipation of seeing something shareable on Facebook, I want to congratulate you and apologize for taking away all those precious minutes from your life-clock. More to come soon. Maybe. If I find the time.

This Saturday was a big day for me: My first Visual Effects supervision job apart from anything related to my education. Magic Movie hired me for the visual effects to their documentary for national TV which will be aired some time in fall. I can’t tell you about the story (because I’ve signed a non-disclosure contract) but I can tell you about my day.

The day started by missing the first train thanks to a couple of old ladies who were totally inapt when trying to purchase a train ticket from one of the ÖBB vending machines on the ramp. After they somehow managed to get a ticket they got onto the next train to Salzburg city, but I missed my connection and had another hour in the morning to get ready for the day.

Usually I avoid riding in trains but when money is tight there’s not much you can take. On the plus side you have six hours of time for disposal when you’re not the one driving. Luckily there weren’t many passengers traveling to Vienna that day except that one guy who sat across me and nearly finished “Hector’s Journey” by some French author by the time we reached Vienna. I was plugged into my iriver the whole train ride and enjoyed the three hours I had by napping for two of them, the other hour was filled with listening to Calexico ¹, reading the IHT, preparing for my upcoming tutorial-class and, most important, reading and pondering the storyboards for today’s shoot.

I arrived at the studio at around 1pm as the crew just had finished painting the white background to blue. It still smelled of wet paint while I was offered a strong espresso. I didn’t even notice that there was no sugar in it for I was so eager for some java. It was the first time I went to Vienna without paying good old Starbucks a visit.

When the actor arrived too and got his special-effects makeup applied by no less than director Michael Satzinger himself I set up the blue screen for VFX with Christoph Skofic, now a very talented and passionate cameraman and cinematograher I know from school. Luckily he already knows much about working with visual effects so I could spare everybody the explanation what exactly tracking marks are and why I need them so badly. On some DVD commentary track I’ve once heard somebody say “Why did we need a visual effects supervisor anyway? Last time the VFX came out well without one”! I say: That might me true, but it would’ve been much cheaper and faster with having a VFX supervisor. Not to mention the thousands of curses from the guys in VFX…

My last train back to Salzburg was leaving at 8:40pm so we had to carry out the most important and most difficult dolly shots in the beginning – the dolly shots. Usually everybody on set hates a Visual Effects Supervisor but I felt fine with that team: They gave me the time needed to mount the tracking marks on the background, on stand-ins and to perform the tedious measurements of everything and the camera’s gamma-mode. You can’t be too thorough when recording what’s happening on set, especially when you do the post-production of the shots yourself. But this crew was very relaxed and gave me the time I needed which I appreciate much.

Difficult VFX shots are always a compromise between what you can force on set to decrease the workload in the post-production, and what you can’t do on the set which results in hours of clean-up in the post. Working as a VFX supervisor means balancing these two positions. It also means being imaginative enough to tell whether a shot works or not by just seeing two people walking around a blue studio. And it also means that it looks like you’re the only one without a “real” task like grip.

Bewteen two shots our director was asked by Lukas, another old classmate of me and grip/lighter/sound in this team
  “Hey Michi, why aren’t you into commercials at all?”
Michael replied boldly that
  “I am not making films to make money!”, directly followed by a comment from technical director and co-founder of Magic Movie, Jörg Steger,
  “Well that’s exactly the problem!”
Jörg spent about 100 € that afternoon for purchasing 30 liters of buttermilk among other edible props for upcoming scenes the next day. “Nobody drink the wine or eat the prosciutto!” – pause – “It’s poisoned!”.

