I was having a meeting with Stewart in a cafe the other day when a waiter accidentally spilled a litre and a half of water over the two of us. We weren't even being offensive.

Were meetings invented in the eighties? They feel like they were. Well, maybe not the sort of meetings we have. The sorts of meetings we have feel like they were invented by us. They're in a different gene pool from the kind of meetings you can charge to your company account and complain about to your therapist.

Standing There Productions meetings are usually too long. They can be called with little or no notice, they are quite frequently on weekends, and they often involve lengthy and complicated tangents relating to the role of women in traditional cinematic narrative, or discussions regarding what's worse: forgetting your wallet, or running really late (in other words, Rita versus Lorin).

Rita and I met with some excellent people at a DVD place called Eskimo the other day. That was a couch meeting, in an old garage, with beers. That's a good meeting in anyone's book. Then we met with a colourist who was supposed to be at a karaoke night. He didn't even look like he was going to sing, so that was disappointing. And then there was the under-water meeting between Stewart and myself. A litre and a half of water over our heads and all we got was a free drink each. Had we been charging our meeting to a multi billion dollar account, that would have been an outrageous exchange.

"Only a free drink each? After being drenched by a waiter? I say, do you know who I am? Let me introduce you to my lawyer..."

Not for us, though. We felt like royalty. A free drink and a free shower. That's the low-budget filmmakers' equivalent of a corporate credit card.

Now all I need to do is get someone to accidentally attack me with scissors and I'll get that haircut I so desperately need.

Scott Selkirk, the one who looks exhausted in all our stills galleries because he carted our gear around for the entire production of I Could Be Anybody, has subsequently made his own short film which has now been selected in the shortlist for Tropfest this year. Tropfest, for the three or four of you who haven't had films in it at one point or another, is a short film festival in Australia, watched by thousands of shivering people on picnic rugs with sore necks nationwide.

So Scott should be sent to the Congratulatorium. So should Fez (the Sound Magician), Tobes (Music Fingers) and Stewart (Light Nerd), who all worked on It's A Good Thing, the short film in question.

Had we entered I Could Be Anybody in Tropfest, there is an outside chance we would be seething with a white hot jealousy. As it stands at the moment, however, we're claiming It's A Good Thing as our own flesh and blood. Congratulations guys.

So now I know what a colour grade is. It's where you make sure all the separate bits of the film look like each other. Sounds simple enough, but ever since I spent a couple of hours with Marcus from DigitAll, I now look at everything as if it's a colour exam.

"Well, that's clearly not a very realistic green" is the kind of thing I now think when walking past a park. The other night when I was in a tram, I had to stop myself from telling a woman who was checking her appearance in the reflection of the window that she shouldn't worry, because it was just that the light didn't match her skin tone.

So anyway, over the next week I will be discussing colours, shades, darkness and light with Stewart, Marcus and Rita. After that, I will probably have to enrol myself in a course that teaches you how to have normal conversations with people who aren't filmmakers. A rehabilitation, of sorts. I expect this course will take place in a restaurant, a bar, on a beach, or outside somewhere in the sunshine. I can't tell you how much I'm looking forward to it.

So it’s the end of the working year and even Rita and I have decided to have a couple of days off (Rita would have worked right through Christmas, but I think a representative from Leongatha came to Melbourne and told her that if she didn’t go home she’d have her citizenship revoked). It’s all terribly exciting because the film is really progressing and I’ve started watching it again in my lounge room and muttering three words to myself over and over again. Three words I have come to love with all my heart:

That’s a wrap.

There are two people in Standing There Productions who are allowed to use the magic words that’s a wrap: Eva Tandy (our 1st AD) and Rita Walsh (our producer). Once you’ve had the right to say that’s a wrap bestowed upon you (and yes I think there is some kind of ceremony), the big secret is how to use the phrase. In other words, when to use the phrase. In other words, how to refrain from using it until everyone else has either passed out or gone mad waiting to hear someone say that’s a wrap. It’s a fine art, getting the timing right. Rita and Eva are brilliant at it. Sometimes, though, you have to be careful because a wrap doesn't always mean a wrap. That's a wrap can be shouted at a film set hours before everyone gets to go home. Sometimes, though, you really need to hear it.

