November 2003

The first draft is finished! I started it in 2000, wrote the first half in about a month and then sat on my lazy ass for 3 years procrastinating. Now it's done. Well, the first draft is anyway. Now for the painful editing, re-writing, etc.

Movie Disclaimer:
To anyone who wants to read my screenplay, contact me at contact@heathallyn.com and I will send you the link and the password to get to it (I have it saved in multiple formats for you to choose from). You can then save it or just read it online. I am looking for honest opinions and feedback, and not just blind praise. I will listen to all feedback, and take no offense at all to any criticism. Artistic works are totally subjective, and therefore I'm sure some people may think it's pure crap, and that's ok. On the flip side of that coin, I listen to all feedback with an open mind, however do not be offended if I don't take your advice or if I disagree with it. Ultimately I am the one who has to be happy with it. I already have a laundry list of things that may need to be tweaked or changed, but I don't want to color anyone's opinions so I'll keep my own concerns to myself for the moment. Keep in mind that as I've said this is the first draft and not a final product, so I by no means think I have a finished perfect screenplay.

Let the reading begin! Contact me if you're interested.

You may have heard me rave on about Crazy Browser which I gave a review of here. It was the absolute cream of the cop of internet browsers in my opinion. Notice the word was.

I now stand in awe of the awesome new king browser, Mozilla Firebird. It does everything Crazy Browser does, and more, and this is only version .7. Technically what they call a "technology preview".

It has all the wonderful benefits of tabbed browsing, and popup killing, plus has a ton more customization options and tweakability should you want it. First off, I actually managed to streamline my toolbar even more than Crazy Browser, getting it down to a sleek single row thus giving me more browsing space. That single row has all my menus, buttons, address bar and a built in Google search bar! It's also highly customizable through the use of "extensions". There's a ton of them available, and they allow to add only features you want without bloating the program with stuff you don't want.

Some of the features that really stood out to me were the find feature and the key word feature. The find feature replaces the normal "find box" you would have to bring up when looking for certain text on a page. Instead you now simply press / and start typing and it will jump to and highlight the text you're typing if found on the page. If you instead initiate a find with the ' then it does the same thing but only with links. The key word feature allows certain key word shortcuts to be used in the address bar. For example, if you type "dict lemur" in the address bar, you find yourself automatically taken to dictionary.com with a definition of "lemur" on your screen. Another cool and convenient feature to me is the ability to simply type a single word in the address bar, and it will automatically resolve the address intelligently. If I type "heathallyn"and press enter it goes to www.heathallyn.com, if I type "mozilla" it goes to www.mozilla.org. One thing it holds over Crazy Browser is the ability to rearrange your bookmarks any way you want, while Crazy Browser insists that they all be alphabetical.

Now for the "downsides" if you an really call them that (which I wouldn't really). Since it is still a "Technology Preview" it's in a slightly rough form. There is no "official" installer program so normally you would just download it , unzip the folder and run it, but there are some "unofficial" installers such as this one which will install it in the more familiar and traditional sense. Also to get the full customizability of various tab options (which I highly recommend) you need to down load this extension. After downloading that I quickly had all the functionality I liked with Crazy Browser, plus a lot of cool new features too. The only quirk I found was some Movable Type buttons which wouldn't show up, but a little research showed that to be the fault of the Movable Type code being IE biased, and I quickly found a fix for it. Also keep in mind that you will most likely need to download and reinstall any plugins you might need like flash or shockwave, since they won't have been installed on a new browser, but that's a very minor thing that didn't even take enough time or effort to phase me, and I'm damn lazy. One more con, I can't use my beloved IESpell spellchecker with it. I'll have to see if there's a Mozilla equivalent.

