If you haven’t cast your vote for your favourite busker yet then click here to go to Busker2009.com and check out video performances by the six finalists; Sean Watmore, Quintet Tarantino, Fionn O’Hargain, Vicky Day (above), Annie Chambers and Beef Supreme. One of these finalists will walk away with a €1,000 cash prize!

Voting closes this coming Friday at 11:59pm. And don’t forget that you must click the link in the confirmation email to make sure your vote counts. If you don’t click the link in the email to confirm your vote, your vote won’t count!

Tune into KCLR96FM tomorrow around 3:15pm to hear more about the competition.

The video for “Fast Way” has just gone online; awesomely shot and cut by student filmmaker Ivars Burtnieks.

As I mentioned before, the video was shot in a freight container in the Hebron industrial estate but it also features footage of the classic rockers in the studio recording. Much to my surprise I even make a little cameo in the video, if you look really closely at around 3 minutes and 30 seconds you’ll spot me setting up for my promo shoot with the band.

If you missed it before then you can check out my behind the scenes video and promo shots from the shoot with Mata Hari here.

Well done to Ivars for doing a great job with the video for “Fast Way”, you can check out more of his videos here on Youtube and you’ll find Mata Hari here on MySpace.

This new film incorporates old footage taken by Cathy on a biodiversity research trip to Suwarrow; a remote, un-peopled atoll in the Cook Islands, South Pacific, in 2000. Suwarrow is an important breeding place for seabirds of all types including the rare and very large Masked Booby; her and fellow scientist Rhys Jones collected data was later published in the NZ Forest and Bird Journal 2001 and the project was a jointly sponsored UN and Cook Island project. While the trip may look idyllic, Cathy almost drowned when the yacht she and her colleague hitched a lift with was hit by a freak wave. Her new digital camcorder was destroyed but her old Hi8 survived to take this footage.

Many years later, Cathy is now actively involved in promoting ecological, permanent forestry in her small woodlands in Ireland; she blogs and creates works about converting her 20 year old spruce plantation to a permanent forest using Pro Silva, close to nature, forestry methods. She believes that small local ecologically based actions can have a positive effect globally and personally.

You can vote for “Once I Counted Birds” here; simply give the video a rating. From what I can tell, it is the only Irish entry in the competition and I think it would be great to see Cathy win given her huge interest in ecology/environmental politics & film and years of hard work promoting the Arts in Ireland.

The voting closes this Friday and don’t forget to follow Cathy’s EcoArtNotes on Twitter for updates and new work.

After seven months and countless hours of street music, the final round of busking for the competition took place on the streets of Kilkenny on Saturday with finalists Quintet Tarantino, Sean Watmore, Vicky Day, Beef Supreme (above), Annie Chambers and Fionn O’Hargain all competing for the €1,000 cash prize.

As always voting is open to the public so please go to Busker2009.com to watch the six video performances by our finalists and cast your vote for the best busker of 2009.

You will get an email asking you to confirm your vote and please note that only confirmed votes will be accepted.

Voting closes at 23:59 GMT on Friday November 13th.

It’s already proving quite an experience for me;  most show’s that I’ve done in the past, I was surrounded by familiar faces, working with a lot of the same people over the years as we all moved away from Dreamstuff to Devious.

Now with the Watergate Production, I’ve gone from being one of the older actors in a group to being the youngest in the cast and I don’t have the familiarity of how people work, like I’ve always had before. Even the play itself is very different to anything I’ve done. But I’m not complaining, it’s all very exciting, fresh and challenging for me.

I’m slowly moving away from the script and finding my character – Ray Dooley; a young chap with a love for Kimberley biscuits and Australian day-time television shows. He is “continually bored” by his surroundings especially when used as a messenger between his older brother Pato (Brendan Corcoran) and love interest  Maureen Folan (Clare Henrique).

Everyone involved in the show has been very encouraging so far, I’m constantly learning little tips & tricks by working with them and hearing endless hilarious stories. It’s also great just to be rehearsing on the Watergate stage; normally I wouldn’t get on the stage until a few days before a show and then everything has to be tweaked accordingly but we’ve been using the stage for the past few weeks, with furniture and rough marks already in place for the set.

It’s already less than a month to the opening night; we’re all very excited by how the play is shaping up and people keep approaching me in the street to tell me how much they’re really looking forward to it. The next few weeks will be filled with rehearsals, we’ve got the photo-shoot coming up and the set will soon be under construction. It’s all falling into place and I’m very excited. I’ve started bringing my camera’s to rehearsals but it’ll be a while before I get a chance to work on the photos.

For now check out this brand new shot on the Oss237.com homepage taken during rehearsals this week; my script sitting on the front row of chairs in the Watergate with my Sb800 positioned on the ground using a wireless trigger at half power to light the chairs in the background. As always comments, feedback or criticism would be appreciated… oh and don’t forget to book your tickets for the show!

The Watergate Theatre Company presents Martin McDonagh’s ‘The Beauty Queen Of Leenane’ in the Watergate Theatre 23rd-28th November.

For ticket bookings call: 056-7761674

Over the course of the 10 week shoot for episodes 5,6 & 7; I tried my best to get some shots from every scene but it wasn’t always easy. Some days were extremely fast-paced, as we worked against the clock trying to meet the schedule and work with everyone’s availability. Some days there was just too much going on.

