I am currently being drowned in a flood of undergraduate Greek history essays, which is why I’m not rambling about Pokémon at the moment. Can I not take time out of marking my clueless students’ misshapen diatribes against history, you may ask? Is not my Pokémon blog more important than this?
Well, sort of. The trouble is that I’m already taking time out of marking essays so I can make pizza muffins at five o’clock in the morning.
This is because I am participating in a short film competition.
You understand now that I am not merely affecting insanity when I write about Pokémon on the internet. This is actually what my life is like.
Perhaps I should explain some of the context involved here.
Every year, myself and a group of friends, under the command of one of my high school friends who’s trying to make a name for himself as a director, participate in a skin-flayingly painful event euphemistically known as 48 Hours Furious Filmmaking. The premise is really quite simple: make a short film of 7 minutes or less, within 48 hours (beginning at 7pm last night). To ensure that everything really does happen within 48 hours, all teams in the country must use certain elements (a character, a prop, a line of dialogue, and a camera technique) revealed at the beginning of the competition, and each team is individually assigned one of ten film genres. This year, every film must feature an insomniac named Vic Mayor (the names are always appropriate for either a male or a female character – in this case, Vic could be short for either Victor or Victoria), a card (a playing card, a credit card, a birthday card, whatevs), the line “did you hear that?” and… some camera technique I’ve forgotten because I don’t know a thing about camera techniques anyway. My team has been assigned the “action adventure” genre.
None of this explains why I am making pizza muffins at five o’clock in the morning.
Although I normally do contribute something to the scriptwriting process, I have for some years now had a rather different role on our team. Every team needs food to survive, and I happen to be a damn fine baker. My pies and Cornish pasties have long been famous in our group, and every year on the Saturday of the competition I work hard all morning to bring our film crew a good solid lunch, then get back to the kitchen to start work on dinner. Now, ordinarily I would have prepared my pie fillings in advance of the competition, to keep my workload manageable, but this year I have not been able to do this, due to the aforementioned torrent of undergraduate essays. Thus, I stayed up all Friday night preparing them instead. I also, as is my custom, submitted an idea for a script. In nine years of competition I have never actually managed to write a script that has caught our director’s fancy. This year (again, as is customary) my idea was good, but another was chosen to be taken to the development and writing stage. I returned to my kitchen to get on with my real job.
However, at quarter to eleven, I received a rather panicked text message from the director, indicating that perhaps it might be useful to have a backup script.
By two o’clock, it had become clear that my backup script was, in fact, likely to be the primary script. I dutifully continued working.
By four o’clock, my work was complete. At this point, though, I reasoned that trying to sleep would just make me feel more tired and cranky when I had to get up again in a few short hours. So I decided it would be a better idea just to keep cooking, hence the pizza muffins. I believe my mind has become host to Dark Forces from Parts Unknown, which are now the source of all my power. To be perfectly honest, it’s really quite exhilarating. I now intend to enslave these Dark Forces and retain them for further use at a later date. For now, though, I suspect they will abandon me if I go to sleep, so I will continue to produce delicious baked goods for my team.
Anyway, I have to go. My first batch of muffins is ready.
Pokémaniacal 