Last year I talked briefly about making a short film. I had a script which has undergone several rewrites but since then I have managed to procrastinate amazingly well. In fact, I am thinking of putting myself forward for the Procrastinator of the year award except that I may have already missed the deadline.

Anyway, one of the big problems I faced (beyond the inability to just do it) was the fact that it was only two minutes long. Not necessarily a problem, but I felt there should be more of a point.

Enter the BBC. No, they haven’t given me a load of money to make a film but they have an ongoing challenge to make a movie that lasts for a minute or less. This is fantastic and exactly the type of thing that my script can be adapted for. There’s a huge diversity in the standard of the films that have already been submitted and a huge range of subjects. Consequently, I have rewritten my script and have started storyboarding it with a mind to getting it done very soon. (All I need is a video camera - quite an important bit of kit really.)

There is potentially quite a lot of mileage out of this one minute movie malarkey. I have an idea for another script already. What about you lot? Any of you creative people (and I know you’re out there) with an idea or two for minute long stories? Perhaps we can do a series of them?

The way the Metro reported the fact that Russian scientists had found the wreckage of an alien spaceship in the Tunguska area, you’d think it was a common place event happening every day rather than a significant front page news event that would have huge theological and sociological implications across the globe.

On the other hand, further reading clarifies that the Russian team that went back to the site of the 1908, 10-15 megaton explosion presumed to be caused by a meteorite in order to find the remains of an alien spacecraft and now claim, after only a week, to have actually found the remains they were looking for.

Of course, if what they have found is proved to be of extra-terrestial origin, there will be huge theological and sociological implications across the globe.

And if aliens did visit the planet, at least they came in peace.

Quiz time. Who said the following?

I am very concerned about our national heritage, and I am very concerned that the films that I watched when I was young and the films that I watched throughout my life are preserved, so that my children can see them

Clue - it wasn’t Stalin.

Anyone have any Toga advice? As in, what’s the best way to make one? For a party.

UPDATE: God bless Geeks and the Internet

I met my first blogger the other day. Well, okay - it was a cheat of sorts. I have met her before although neither of us could remember exactly how long ago that was. (It was 7 years ago. July 11-14, 1997.) We reminisced in a “do you remember what freaks those other people were?” kind of way. I keep meaning to blog about it all but I keep thinking no-one would ever believe me. I know Pix would - she was there. Then again, the part of my brain that deals with denial of the unimaginable horrors that we encounter is in overdrive and it would take months, or possible years, of regressive hypnotherapy to even start scratching the surface.

Then again, the fact that I was absolutely shitfaced most of the weekend didn’t really help. That’s what happens when you try to keep up drinking with Roj Blake himself, Gareth Thomas. That was a mistake.

Still, it was nice to catch up and, despite not being in touch for quite some time, we chatted away for several hours. Or perhaps that was the (quite nice) Fuller’s Summer Ale giving me a bad case of verbal diarrhea.

If you don’t know who Fay Wray is - was - then you aren’t really a film fan. One of the most iconic moments in cinema history is the finale of the 1933 movie, King Kong, when the eponymous beast scales the heights of the Empire State Building, clutching a screaming Fay Wray in his giant hand.

But yesterday, the curtain finally closed for the 96 year old actress who will always be remembered as the original Bride of Kong.

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Two weeks late, I know - but finally here are some pictures of my “epic” endeavours at Tough Guy this year

Apparently there were about 2,500 entrants this year. The “Front Squad” started a minute before everybody else (most of home were behind the hillock at the back

My second lap, just after the Vietcong Tunnels which I think was the hardest obstacle that day.

In action: The Paradise Climb. I didn’t see the point of not giving the ropes a go.

Half way around the second lap - all attempts at hitching a lift failed.

This picture doesn’t really convey quite how relieved to have finished and knackered I felt at this point. “Another lap sir?” “Not for me, thank you - I’m shagged!”

There is a very slim chance that I may appear on television next weekend.

UPDATE: Okay, that was a tease, I admit. In all likelihood, I won’t appear on television at all and if I do, it’s going to be a fraction of a second in a crowd shot. Apparently, Channel Four’s “Transworld Sport” program will be doing a piece on Tough Guy next Saturday (at 7am!) so if you’re an early bird and fancy seeing footage of the madness I took part in a couple of weeks ago, that’s the program to watch.

And just in the unlikely event that they show the shot of me running up the trail behind the cameraman perched precariously on the back of the quad bike, I have put some piccies up in my training diary. (The action ones are poor quality because they are taken from video footage but that aint’ being published!)

Way back in the dawn of time, when video games used to come on cassette and would take five minutes to load, one of the golden rules of gaming¹ was that if there was a game made from a movie then the licensed tie-in, normally developed by Ocean software, would invariably be an absolute piece of crap.

While the standards of 21st century gaming have progressed, the rules governing the creation of games, on the whole, have not. These days, however, it has been known for the game of the film to actually be quite good. Aliens Vs Predator was cracking if a little short, the old 3D Terminator games were surprisingly good, 90% of Star Wars games are superb and the recent Spiderman 2 game has been raved about by some console owners.

The jury is still out on the forthcoming Fight Club tie-in though. The trailer suggests a substandard fighting game without any of the graphic niceties or scantily clad women of the Dead or Alive, Tekken or Mortal Kombat series, but it could be the closest you’ll get to being Brad Pitt.

It does, however, seem a total waste of a license to produce a straight forward beat-em-up and it is such a shame they didn’t create a game that put you in the shoes of the SpaceMonkeys as they went around the city causing total and utter mayhem and chaos. That would have been a good game! Although there is some irony in that they have made a generic, run of the mill, clone of a thousand other games and passed it off as “Fight Club”.

¹The converse rule, that the film of the game is crap, also holds with few - if any - exceptions.

Doom 3 is, surprisingly, the sequel to the classic Doom and Doom 2 games of the early nineties. If you don’t know that then either you had a life or are a girl.

It’s the newest game from ID software, the Godfathers of first person shooter games and boasts some fantastic graphics and is marketed as a truly terrifying sci-fi shooter.

Gamespy have been running a PC: DOOM 3 blog about their initial thoughts of the game as it’s released in the states this week. UK players will have to wait until it’s released here next week. On Friday 13th.

Personally, I’ll probably wait until I hear more about it. Or get it off eBay. Or wait until the nights draw in. Or something.