New Horizons

Time flew by and I could assist on three shots before I had to leave for one interesting train ride home. First, I nearly ended up in a train car to Venice (Italy) but finally found a seat in a cabin with only three older ladies and an older man reading a thick book. I thought that they wouldn’t be trouble when I was trying to sleep. Big mistake. Except for the man with the book (who got off after 15 minutes) they were all drunk. Majorly. Plus their husbands where only one cabin apart — just as drunk and also with an open door towards the aisle. One of them paid cheesy visits and babbled something about “how I love you, Hildegard” and “how I hate you, Hildegard”. Somehow I still managed to sleep a one and a half hour in total, waken up every ten minutes by a high-pitched sharp laugh. When the old men started singing again on the aisle I woke up and harshly shut the door which irritated the old drunks but I couldn’t care less.

In Linz they finally got off and I was alone — at last! I switched seats and just when I had fallen asleep again three young black hip-hoppers with two local R’n'B-styled lower-Austrian girls hopped in and started babbling, partly in French, and insulting each other so bad that I wasn’t sure if they really belonged to the same clique. Half asleep I learned that one of the girls, Kathi, was pregnant and always concerned that her folks would stare at her belly while she was insulting Foma all the time that
  “Africa stinks of all the cows and I’m gonna sue you because you ain’t Austrian.”
Foma kept laughing
  “It’s the corruption that’s so terrible don’t you go to school?”
Kathi growled angrily. Foma looked at me
  “Sorry, man, she just keeps talking and talking and talking.”
He laughed tipsily and one of his “brothers” leaped in and gave him a 2-liter plastic bottle of whine of which he took a big gulp.

Half an hour later their peers found a cabin they had for their own, one without a creepy sleepy blond guy, and went off. Before he left Foma looked at me.
  “Everything alright? You want me to turn off the lights so you can sleep?”
  “Thanks, man. I’m fine. But keep them on, I don’t wanna fall asleep again and miss my station!”
He nodded, smiled and left, keeping the door open, but I didn’t mind. Still after another thirty minutes I got a terrible headache, dimmed the lights and decided to order my thoughts while blankly staring into the dark, ever changing landscape outside as Foma and his folks were merrily goofing around in the aisles. Suddenly one of them looked into my dark cabin, assumed that I was sleeping and silently closed the door before he went back to his friends.

In Salzburg I got off, paid the exorbitant amount of 5.20 € for a pair of hot wieners and went to my train due campus Urstein that wasn’t leaving for half an hour and so I waited more or less alone and more or less awake for it to start moving. I was tired and exhausted and felt as if I was the only one awake around. But I was mistaken. Two stops before I had to get off a goth girly all in black, of course, tumbled in, nearly tipped over her enormous boots and cranked up the volume of her white iPod Nano to the max listening to an old Evanescence track. She opened her bag and dug into it for something. As she finally found a tiny lip-gloss she let out a sigh of relief while applying it. I could tell from the intense smell that it had some very fruity flavor. And I am not sure but I think she even ate some of it.

When I got off at my station there was cold silent fog everywhere. It carried away some of my dizziness as I made my way towards the campus building. As I was making my way to the backside I noticed that it was full moon and with the floating fog around and with the already turned-off garden lamps the place looked nearly magical. Behind many blinds the rooms were lit, probably with awake people inside them, working, talking, still I was certain there was nobody else awake. I was so sleepy that it was enough for the whole campus that night.

This weekend it was so warm and sunny, it was almost ridiculous because of the heavy snowfall that was going on in the same week. 22°C, some AC/DC in the car and a task: location scouting for our next shoot in the middle of April. As we were driving around I could smell the warm, spicy and forgiving scent of summer everywhere — well except for Puch where it smelled of crap. For days.

That’s one of the things the tourist information never tells you, and you won’t smell it in the beautiful pictures of the Salzburgian pastures, the smell of freshly manured plains, fields and farms thanks to the ancient rural Austrian practice to carry out, literally, the shitload of cow-crap that has accumulated in the winter. Yes, it’s good for the seed and makes the grass grow greener, but it detains the smell of summer for a couple of weeks longer and you just can’t close your nostrils!

