I may be a bit late with writing up my activities over the last $timeperiod, but after a week hidden underground at the SCI-FI-LONDON film festival my brain has taken a little while to start working at the required speed again. The flywheel has reached velocity, so here goes.

This was my fourth year of helping at the festival and my fifth of attending. It was also the most films I’ve seen in a few years, having been pushed into screens with a torch with instructions of ‘Look after the screen’ a couple of times. In short – it was rather good. We added a bunch of talks this year, hitting up comics, books and science as well as the normal film, and I got to meet some lovely and insane people. A few highlights:

My top film of the festival was The City of Lost Children. The first of my ‘look after the screen’ films, I didn’t really have much urge to watch it, despite Marc Caro (co-director along with Jean-Pierre Jeunet) being around as Guest of Honour, but after about two minutes I was rather hooked. I ordered the DVD within seconds of getting home and it’s up on my list of most beautiful films ever now. I spent most of the rest of the weekend thanking staff-wrangler Shaun for kicking me through the door…

Next up was the closing films – 20th Century Boys parts 1 and 2. Live action and based on a manga series that I’ve started reading (although they only have 2 of the 24 books out in english at the moment and are releasing them at a rate which means I’ve got 3.5 years until I get to the end…) it is quite difficult to describe. So far I’ve stuck with “It’s about the end of the world”, but it has cults, giant robots, convenience stores, people eating soup and crying transvestites, so there’s something for everyone. I spent the second film standing at the side of the cinema due to it being sold out, and chivalrously offered the last seat that my rather destroyed brain could see to a fellow volunteer, and it finished me off, removing my already minimal grasp on the art of speech and turning me into a gibbering idiot. A nice way to finish off the festival…

My top new film of the festival was The Mother of Invention – a film that may not get out into the wider world unless they get a distributer, but one that deserves to be seen by more people. The tale of a young ‘inventor’ in his last year of eligibility for an inventing competition, it’s a mockumentary that hits many of the right notes. I loved it and ran a Q&A with the cast and crew (who’d come over from the US specially) after the showing. Well, I say ‘ran’, it was more ‘they ran it before I needed to’, which was a help, as I had no idea what to say.

I didn’t get to sit through much in the way of panels, as I was running around helping to wrangle participants, but I saw a bit of a live read through of Robert Rankin’s Brightonomicon, which was rather good, with a lot of ad-libbing and the occasional bit of corpsing.

Most of the panels seem to work well, with about 60 guests wandering through over the space of the 6 days of the festival. I suspect we’ll be doing it again next year, which will be rather good.

There was one bit of controversy during the festival, although it turned out to be a storm in a teacup. One of our events was a showing and talk focusing on Israeli science fiction films, which was answered by some online articles asking for us to cancel the event and calls to boycott it due to the ongoing situation in Palestine. However, this didn’t pan out to any protests or anything in the end, and the session went without a hitch. The thing that amused me was comments on Twitter and elsewhere that China Mieville had walked out of the Clarke Awards in protest of the Israeli film event, which was slightly at odds with the comments about double booking he made as he said goodbye to the people manning the festival front desk (including me), and also didn’t tie in with the panel he did later in the week… The wonder of the internets strikes again.

Lots of other rather random things happened, with a dance-off to decide the winners of the pub quiz, Kevin O’Neill turning up late to a Q&A and having the film paused while he talked, Richard Jobson’s tales of being bottled ‘on set’ (the set being a street party at new year in Edinburgh), Marc Caro being Marc Caro, and me ironing a shirt for the festival director so that he could introduce the Clarke Awards, but giving up halfway through because I’m crap at sleeves. A great but knackering week.

Anyways, there’s going to be another Oktober fest in October (with all three 20th Century Boys films and some as yet un-announced/decided all-nighters) and an upcoming premiere of the live action version of Blood: The Last Vampire (originally our closing film, but postponed til June as it wasn’t done in time for the festival) already organised before next year’s festival. Hopefully some of the other interesting things in the pipeline will also appear soon…

This weekend I done made a film. Not one of my ’special’ movies that the restraining order says I can’t send to Belinda Carlisle any more, but an entry for the SCI-FI-LONDON 48hour Film Challenge.