But even though I may have missed a few small scenes, I still have hundreds of behind the scenes shots to get through. I’ve spent the past few days just trying to organise them. I’ve decided it’s best to upload the photos in the order that the scenes appear in the episodes as opposed to the shoot day itself.

First up is a collection of behind the scenes shots from Episode 5:’ The Adventure Of The Hidden Microfilm‘; the scene where Janine Drew (played by Suzanne O’Brien) meets the Hardy’s (played by Peter O’Connor and Geoff Warner Clayton) for the first time. It’s a very short cut-to scene as Vultour reveals to Tennyson that he’s been passing on work to Janine; we find the chav detective interrogating the Hardys about a street full of keyed-cars.

This is the first appearance by the Hardy’s and according to my video diaries we shot it on Shoot Day 32. Given the length of the scene it was a relatively easy shoot that afternoon; it was Sla’s birthday and we spent most of the time making fun of him and talking to “da hoss’s” in the field beside us.

We were in the middle of a four day shoot for the Pinkerton Lair Scene at the end of Episode 7 but that afternoon we shot this scene and Janine & the Hardys’ part of the montage from Episode 6 before heading back to shoot more of the Lair scene that night (and eat birthday cake).

You can check out my brand new shots of Janine Drew & the Hardy’s here and here on the Oss237.com homepage and you’ll find the rest of the shots here on Flickr.

As always any comments or criticism would be appreciated. And there’s plenty more shots from behind the scenes coming soon.

Watergate Theatre November 23rd – 28th.

I think my three-year commute to college was the first thing to take it’s toll; during third year and throughout my thesis I was using the PowerBook so much that the charger quite literally melted on itself. I replaced it with a Macally charger (I couldn’t wait) which broke a year later only to be replaced by the current Macally charger (which appears to be nearly dead already too). Due to my nasty habit of always plugging in my PowerBook; the battery became very unreliable and wouldn’t last long.

Despite the power issue, I’ve had no other major problems until about a year ago; when the PowerBook started going to sleep at random while in use. The first few times it would be easy to wake it up again by simply pressing Enter, but over time it began to go to sleep more often and it became harder and harder to wake it up. The worst case left the Powerbook asleep for nearly a week until it eventually shut down with no power. I charged it, turned it on and then it seemed fine for a couple of months until it started happening again.

When I bought my iMac; the intention was to clear everything off the PowerBook and reinstall OS X, which I was hoping would sort out this problem. I was transferring and doing backups of anything on the PowerBook I needed when I knocked it off the corner of the desk. The above image shows the nasty dent caused by the fall; but apart from just visible damage, my problems got a lot worse. Ever since the drop, the disc drive on the PowerBook doesn’t work; if I insert a disc it makes some horrible scratching noises and won’t read anything. It can also be very difficult to get it to eject a disc. And it fails to attach to our wi-fi network in the house (I’m told this may not be related).

Without being able to insert discs, I wasn’t sure how to reinstall OS X, until last night when we used the iMac connected to the PowerBook. We set the iMac in Target Disk Mode and used it to install OS X on the PowerBook. The first disc was fine, it took over an hour but it seemed to be working. We moved on to the second install disc and then the PowerBook went to sleep again, it happened a couple of times but would wake up and there seemed to be no problem with the install. Half way through the second install disc it went asleep and would not wake up.

It had to be something to do with the Power (didn’t it?)! After much deliberation as to what to do; we removed the battery. Nothing happened. So we pulled the power and of course it died. We then plugged it in again and turned it on without the battery, it seemed to be working fine and prompted to install the second disc so we did. It took about 45 minutes and then everything appeared to be fine, the PowerBook started from scratch and even managed to find the network. So I did a series of updates for the next few hours and still everything appeared to be okay. And then with no warning; the PowerBook died and can not be restarted.

I’m not much of a techie when it comes to computers (which is probably very obvious from this post) and at this stage I’m well and truly in over my head so if there’s any Mac users out there (or indeed anybody) who has any idea what the problem is here or have had similar problems then please let me know.

At this stage I’m not sure whether this is the end of my PowerBook or not!? Is it a power problem? Should I buy a new battery and yet another charger or is this just a waste of money? Would it be more expensive to repair the dent in the PowerBook (and the drive) than it would be to buy a new one?

Any advice or help would be very much appreciated!

With Isabelle Vultour captured and the Pinkertons establishing their firm grip on the town, the gentlemen detectives of V.P.I. must concoct a plan to get Isabelle back, stick it to the Pinkertons and for Vultour and McGrain… avoid a threesome with Natalie Blaise? But in order to do so they must rally the troops. And the actions of the bullying Pinkertons has ensure that there’s plenty of volunteers. This is it. The final battle. The detective apocalypse. Who will reign supreme? Who will prove to the best detective force in town? Or will it all descend into a terrible mess? This is the long goodbye, where the goodbyes are long and the farewells are hard.

With the last episode now online, I’ll be spending the next few days getting to work on hundreds of photos taken during the 10 week shoot for episodes 5, 6 & 7. To avoid spoilers I’ve held back on uploading any of the images.

I’ve also got hours of behind the scenes footage from the shoot that I might use for a bit of editing practice, I haven’t really decided what to do with it yet. Now that it’s all come to a close I’ll also be able to talk about the shoot in detail.

For now I’ve uploaded yet another promo shot of the hapless detectives of V.P.I, which you can check out here on the Oss237.com homepage. I’ve already got some great feedback about the final episode and as always I’d love to hear people’s comments and feedback.