Now a little explanation to clarify a few things. Mozilla 1.5 is now out, and is a suite of programs including browser, mail, chat, news, etc. Mozilla Firebird is a stand alone browser, and Mozilla Thunderbird is a stand alone mail client. Strangely Mozilla does not have all the features of Firebird since the Firebird code is newer. I would hope that all the cool features of the stand alone programs will eventually be worked into the full all in one suite since they are, for me, the features that have made Firebird my new default browser. I am going to check out the mail client too, mostly because I'm excited at the fact that it has a built in baysean spam filter which intelligently learns to tell junk from mail and gets more and more accurate over time. I currently use Popfile to provide the same filtering for Outlook Express, though I like the idea of it being built in. The only downside with the mail client, to me, is the inability to check and sync with Hotmail, which naturally only Microsoft products can do since Hotmail is owned by MS. Not a big deal, but I like to keep my address book synced up with Hotmail so I have a backup of it in case of emergencies that's also available to me via the web. However if Thunderbird is anywhere neat as good as Firebird, I may switch mail clients too.

Mozilla has obviously been doing their homework, and the fact that it's all free and open source is very large bonus. I will be doing my part to spread the word and see if we can't help Mozilla take a bite out of IE's majority market share. I never thought anything could take me away from Crazy Browser. Technology always marches on, I suppose! Download Mozilla Firebird now, and you will never be able to go back to another browser.

Check my Links section for a consolodated list of all the links listed here and links to extensions which I use.

Well not technically. Technically, my big screen debut was in "House of the Generals" which debuted at a theater in Dallas, and I couldn't make it. However, my first big screen debut that I've seen was tonight a the Alamo Drafthouse in Downtown Austin. It was the first screening of half of the entries in the 48 hour film contest. As you may have previously read, the way it works is that Friday night at 7:00 all the teams drew a genre, and then had 48 hours to write, film, edit, score, etc. their film. We drew film noir. Every film also had to have the following:

Character: Jordan Moonie, professional skateboarder
Prop: brick
Line: "Excuse me, I think I love you"

In case anyone cares, beware spoilers for our short film "Dead Stock" below.

Friday night, the writers wrote the script. Saturday morning filming began. I wasn't needed until about noon supposedly. I was later told that they wouldn't be at the second location until about 2:00. So around 2:00 I went to the location (a dry cleaners) and they started to film scenes there. We got to my scene about midnight, and I wrapped up filming around 2:30 a.m. I played the small, but fun and pivotal role of Drake Manford, uber successful pro skater nearing the end of his career who is fabulously rich and successful, but whose wife convinces my former protégé, Jordan Moonie, that I'm the one who attacked him and shattered his knee with a brick, because I was jealous that he started to do better than me. She also convinces him that she's in love with him, and that I beat her, so he agrees to kill me. In the end she kills me, frames him, and then trips on a brick and falls unconscious on a train track as a train approaches.

The contest itself was also full of drama. At one point the editor called and told us the tape we had run to him was blank. Nothing on it. Turned out we had sent the wrong tape, so whew! Later however the actual tape we finally got him had glitches (it had jammed in the camera) and was unusable. This was about 2:00 a.m. and that meant they would have to re-shoot 2 scenes, one of which included an actor who had long since gone home. They shot everything except for that one scene, hoping to get it first thing Sunday, and wrapped around 5:00 a.m. The next morning, they still hadn't heard from the actor, so the director stepped into the role, and did great. At some point the editor had told them another tape was totally blank. eventually the problem was figured out, and they got the tape working, and I believe, in fact, also figured out that they could have used the other "bad" tape too, but at this point they had already re-shot. The deadline was 7:30 p.m. at Mother Egan's Irish Pub, and at 7:20 they were in the car still editing with a lap top while speeding to the finish. We were literally the last film submitted right at the 7:30.

Tonight, we went to watch the showing of the "group A" films which included ours. It was amazing. In everyone's opinion who I talked to, our film was in a complete other league from the vast majority. Every film played looked very much like an amateur film shot on somebody's home video camera, and all but the first one were generally bad all around. Acting, writing, etc. When ours came on, it really looked like a real movie. Moody lighting, good acting, nice script, good score, editing, etc. It was just tremendous.

