My question is: just what the heck is Osborne andHMRC up to? Why are we favouring (foreign) entertainment industries over (foreign) technology companies when it comes to paying tax to get things made here? Why are we not providing more support to domestic, home grown companies instead? If we’re favouring one over the other – why bother with corporation tax at all in that case? I am truly baffled by this.

One thing I noticed a while back when the UK government introduced more favourable tax incentives for the film industry: it appeared that a whole bunch of new post-production and VFX companies were springing up every single day. There wasn’t a moment when I was reading Broadcast or any of the industry rags that a new VFX facility was working on a new film or TV show from a Big (multi-national) Studio.

Now that other countries are offering similar incentives, these very same companies are either being sold, merged or closed because there just isn’t enough work to go around because all the work is going abroad where there are even better tax incentives to be had. All the while the companies making the use of these carrot-and-a-stick tax incentives started using them as leverage to get even more tax relief to further increase their profit margins while declaring a roaring success of contributing to the UK economy – until they start shifting production to Eastern Europe and beyond and UK film talent then suddenly finds itself out of work, or having to migrate elsewhere.

As I say: we need to limit (foreign) entertainment tax incentives to companies and productions that have a limited annual turnover. If you exceed it, no tax incentives for you. If you fall below that limit, you get some credit. Priority needs to be given to companies and producers who are domiciled in the UK and, let’s say, have no ties to foreign investors outside of the EU.

So in other words: whatever tax credit applies to film, TV, computer games, etc. should be means tested as well as being location based (this is in order to protect each country’s own film industry – goodness knows how badly Los Angeles has suffered from tax incentives by shifting everything abroad and Canada is now beginning to feel the pain as individual territories within the country are aggressively competing against each other and BC is losing).

If I were a film producer (or studio) that regularly makes $50-100 million and over PROFIT from each of my movies – I shouldn’t be getting any tax credit at all. If I wanted to make a film here in the UK and was Hollywood-based – fine – but I should expect to get these incentives on a plate to do so in the form of tax relief.

Less reliance on others – let’s look after our own in the first instance.

Before Disney’s announcement that it was to take over Lucasfilm and start making new Star Wars films, I knew that they had taken over a substantial part of Pinewood Studios. It was clear that Disney had intended to ramp up production over here on various projects, but it was unclear at the time what those projects were. We now know.

My question is: what do UK funded British productions (financed here with British crew) get to film their projects when our studios are being occupied by American-financed productions?

The problem with the current film and TV tax incentive system is that:

1) The majority of Hollywood studios have already substantial amounts of money in the bank. It’s not as though they cannot afford the full cost of making a film domestically (or abroad if the requirements dictate it). The movies that they make – regardless of wherever they are shot or whatever tax incentives are given – rake in substantial profits. There are a few exceptions to this (John Carter being one of them), but certainly the majority of movies made over here with US money go on to make the studio significant amounts of profit.

So I ask: why offer tax incentives to these large studios at all? Studios and the UK government will claim that such productions add millions, if not billions, to the UK economy – which is nice for us (although short term) – but it will take jobs away from US domestic film companies reliant on income from movies being made there. See points 2 and 3.

2) The studios use tax incentives as leverage. As we have already seen with Warner Bros. and Harry Potter and The Hobbit, if they don’t get their way – they threaten to withdraw support to the country where they would like to make the film.

This is practically the same with corporations who have been accused by the UK government of not paying full corporation tax. They have huffed and puffed and have stated that they will take away their products and services from the UK economy if they are forced to pay any more tax. It’s ironic (and also moronic) that George Osborne has said that he’ll go after those tax avoiders and yet will happily allow multi-billion Hollywood film studios receive a sizeable chunk off their tax bill.

All this happened during my time in the film industry and I remember that my employers (at the time) were extremely nervous of what would happen if the UK government did NOT increase tax subsidies to the likes of Warner Bros. As such I’m very glad not to be working in post production now because it is..

3) A rush to the bottom. As large studios find the cheapest route to profitability, vendors such as VFX and post-production open shops in different countries. My former employers, MPC, have opened shops in Canada (two locations I believe), the US, India and through a subsidiary company, China. Other Soho VFX companies have done the same – and some of them have even had to let people go from the Soho facilities if employees weren’t prepared to work in offices abroad – where employment benefit is radically different to those domestically. We have lost some good VFX companies over the past few years thanks to tax incentives: Digital Domain, Rhythm and Hues, and Pixomondo have recently shut several offices in the US and London.