I didn’t really mean to enter, it just sort of happened. After taking some piccies of the cinema full of eager faces ready to run away and make MOVIES! for a weekend I sat down with some of the other volunteers and accidentally grabbed a title, prop idea and line of script from the bags – in order to ensure that the films were made over the weekend we provide those three pieces of information to be used in each film. It was rather an interesting combination with a throw-away title (XY & Zed) but a prop and line that worked naturally together:

• Prop – A box of 5 ring doughnuts
• Line – At some point you have to just stop, give it up.

I spy with my little eye a film about me eating doughnuts. In space. Jokes were made, I vowed to make it, handed out a script editing credit and promptly forgot about it. I then wandered off to the Prince Charles Cinema for an afternoon of dodgy sci-fi – Push. I think I can blame Push for my considering the idea of a 48 hour film further, as its plot was so nonsensical and internally inconsistent that after a while I stopped trying to keep up with what was going on (although, I think it’d make a great Heroes style TV series) and started pondering what I could do with my title. Unfortunately a grain of a thin and not great idea started growing, and by the end of the film I decided to have a go at making one myself.

So, after a ’script writing’ session on the tube, the purchasing of eight doughnuts (they come in boxes of 4 or 12…) and a bit of script editing due to not being able to use iMovie’08 very well, I ended up with a ‘film’. It has 3 shots, 4 people credited and lasts almost exactly 5 minutes. I ended up reshooting the middle shot this morning, allowing a small amount of beard growth and also a slightly better (but still not all that great) take, and I now have (thanks to the POWER OF APPLE!) a DVD of ‘XY & Z – A Team Billy Production’ sitting on my coffee table ready for submitting.

I can’t win anything and I’m not even eligible to be entered into the judging, the peril of being a festival volunteer, but it’s been a rather fun thing to do of a weekend. Next year I’ll have to join a proper group (although my being tainted by touch of SFL volunteerdom will probably nix that idea) rather than shoot three short video blogs about a slightly Nic Cage inspired theme, and have already had interest from someone to help out. I like making movies, no matter how rubbish they probably are, so I think I should start doing this more often. I’m still not sure whether I should submit my low-res, me on screen babbling attempt at a short film to the festival, but it has at least made me think a bit.

All I’ve got to do now is learn how to write scripts, shoot and act…

I’m sure I’ll stick it up online sometime. Contains unshavenness, silly hair, a knife, a pink doughnut and one scene of mild hand flappiness. Certificate U – Unsuitable for viewing by anybody

My yearly bout of poking sci-fi film fans into darkened spaces is almost upon us and the Sci-Fi-London film festival will soon be opening its doors.

The schedule is now up on the website and it has expanded this year to have a programme of panels and talks running in parallel with the movies. It’s covering film (as you’d expect) as well as literature (both kinds: comics AND books) and SCIENCE! – there’s some rather good stuff which I will be volunteering to ‘look after’…

Highlights for me are:

• The Mother of Invention – slightly mad mockumentary about inventors
• Cyborg She – my obligatory bit of mad japanese film. This year it’s about cyborgs.
• The Pub Quiz – where I will probably showing of my M4d b33R uncapping skillZ
• Comedy and Satire in Science Fiction – with a potential live excerpt from the Brightonomicon
• Hardware with an intro by Kevin O’Neill – I like post-apocalyptic films and stories of their making from the guy who successfully sued the makers for plagiarism.

As normal I’ll be trying to sneak in and see the short films as often as I can, even if I have yet to make it through an entire showing of the programme without having to run off and do something else (pack a bag, buy some batteries, eat a sandwich – it’s all go).

