Hey, just wanted to let you all know that the New York diaries for 29th and 30th October will be a bit delayed, but they will come up sometime tomorrow morning (so around 1 PM GMT)

Finally here, in the hotel room. A pretty tiring and boring day yesterday, so I didn’t have time to write. Anyway, everything happened as we had planned. We took the plane to London Heathrow (it was pretty delayed while we were in the air, so it took roughly 2h 10min). When we arrived we looked around in the various stores that could be found there. Didn’t buy any still camera though, but it really doesn’t matter.

The plane left at about half past two in the afternoon, and we had some really comfortable seats which would have made it really easy to sleep if it wasn’t for the fact that the whole flight was in broad daylight. I watched “Devil Wears Prada” (pretty good film, not really my cup of tea, but good just to keep time passing), and “The Break-Up” (a very nice surprise, really funny dialogue in it). I managed to get about 30min of sleep, and then I basically just sat around reading various newspapers and books I brought from home and bought at the airport.

We arrived sometime around six or seven PM local time, and we took a nice car to our hotel. The car was a Lincoln, with really good backseat, suspension and much more…I really didn’t expect that from an American car! Guess I’ll have to lay off on the prejudices then. When we came to the hotel I managed to find a Wireless Access point that belonged to the hotel, and was free to all guests. It has about 20mbit/s, so it’s faster than being at home.

Oh, I managed to film a whole hour of footage yesterday so I’ll just have to edit it, and the first day of the video diary is completed. Hopefully you’ll like it, and I’ll write more probably this evening!

Well, this is the first installment of the New York diary I will both be writing and filming during this upcoming week. Enjoy!

Well, the big day before everything I guess. Everything is packed, and the cab leaves at 08:30 tomorrow morning. It feels quite exiting, feels like ages since I last went on a trip so far away. Mostly it’s because our country side house, it really gets much attention and me and my family really like to go there on our weekends and free times. But as said, this time I’m going a bit further away. To New York. To The Big Apple. I managed to grab some movies from my local videostore yesterday, so I have something to keep me entertained and awake during the trip. I bought some kind of swedish comedy show, “Natural Born Killers”, “Schindler’s List” and “Mission Impossible: 3″. I also brought some books, which is probably a miracle, since I’m not much of a reader.

I also brought some homework with me, something about minerals and geology, which I can never really get the hang of…why do I even need to learn this? I mean, it’s probably useful if you want to be some kind of scientist or doctor, but for god’s sake, I want to be a movie director!

Enough of that. Well, so what’s going on tomorrow? As said earlier, the cab leaves at 08:30, which leaves me with little or no time to do anything in the morning. Don’t know when the plane to London leaves (that’s right, we gotta fly there first, since we are flying with British Airways…don’t ask me why). It’s not that big of a deal though, since I love walking around at airports, especially if you know you’re going to sit in a confined space and suffer from deep vein thrombosis (well, not in my age, but you get the point) for the next 7 hours. I love looking around at all the funky stores available, especially at Heathrow. There are so much to be found there, including a lounge area that you can relax in before take-off. I don’t really see the point of those though, since basically the only thing you do on a flight is relax, eat, relax some more, and perhaps watch some movie where all the swearing and violence is cut out.

I bought 5 MiniDV cassettes today for my camcorder (and no, I will not be filming in HD). The salesman in the store was either really nice or pretty stupid when I asked him for a rebate. You see, one single tape costs about 60 kronor, which is about £4. Since I bought 5 of them, I would have to pay 300 kronor (roughly £20) for them. So, naturally I asked for a rebate. The store clerk seemed to really think for a while, when he finally settled for a price of only 150 kronor (£10). That’s half the price!

Anyway, I’ll start filming tomorrow, and hopefully this project will prove to be really interesting and I do hope I learn a lot from it. I can’t wait to visit B&H Photo Video when I’m in Manhattan, it’s a really big video camera store with some pretty awesome cameras and electronics. I’ve heard a lot of good things about them on FXhome.com. Speaking of FXhome.com, “Cell” is as said earlier this week submitted to the Hauntfest contest and based on the reviews it’s doing quite well. I won’t take out anything in advance though.

Another thing which will make the stay at Heathrow much better is the fact that we’ve lost our digital camera, so we have to buy a new one. There’s nothing like walking around some nice still cameras, and convincing your parents to buy the one with the highest megapixel quantity. Nah, just kidding, but it will probably be interesting.

So, how will the video diaries be posted? I’m not really sure. Well, I could theoretically put them on my computer, cut and fix everything, but I’m not sure that I really would have the time to do that. I’ll probably film everything and when I get home I’ll have to edit it together and upload it day by day. Gotta go to sleep now, and I’ll write more tomorrow, so make sure you check back here sometime tomorrow (can’t say which time though, since I don’t really now what time it is over there).

Life is spiffy, that’s for sure (not sure if “spiffy” is a real word, but it sounds cool).

Well, I changed server from the blazing fast Renfors.eu server to the not-so-blazingly-fast Archive.org server…. At least it’s up and available to download, and that is pretty much what counts. The high quality version of the school documentary is not online yet, but it will soon be.

Oh, and tomorrow I’ll start writing my NewYork blog, since it’s then only one day left.

Due to the popularity of “Cell”, the movie has been downloaded a lot since it was put on the website. Roughly the bandwith was at about 25gb/day. This managed to kill Johannes’ website renfors.eu (his webhost shut it down). This means the links to that movie and to the school documentary are temporarly offline, so I need to find a new webhost really, really fast!

Updates are coming!

“Cell” is now available for download! Check out the movie’s page for download links to Low, High and HD versions!

I submitted the movie to the Hauntfest contest too

Comments go on the movie’s page, so I’ve disabled comments on this post