There was only one film after ours. Unfortunately it was the absolute hands down best of them all. It looked, and sounded 100% professional. All the elements were just jaw dropping good quality from the look and sound of it, to all the things I mentioned about our film, and even the credits. There was just no denying the big dog. I have to think the order of the films was no coincidence. Just as seeing our film after all the rest made me smile hugely, seeing the one after ours took some wind out of the sails a bit.

All in all though, I am ecstatic with it. The team was amazing, the writers took a very brave choice of doing a straight dramatic film noir instead of going to more audience friendly comedy route, and we delivered and incredible piece of good looking cinema that was just miles beyond everything except the last film. Hopefully someone will put it online at some point. Now I just hope there wasn't anything to incredibly good in the "B" group of films which we didn't stay for since we would have had to buy separate tickets to it. Tomorrow I'll be talking to some of the guys who stayed for the second group to find out.

For the moment you can visit the music composer's site here and listen to the music. There's also a nice montage shot including a dramatic shot of me (the middle picture) during my climactic chase scene.

...that Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play. Ahh, but who cares about that old git and his silly band. More importantly, it was one year ago today, that a wunnerful woman lost her mind and actually married me. How she's managed to put up with me for one full year is a mystery for the ages. One year, is our paper anniversary, which is good since I can afford that. I made her an origami giraffe a few weeks back in anticipation. It's nice to always have your best friend around.

Yay for us!

Jess and I will not be attending the Lord of the Rings marathon trilogy...

because our 2 tickets just sold on ebay for $400. Now we will be pleasing the Lord of the Rent next month.

Why is it so rare that these two things go together. It seems like I only ever have an abundance of one. Right now, I don't know that I've ever felt as happy in some ways and creatively fulfilled. Since we've been in Austin my creative passions have run free. This weekend alone, I went on something like 6 auditions, and I must say kicked ass, but more on that later in the entry. The point is that our money situation is beyond an emergency state, and I must find a job, any job, and quick. This will balance out the money factor at the expense of my happiness factor. Anyway, enough about that, onto the fun stuff.

I had 3 different auditions today (all for non-paying projects). Before the first one, I stumbled upon a monologue that just resonated with me and fit like a glove. I have 2 other monologues, one light, and one darker that I've been using when needed up until this point. I knew immediately that I just had to learn this new one. With both the others, I really had to struggle and work on delivery and timing and such. The new one just flowed with me perfectly from the moment I read it. I quickly memorized it, and 30 minutes later did it at my first audition. They then asked if I had another one from a different angle, so I did my light hearted one from my repertoire. By the end they knew they wanted to use me in their short film. One small hitch was that this film was for the 48 hour film contest where film makers receive a genre and some miscellaneous detail Friday night at 7:00 and have 48 hours to make and submit a film. What's the hitch? The fact that I had already auditioned for 2 other teams, one of which wants to use me for something, albeit they told me it would be for like 30 minutes on Friday night which wouldn't interfere with the other 2 which would be shooting on Saturday. So now the problem was which of the other two to participate in.

I went to my second audition for a short student film, and absolutely killed with my portrayal of a tailor named Vito which I did with a strong New York accent.

My third audition was callbacks for the other 48 hour team which I had auditioned for yesterday. I told them that the other team definitely wanted me, so I wasn't sure I should even audition again with them. They said they also wanted me, and that they'd love for me to at least stay and read, and I could decide later. I stayed and read, and felt like I kicked some ass. I then waited around before a second round of reading, and got to know some really cool actors as we chatted away for hours. After the second reading, they wanted me to stay for a third reading since they were really short on guys to read opposite the girls so I did. In the end, I felt I'd really done well, and now I have to decide which of these two teams to go with, and hope that the third doesn't end up changing from the initial Friday night shooting estimate.

It's nice to be wanted and feel confident in my work. I'm trying to just bask in my current happiness and not think about the getting a job thing right now. At least until tomorrow. I actually put in an 8 hour day of auditioning today. Crazy, eh? I have begun my world take over.