Pulling out the plug

I'm all done now, for a while. Feels good, especially now when I finally got some sleep. I worked most of the night last night. After the whole day crit, that is. Slept only 3 hours after in the evening, tried to catch some more during the night but couldn't. I've never worked like this before, and I'd never let things get like this. This was meant to be a relaxed last week during which I hand-in a nicely done, high quality piece of sound design. On Friday, my hard drive failed and I had to start all again from the start. I'm still happy with the outcome considering the time I had in my use, and during the dark hours of night I might even got a bit too much into this project - it's not easy to know when to stop, when working on your own and having no one to stop you. (Recording at 4 in the morning because there's less traffic noise? Syncing footsteps until 8 am?)

I thought I was the only one who stressed about this project, but then saw how other people were. I've never seen the class as worn out as today.

Anyway, it's all done now - I've got some small things to do but they won't be assessed.

I promise not to write about uni work for the next month! ;-)

Tackling obstacles

So the next, final deadline of this term (and year) is on Tuesday and I've been working hard on my film sound assignment (and I've still got the written contextualisation to do for the piece I presented in the composition class on Monday + little bit of recording for the animator I worked with last spring). In other words, a lot of work that needs to be completed before Monday (can't work on Mon-Tue night for other reasons).

What happened then? The hard drive on my computer broke down suddenly. Being me and having a lot of experience with computers, I've got a backup (or two actually) from last week. Which helps a lot, I didn't lose all of my past work, archived e-mails, plane tickets, pictures and music. I didn't lose the recordings I did last night (until 3 AM) for the film assignment (I would have, but luckily I had yet not formatted the SD-card on my recorder). What I lost was the following: the draft for the above mentioned contextualisation, all the syncing and editing work I did today and some of the thoughts I had written for the film assignment (there is two short written things for that as well).

What have I decided to do then? I've already written more (and better) stuff for the contextualisation than I had before. Tomorrow I'm going to buy a new hard drive, install and format it and copy everything back to where it was. Fuck you, fate!

Cycling!

Monday - 16 km
Tuesday - 16 km
Wednesday - 16 km
Thursday - 14,5 km
Friday - 4 km
Saturday - 22 km
Sunday - 7 km
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Total - 95,5 km

I need to get mudguards. Cycling in the rain is fine, but getting your back wet is not.

Other than cycling, I've been preparing my presentation for Wednesday and an electroacoustic piece for next Monday. Then I need to do sound design (from scratch) for a 4-min clip of Tarkovsky's Stalker and after that crit I can relax for a bit and go to sauna...

Health and Safety

There's still a lot to do and it's getting really hectic now but at least I now know how to keep the stress at bay: cycling! Bought a bike yesterday, a heavy duty lock and lights today (spent more on them than the bike itself). I still need to install mudflaps and I might even get one of those neon coloured vests with reflective strips on them.

It's nice, cycling in here. Small, quiet backroads (around Broadway Market and Columbia Road and generally here in east) and then the more extreme central London traffic (to awaken me before going to uni). It's not as bad as it looks like, that's my feeling after this first journey among the traffic at least. Demands active thinking though. Today it took an hour there and more back (didn't dare take the main roads without any lights on the bike). I guess it will be around 30-40 minutes once I get more used to it.

What I will lose though is the bus rides home wif me mates. I might still get more into this whole thing, riding a bike! Simple things in life...

The Shitloads

I'm taking a presentation class. This week I gave a one minute presentation where I explained what I'm going to talk about in the final 5 minute presentation. The tutor said that it was fine except for the topic. She thinks that a group of 19-20 year olds (most of the group are of that age, excluding me and one of my classmates) wouldn't be interested in a linguistic venture into the realm of the Finnish language. So I guess I need to change my topic then. She suggested that we should talk about something that's close to us. What could be closer to me than my language? I can't exactly talk about my mum, can I?

What else? Finished mixing a reggae track today. Worked a couple of weeks on that and I'm happy with the result and finished three days before the deadline. Really enjoyed the project, starting be confident using Pro Tools now. This is the stuff that divides the class: many of the people who enjoy the cultural studies were complaining and the other side seems to think that this is the stuff they came on the course for.

Moving to movie sounds next which is also nice. We've got three options to choose from: Stalker, La Haine and Ghost in the Shell. We've been given a three minute scene from each and we need to make the sound from scratch. Haven't decided yet which one I'm going for.

Then the 'electro-acoustic piece with an improvisational element'. No idea for that yet and time is running out. I need to start working on that tomorrow and keep reading on the journeys to uni as all of this above mentioned stuff needs to be finished before Christmas.

I was asked to do sound for an animation, and I'm still producing music with someone and participating in the improv group and trying to maintain a social life (which is not too hard as most of it happens at the uni anyway).

Thank you for listening.

PS. I'm not sure if I should keep tagging these entries because I seem to be writing about the same subjects in every entry. Maybe I'll have something else to write about some time in the future.

PPS. Oh yeah, finished the first part of my soundscape diary some weeks ago. Will be posting it here soon.

Back to uni. Presented the Nightmare animation to the first years, not the version that is online though. I realised the animator had added a black screen in the beginning which resulted the sounds being out of sync with the picture. Also added the missing sounds to the corrected version.

Our improvisation group played a gig there. (The room was as hot as always, 50 people sitting in an acoustically treated room without air conditioning.) I completely lost my sense of time, I thought we went on for at least 30 minutes but I heard it was more like ten. Anyway our first year tutor seemed to like our stuff and two people want to join our group.

Today I've been mostly playing with a contact miked toy ukulele and a loop pedal I borrowed from a friend. I'm really getting into this improvising but thinking about future and moneywise it's probably the worst thing to choose - and yes, I need to make a choice soon. Improvisation is one of the six electives from which we get to choose two. I think the tutor is one of the best ones and I haven't heard much good about the ones that teach my other options. Luckily I don't have to choose just yet.

It's been almost a year since I moved here. (15th Sep)

Language is still the hardest (and at the same time one of the most interesting) aspect of life I've needed to adjust to.

- I've learned some words and phrases I'm not sure how to spell. Usually it works the other way around for me, I know the meanings and spelling but have no idea of what's the correct pronounciation. I'm beginning to understand what someone meant by saying 'Some English people have no idea how to write the language, they just know how to speak it'. It never occured to me before how far the written and spoken language are from each other. I guess the difference between spoken and written Finnish is much smaller because the written form is still relatively young.
- I'm still wondering if there's some kind of logic behind the phrasal verbs. Here are some I remember using or hearing recently: put off (menee fiilikset), pull out (feidata, vetäytyä), hang out (hengailla). I'm in desperate need of rules here but I guess they wouldn't call them phrasal verbs if there were rules, would they? (I'd like to take this opportunity to thank the Finnic forefathers and -mothers for having such a logical and practical outlook on life that they decided to keep to a set rules instead of relying on randomly selected combinations of words. Finnish is almost like mathematics.)
- One thing that still keeps surprising me is how much tiredness and hunger can affect the ability to use a second language. It gets easier in time but at times it's still annoying.

I might write more about the differences between here and home soon. Attitudes towards life, habits and some other stuff I find interesting.