My proposal is to stick two fingers to foreign film studios with an annual turnover of X million dollars and instead prioritise them to UK production companies with a much smaller turnover in order to ensure that the money spent remains fully within the UK economy – and not being pumped back out to studios who may see Canada or Eastern Europe as their next target for investment.

In the same way our housing market was affected by US banks, our film industry cannot follow the same path. We UK filmmakers must take charge over our own film industry and not be too reliant on others – for if Hollywood fails, we will fail too. No one country should be this reliant on another.

It is a selfish need, but I believe a necessary one.

I could do with learning to drive as we have a bit of an upheaval at work soon which would benefit from me driving and owning a car. On the other hand, I find the microwave at work incredibly useful when it comes to lunch time – and I’d at least like to use it to cook vegetables at home.

My budget is £50. If I went for the driving lessons, I’d probably not choose the AA after the SMS spam from a previous enquiry. As for the microwave, I’ve spotted one that does the job from Sainsburys.

Decisions, decisions!

Sigh.

Virgin Media are proving to be more incompetent delivering video on on demand than NOW TV was when they first launched – and that really is saying something. Especially when you consider the Virgin Media system is a self-contained ecosystem unlike NOW TV where I had to deal with installing the relevant codec (namely Silvershite).

So just what is it with Virgin Media’s On Demand system that causes it go to go wrong so frequently? I had just watched An Idiot Abroad 3 (India) successfully without issue – so why does the premium HD movie package movies on demand fail so often?

I’ve had a letter back from Virgin regarding my complaints which says:

I hope Virgin at least offer me a 1Tb Tivo by way of having to record everything in order to watch something in its entirety in lieu of dodgy On Demand. I’m given serious consideration to cancelling the Sky Movies HD package too as I’m absolutely not getting all the benefits that come with it.

As I say, I’ll give VM a chance to rectify these issues – but I will only wait so long.

This exercise was principally inspired by the release of nginx 1.40 to Dotdeb, but also I wanted to test my own notes to see how well (and how quickly) I could rebuild a web server running Debian and nginx from scratch.

It’s all turned out quite well, I think.

So I’ve traded it in for an iPad mini.

While the screen resolution has been given a resounding knockback by many critics, I actually like it – it does the job well enough and even though it isn’t Retina, it’s still a slight improvement over the iPad 2 display. I have no complaints. The camera (front and back) is a massive improvement over the iPad 2 although it doesn’t quite come close enough to the quality offered by the iPhone 5.

The overall size of the device, however, is what matters. Not only can I hold the device in one hand – it makes reading and watching videos in bed far easier than before.

iBooks are now a pleasure to use (and much nicer than Kindle’s iOS app – I’ve always appreciated iBook’s hyperlinking/footnote navigation over and above that of the Kindle – the downside is that there is no native OS X iBooks reader in case your iOS device goes walkies). Magazines such as Empire Magazine and National Geographic don’t feel like you’re holding the entire collection of Encyclopedia Britannica in your hands[3].

Combined with an EE SIM that will soon offer LTE speeds in the local area, this is as close as I’m going to get to mobile computing without carting the MacBook Air around- which is already an ultralight device. But I like being able to download new books and magazines from anywhere in itself is a plus. I’ve used my iPad 2 as a revision guide for upcoming technical exams – the iPad mini makes it even easier.

Battery life is exceptionally given the cellular connectivity and wireless. The Lightning connector makes transfers nice and nippy when hooked up directly to the MacBook Air. Despite the inconvenience of having to use a different connector from previous generations of iOS devices, I’ve taken quite a shine to Lightning. Thankfully I have no audio or video kit which has the old style dock connector – so I’ve nothing to replace (or buy a convertor).

The iPad mini comes highly recommended.

Pinocchio is an absolute classic. Featuring all manner of animation types, including rotoscoping a live actress playing the Blue Fairy (whose hair I assumed would be blue, but no – it’s just her sparkly dress which is expertly animated and is quite a special effect in its own right) through to multi-layer background/foregrounds. The music, the story and acting is top notch.

Bambi. What can I say? The animation techniques are even better than Dumbo and Pinocchio – the backgrounds in particularly are absolutely stunning. And I dare anybody not to feel something at the point in which Bambi’s mother is shot and Bambi’s facing his father with a single tear in his eye having been told that he’ll never see his mother again. That is one hell of a powerful scene. Everything about Bambi is, quite frankly, brilliant and there are some underlying tones that adults will enjoy as well as being eye candy for the kids. The musical score is one of the finest ever to grace a motion picture of any form, but it’s a shame that while Bambi was nominated for Oscars in several categories, it won none of them.

