Well, the film year is really kicking in. Tropfest was in the news this week for more than just the usual "would you believe young people make films using their home computers" angle. Sensational claims and counter-claims about lying and cheating, cancelled festivals and drenched celebrities... it's all very tinsel town. Funny that the boring, plodding world of unfunded and underexposed short films suddenly becomes a cute news story for half a day. And then Thorpie gets a "mystery illness". Talk about a headline from heaven.

The same is true about the comedy festival. I was looking at the program the other day (don't bother - the best shows will be advertised right here. I have a feeling they'll be Kathy Smith Goes to Maths Camp, Yianni's Head, and anything involving Lawrence Leung or Sammy J) when it
suddenly struck me that most comedians spend the whole rest of the year doing gigs in pubs, trying to amuse half-pissed barflies who are attempting to pick each other up before last drinks. Then suddenly there's a festival in their honour. From poor and unrewarded to "Here, have the town hall".

You've just got to love the way the world works sometimes.

Working in the law world a little lately, I've been reminded of the concept of "status". The legal system of course is very hierarchical (a concept which contradicts almost every central theme of the Western Legal System, except for maybe the central theme of the enormous pay cheque).

I've always thought the legal system's status structure is enormously open to parody. Someone pops a wig on and suddenly everyone's shouting at him in a court room politely. Like in Parliament, when some bloke leans across to the other side of the house and spits, "Will the honourable member please go jump up himself with an armful of chairs".

But it's not like that in the art world. It's "everyone's presumed talentless until proven famous" or something. And then when you get famous everyone says "Yeah that's great. Well done. Man. What a dick".

So, the fact that we don't have a structured system of status in the arts means that we're completely confused whenever we come across status of any kind. So, famous comes to mean important, which means talented, which means arsehole.

I love my job.

This year, I've been living with doctors. I've also lived with a lawyer and an engineer. Now I'm living with another lawyer and someone who works in HR.

Normal people. People whose jobs have structure and purpose.

And they're not boring, either. They're interesting. They build (literally) bridges. Not in a "build a bridge and get over it" kind of a way, or a "bridges to a network of artistic communities" kind of a way - they literally build bridges. Well, the engineer does. The other ones do things like, you know, deliver babies. Bring people into the world. That kind of stuff. The others appear in court. One of them employs people.

I don't even employ myself. I'm what's called freelance.

Wikipedia defines a freelancer as "a self-employed person working in a profession or trade in which full-time employment is also common. The word's etymology derives from the medieval term for a mercenary, a "free lance," which literally described a knight who was not attached to any particular lord, and could be hired for a given task".

Well, it's true in a way. I'm not attached to any particular lord. Not in my professional life. In that sense, I guess I'm kind of my own lord, which is nice.

It's the "working in a profession or trade at any given task" aspect that makes freelance sound rather like work-whoring. Sometimes, when I go home to find doctors who've saved lives and engineers who've constructed bridges, it does make me wonder what the hell I'm doing with my time. The other day, I was negotiating orange juice prices (no, really) at one of my paid jobs, when Rita called asking did I know the German translation of "I Could Be Anybody". Not exactly your average day in the office.

I suppose it could be described as "mercenary" though.

I'm thinking of writing "mercenary" as my profession on my tax forms. Or at the very least on my passport. Although the other option is, I could just write, "own lord". I'd be in some good company there.

So we’ve been trying to work out what the title of our film is in various different languages, because we’re thinking we might send it to people overseas. It’s arguably fairly presumptuous to believe that the French would be interested in je pourrais être quiconque, but we don’t care because it sounds posh. And anyway it’s true: je pourrais etre quiconque. You can’t deny it.

I think Melbourne and Fitzroy will look way cool to the French anyway. And the Germans. Sure, they’ve got that French tower, and those German beers. But we’ve got Flinders Street Station and nice cheap bottles of wine without labels on them, and trams that pose difficult lighting questions in post production. How can they not think to themselves, “C’est vrai! Je pourrais être quiconque! En Australie!” We’re probably injecting billions of dollars into the Australian tourism industry as we speak.

