The Beacon: March 14th 2002

Well, a childhood spent alone in my bedroom writing computer games on my Amstrad CPC instead of drinking beer with alcohol in the Winter Gardens, has finally paid off. Having nothing better to do with my time at the moment, I decided to see just how much versatility I could get out of a Digital Versatile Disc, by coding an interactive editing feature which would allow the viewer to recut a scene from The Beacon in whatever way they saw fit. By a staggering stroke of luck, the likes of which are rarely seen outside of a Douglas Adams novel, it worked first time. Okay, so the limitations of the DVD scripting language mean that essentially all you are doing is compiling an eight item playlist from a choice of 20 clips, but it does mean that you can make one of the SAS soldiers apparently shoot a fellow trooper, from the comfort of your home cinema system. And, the scene in question being the infamous Fields vs. Harrison fight, maybe even Simon can cut a version which satisfies him. (But I doubt it.) In other news, I’ve been coerced into placing an advert in Hereford Admag, which will obviously fail to recoup even the slightest percentage of its UKP50 cost. I’m sorry. The Prime Minister made me do it. Also, I’ve today sent a copy of the film States-ward (always an amusing situation at the post office – “Can I ask what the contents of the parcel are, sir?” “It’s a videotape.” “Right, sir. Is it porn?”), to the New York-based straight-to-video distributor www.b-movie.com (go on, check it out – you’ll wish you hadn’t) in the hope that they might buy it, thus relieving me of the annoying, and insurmountably difficult, obligation of trying to sell it to punters.

The Beacon: March 14th 2002