The Black Cauldron. An epic Disney adventure not animated or directed by Don Bluth! Nonetheless it’s a great adventure and features some great animation (some of the conceptual work came from a young Tim Burton). I dare anybody not to see the similarities between furry protagonist Gurgi and Gollum from Lord of the Rings, though.

Finally, I ventured into South Korean director Chan-wook Park’s Oldboy. I really got into his work when Film Four aired his Amelie meets One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest surrealist comedy-drama I’m A Cyborg But That’s Okay recently.

Oldboy is a very odd movie. And yet it is utterly, utterly brilliant. So much so that Spike Lee is directing a US remake this year. It’s difficult to describe this movie without spoiling it. After 15 years of being held captive, Oh Dae-Su is finally released by his mysterious captors. Struggling to find answers, he meets with Mi-do, a young female sushi chef who falls in love with him and together they try and piece the puzzle together.

All I will say is that this is a very, very messed up movie that will definitely shock you. All I will say is that if you thought some of the stuff that goes on in Game of Thrones is a bit excessive – well, Oldboy steps over the line and drags it several hundred metres forward. Oldboy is definitely an oddboy indeed.

On Demand continues to break[1], the Tivo iOS apps keep losing their connection[2], the new traffic management policy (which was never officially announced – I read about it through thinkbroadband.com) is seriously affecting my testing of SquirrelSave and consequently my entire broadband “experience”[3]. Broadband is now considerably worse off than the BT Infinity product we had prior to Virgin Media.

I’m giving VM three months to fix this otherwise I’ll fight them in court, if need be, to get out of my 18 month commitment with them. I am absolutely not happy now.

I’ve sent them a polite three page letter explaining all the problems – I hope that they respond in a timely manner and will help me to get these issues fixed. Not looking for compensation other than if they can’t fix them, I want out. I think that’s a fair deal without screaming blue bloody murder to the press, Ofcom, trading standards, etc.

[2] I use a complex, non-memorable password. It’s an enormous PITA to having to keep re-entering it because the Tivo iOS apps are seemingly incapable of doing so every time the app loses connection to the Tivo – either locally or remotely.

[3] Downloading is generally unaffected, but submitting anything to any web site is incredibly slow when throttled. Latency jumps into upper three figures. The new throttling policies are significantly worse over a shorter period than the 5 hours previously mentioned. That I have no say over this infuriates me no end.

Divorce seems to suggest that one or both people in the relationship were either unfaithful, cruel, or generally a complete arse and couldn’t make the relationship work. But why do we hold special reverence for legal partnerships and not those that are perfectly happy unmarried? You don’t see me question women who never married but have had (multiple) long term relationships that have consequently failed.

When I set out to get married 12 years ago, I had no idea that I would eventually divorce. No idea at all. But we are where we are and as responsible adults with no children, we felt it was the best decision for our situation. We’re both still friends too – but I dare not mention that to anybody straight away because that then could then create a sense of paranoia in a potential new mate.

I’m completely honest and open about what’s happened and I don’t try to hide it. I do want to find somebody new because I miss having female companionship and having been married for 12 years, it is very difficult to find oneself alone again. But if women pre-judge me just because I’m divorced and think I can’t hold down a relationship and therefore bad marriage material (yes, I would get married again – as I say: I don’t set out to fail at long term relationships – I am NOT a player) – that’s their problem and not mine, and probably best left alone because whatever I say or do I will not be able to reason with them.

As the old saying goes about assuming things: Assuming makes an ASS of both U and ME. Don’t do it – I am an intelligent human being. Get to know me before making judgements. By all means reject me because you think I’m ugly, dislike my taste in music, whatever – but don’t go dismissing me just because I’m divorced!

I got to wear a tux (apart from my wedding suit, probably the only time you’d ever see me dressed so smartly!) and sit in the same theatre as George Lucas, Stephen King, Peter Jackson and the cast of Kong, Stacey Snider (who at the time was CEO of Universal Pictures), Richard Taylor of Weta Workshop – and so many more VIPs. Highly memorable (albeit bloody expensive) event. Also turns out that the associate producer of King Kong went to work for MPC. Small world.

Earlier that year, however, I got to see Tim Burton/John August’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory for whom MPC worked as principal VFX vendor. Digging around upstairs at home, I found the original cast and crew screening ticket:

What I remember about the screening was that Tim Burton came up on stage to say very few words (just thanking everybody for their hard work) before the film started. I remember seeing the late Richard D. Zanuck (whose father Dayrl F. Zanuck co-founded and ran 20th Century Fox back in the 1930s) waiting in the wings. It was all quite surreal.