I’ve been tinkering around on the web side of things a bit this year, and have helped put together a bunch of tools to keep an eye on the festival, talk to the organisers and keep track of what you’re going to:

• The obligatory twitter account, @scifilondon – this is currently me, although we hope to use it during the festival to talk to people coming along and fire out last minute info.
• sfl2009.sched.org – the nice people at SCHED* have put together (from a big spreadsheet I built) a schedule site for us. If you’re going please sign up and let us know what you’re going to see. I’ll be updating it with descriptions of all the events (rather than just links back to the main SFL site) when I get some time.
• Google calendars – I got bored the other day and transferred the schedule over to a bunch of Google calendars, the things by which I run my life. Add them to your gCal, iCal, whateverCal if you are interested – I’ll be keeping them updated with any changes
• Our Flickr and Facebook groups – pictures and link aggregation respectively…I think. Still working out what to do with these.
• The website – hopefully it will be updated daily with reports of events, interviews and last minute news. It depends what sort of net connection we get, but it should All Be Fine…

There should be a bunch of random stuff happening running up to the festival (I’ve heard rumours of the Apollo Piccadilly being invaded by orcs this weekend as part of the build-up to the Hunt for Gollum premiere at the festival…), so if you are after a photo opportunity involving people dressed up in an ‘interesting’ manner let me know.

Anyways, as ever, let me know if you’re going along.

I have just spied on the Sci-Fi-London website that the long list for the Arthur C Clarke awards has now been announced. I’ve read a chunk of them this year and am now reminded of a load of other books that I wanted to read but forgot about.

I was coat monitor at last year’s awards (a promotion from ’sausage roll carrier’ the year before) so I might even get to go along again this year… and stand in the lobby of the Apollo guarding coats. I am quite good at guarding coats…

Ones I’ve read in bold

• The Ashes of Worlds by Kevin J Anderson (I still don’t quite understand why people can read these books. Then again, I ‘enjoyed’ Guy Smith’s Crabs series…)
• The Line War by Neal Asher
• The Heritage by Will Ashon
• Man in the Dark by Paul Auster
• Neuropath by Scott Bakker
• Matter by Iain M Banks
• Flood by Stephen Baxter (I think I was rude about Stephen Baxter’s recent books, accidentally, while standing in front of him and taking coats at last year’s awards. I didn’t mean to be [it was part of a very long conversation] and if he ever sees this and did hear me then I’m very sorry. I bought The H-Bomb Girl out of guilt and rather enjoyed it.)
• Weaver by Stephen Baxter
• City at the End of Time by Greg Bear
• Kethani by Eric Brown
• Necropath by Eric Brown
• Sputnik Caledonia by Andrew Crumey
• Little Brother by Cory Doctorow (it’s on my e-reader although having spoken to a bunch of people about it it’s not at the top of my list…)
• Incandescence by Greg Egan
• Infoquake by David Louis Edelman
• The Broken World by Tim Etchells
• Omega by Christopher Evans
• Blonde Roots by Bernadine Evaristo
• Principles of Angels by Jaine Fenn
• Eve: The Empyrean Age by Tony Gonzales (This looked vanity published and expensive, and I know enough people addicted to Eve (you know who you are) that I stayed away. I may have a look now. The book, that is, not the game. I’m not that stupid)
• The Temporal Void by Peter F Hamilton (My favourite book [well, series at least] of last year)
• The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway
• Template by Matthew Hughes
• The Invention of Everything Else by Samantha Hunt
• Song of Time by Ian R MacLeod
• The Night Sessions by Ken MacLeod
• The Affinity Bridge by George Mann
• The Quiet War by Paul McAuley
• Dark Blood by John Meaney
• The Steel Remains by Richard Morgan
• The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness
• Debatable Space by Philip Palmer
• House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds
• Swiftly by Adam Roberts (I got this for my Dad for Christmas as part of my tradition of buying him good books that he probably hadn’t heard of. I was meant to read it before I wrapped it…and didn’t)
• Going Under by Justina Robson
• The Last Colony by John Scalzi (I enjoyed it, even if lots of people have dissed it)
• DogFellow’s Ghost by Gavin Smith
• Anathem by Neal Stephenson
• The Dog of the North by Tim Stretton 
• Halting State by Charles Stross
• Saturn’s Children by Charles Stross (Still waiting on an ebook that doesn’t cost £15…)
• The Margarets by Sheri S Tepper
• Blue War by Jeffrey Thomas
• Off Armageddon Reef by David Weber (I just read On Basilisk Station – once you have a formula for book titles, you might as well stick with it… [I rather enjoyed Basilisk Station])
• Martin Martin’s on the Other Side by Mark Wernham
• Winterstrike by Liz Williams