Sooner or later you get used to it. Like all of us here on campus. At first we avoided going outside or open the windows to air the room but after a couple of days it’s like fresh air to you. We held meetings outside, some grilled, some played volleyball, I golfed and all of us were used to the constant smell of fermented crap. We just didn’t notice it any longer.

But others did. I was sitting in the Café Wernbacher in downtown Salzburg again, was enjoying my café latte, reading my newspapers and my weird book and was a little irritated by the seats around me, which weren’t occupied for long. And suddenly I smelled something awful. I sniffed and sniffed and found the stench originating in my jacket. Yes, the smell of Puch!

But last night I was driving around Salzburg late at night after a meeting in the same café, the air still warm and soothing from the day. The streets were mostly empty, not many people around on a late Monday evening. A breeze has sprung up and the wind eventually carried away the stench from the past days. And there it was: My first real moment of this year’s summer.

The windows of your car down, Iggy Pop’s The Passenger at maximum volume on your stereo, the orange lights of the city passing by one after another on a long and empty road. In your mind memories of other years’ summers, experiences with your friends that brought you closer together in some bygone mild blue summer’s night.

In an attempt to give you a short “demo” of this first summer-moment in 2008 I took a photo with my, omg!, cell phone for you to view and a minute of Iggy Pop’s song.

Iggy Pop – The Passenger. Lust for Life (1977)

Download audio file (20080401_pop-passenger.mp3)

Becoming a different person by extensive and cruel trainings and missions, never bound to worry about any meaning anymore. As gruesome as it sounded, it also bore a certain connotation of freedom hence to the uncreativity of thine own existence in the legion. ¹

But a couple of minutes ago I was bringing out the trash only in jeans and a T-shirt when the cold Salzburgian wind blew and rattled on the blinds — still it wasn’t really cold, noting below 4 or 5°C. When returning after disposing of my garbage, the moment came when I totally rejected the thought of eventually becoming a legionnaire: It felt so terribly cold! I thought that I couldn’t stand it any longer and I just wanted back into my warm room with a scent of coffee in the air. I am such a wuss, I don’t even respect myself much.

From today’s perspective I can’t imagine anymore how I pulled off one year as an uncreative, ever freezing Zivildiener; getting up at 4:40, washing firetrucks in the chill of northern Styrian winters… *shiver*

 

Today we payed the classy café another visit and enjoyed to yogurt fruit cups for about 6.20 € each. It felt like a little vacation in your mouth and in your tummy so be sure to check it out. And best thing is: It’s healthy!

I just received another mail from one of the moviebakery.com headhunters. Actually I feel a little flattered, but on the other hand I don’t know how many of you out there got that mail too. I got the first mail a couple of weeks ago, read it but thought of it as some kind of spam. But the mail today was rather personal, my first name in the header and so on. If it’s spam than, damn, this is some clever one! So I thought I might check their website and register. Who knows what Web 2.0 and viral marketing can do for me (or rather vice versa).

I ordered a jasmin tea (2.10 €) and a large sushi set (~ 18.50 €) – I was hungry. Lisa also settled for a jasmin tea, a miso soup (2.80 €) and a small sushi set ( 8.70 €) which included three maki (cucumber, salmon and carrot) and four sushi ( 2 salmon, 1 tuna and 1 tamago).

When the food arrived I realized that my order of a large sushi set had been forgotten – probably because we were the only guests after a while. So I also received a small sushi set which was eaten all too fast. It tasted nice though. Better than Vienna’s Akakikos and Graz’s Osakabut the price was steep for what you got: More than 10 € just for a snack is just too much for me.

We tipped a little and left. The service was pretty good, although the Japanese flair was missing, probably because the waiters talked Chinese and the muzak was just random Chinese restaurant music.

Japanese Restaurant
KUSHI HACHI
Innsbrucker Bundesstraße 45
A – 5020 Salzbrug
(Map)

Parking Situation:   8/10
Atmosphere:          6/10
Service:             7/10
Food:                8/10
Cost/Performance:    3/10

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 Overall Score:     32/50



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