By the way, Melanie Howlett (one of the Standing There captains of industry) is way clever. She and Nick Jaffe are our official translators. Does anyone out there know Russian? Not much snow in je pourrais être quiconque, but there’s a possibility that in the opening scene someone is having a vodka.

Surely that's what's known in marketing as an "angle". Russia, here we come!

Our little film came into the world last night at 1am after a six month labour and an even longer gestation period. Producers and movie are both happy and well. The little bundle of joy weighed in at nearly fourteen minutes, and visiting hours will be announced on this website very soon. Congratulations to everyone involved!

In order to guard against post-natal-depression, we have decided to get busy planning for the future of our little darling. We will be designing a DVD, we will be going around to all the best festivals and seeing if we can enrol the film (although the waiting lists are very competitive) and we will be organising a naming ceremony, in the form of a cast and crew screening.

I will also be putting my metaphor to death, because I feel I need to press on without it. Hopefully my heavy symbolism will get me through this emotional time.

We got the film back from the colourist yesterday and now we're watching it again. We've watched it a few times now. Like, maybe a couple of million. Maybe a trillion. You know China? China's really big. We've watched the film a China-worth of times.

This whole "colours" thing is funny. Weird funny - not amusing - it's the least amusing thing ever. Deeply serious. You sit there, staring at a whole lot of screens and making really rash decisions based on instinct. And it's not even a good instinct, apparently. The colourist (cool job title, don't you think?) - his name's Marcus - he told us that it's a fact (so therefore it is) that humans only retain memory of colour for five seconds. So if I show you a colour and then six seconds later I show you another colour, well frankly I don't care what you think because you don't know what you're talking about.

So, imagine the confidence that piece of information inspires in us as we all sit around watching the same pictures over and over and trying to remember what we think we want.

Anyway, gives a whole new meaning to the expression, "You're looking a little off-colour". Our film was looking quite off-colour for a while there, but it's looking healthier now. It's back on the solids and it isn't watching Oprah and vomitting into a bucket anymore. Hopefully it will be able to go outside and play with its friends soon.

Personally, I can't wait.

Little bastard's been under my feet for months.

Well, I would be lying if I said I wasn't pretty disappointed to read in the papers that I Could Be Anybody has not been nominated for an Oscar this year.

I was having a meeting with Stewart in a cafe the other day when a waiter accidentally spilled a litre and a half of water over the two of us. We weren't even being offensive.

Were meetings invented in the eighties? They feel like they were. Well, maybe not the sort of meetings we have. The sorts of meetings we have feel like they were invented by us. They're in a different gene pool from the kind of meetings you can charge to your company account and complain about to your therapist.

Standing There Productions meetings are usually too long. They can be called with little or no notice, they are quite frequently on weekends, and they often involve lengthy and complicated tangents relating to the role of women in traditional cinematic narrative, or discussions regarding what's worse: forgetting your wallet, or running really late (in other words, Rita versus Lorin).

Rita and I met with some excellent people at a DVD place called Eskimo the other day. That was a couch meeting, in an old garage, with beers. That's a good meeting in anyone's book. Then we met with a colourist who was supposed to be at a karaoke night. He didn't even look like he was going to sing, so that was disappointing. And then there was the under-water meeting between Stewart and myself. A litre and a half of water over our heads and all we got was a free drink each. Had we been charging our meeting to a multi billion dollar account, that would have been an outrageous exchange.

"Only a free drink each? After being drenched by a waiter? I say, do you know who I am? Let me introduce you to my lawyer..."

Not for us, though. We felt like royalty. A free drink and a free shower. That's the low-budget filmmakers' equivalent of a corporate credit card.

Now all I need to do is get someone to accidentally attack me with scissors and I'll get that haircut I so desperately need.