Rita said that’s a wrap yesterday. “Well that’s a wrap on the sound”, she said. I nearly married her.

So, we've wrapped the sound, we've wrapped the picture, it's just boring producer type stuff from hereon in. So - and I'm going out of my jurisdiction here - I'd like to declare that that's a wrap on 2005. Thanks everyone for visiting our website, helping us out, supporting us, and hacking our site for no apparent reason. Have a great nondenominational holiday period and we'll see you in the new year. Have fun!

Well, it simply does not get more exciting than this. Our website has not yet been up for a month and Standing There Productions has been hacked by robots. Yes, robots.

Yesterday afternoon, human time, our film site (www.icouldbeanybody.com.au) was suddenly not quite as informative it once had been, at least not about our film. I was extremely busy at the time, having a drink in a bar full of rowdy construction workers, so I couldn’t make out what Stewart was saying when he called. Stewart (who is fast earning his credit as post production supervisor) is sick with a head cold at the moment, so it was like talking on the phone to Barry Manilow from the back of a Guns N Roses concert. Eventually, with my hand over my ear, I deciphered “website” and “hacked”, which was somewhat alarming, except for the fact that these two words were closely followed by the word “Nick”. U.S. Republicans say that Al Gore claims to have invented the Internet, but I suspect they are overlooking the possibility that he could have had quite a bit of help from Nick Jaffe, who helped us set up our website, became virtually our entire camera department on I Could Be Anybody, and who I’ve now discovered also apparently battles robots. Of course he does.

I asked Nick who it was who hacked our site and why they targeted Standing There Productions – had we become an international symbol of all that is wrong with contemporary do-it-yourself filmmaking? Was this a political protest? A cry for help? Were we being targeted because of the subversive secret messages in Rita’s biog?

No, apparently. We were targeted because our password was so crap that a robot could decipher it.

That, and the hacking wasn’t even interesting. I'll post the actual hack image above this when I finally work out how to do it. It's very dull. Nevertheless, this act of vandalism will not go undramatised. We will be holding high level meetings in the New Year to develop new security measures (ie a password that isn’t the actual word PASSWORD) and our spirit shall not be weakened. It is true that our art has been defaced and our spirits dampened, but we are determined to get on with our lives despite the activities of our robot oppressors.

We humans must be strong. Fight on, good friends.

Man how exhausting is this time of year and that’s a rhetorical question but you can feel free to answer. I feel like those people who collapse in marathons - they always slow down the footage of them in the opening montages of sports shows and you can see the muscles quivering and then giving way in their spindly thighs as their legs buckle beneath them and they crumple onto asphalt.

After just an hour in the city at the moment, my spindly thighs are killing me.

The film is still "nearly finished". The Sound Magician is mixing the sound brew, the Picture Fairy is fiddling with the smoke and the mirrors on a couple of bits, and there is also something called a grade, which apparently is looming on the horizon and about which I am blindly ignorant in every respect. If anyone out there knows anything about what a grade might be, please notify me immediately. Grades at school were fairly simple to understand once you got the hang of them, so I can’t imagine it can be that difficult to comprehend. Can it?

Thanks everyone for the overwhelming responses we've had to our website. To answer the one question we're getting from everyone (who designed it?) the answer is yes, his name is Clark Kent and no, none of us can work out why he always arrives late for meetings, muttering about bad traffic and tucking his shirt in.

Paul Daniel is our website designer. You can call him Superpaul. He is a professional website designer and if you'd like him to do your site, go to www.pauldaniel.com.au and contact him there. He is currently at large in Eastern Europe but he's back soon and we will be holding a parade in the street to hail his return. It is obviously a bonus to have a clever and creative website designer who also leaps tall buildings in a single bound.

Superpaul is also - now stay with me here - somewhat of a font nerd. Take him to a sign, a website, a letter, a subtitle to a movie, even a portion of someone's handwriting, and ask him what font it is. Time him. If his head doesn't explode from trying to decide between two seemingly identical (but apparently vastly different) styles, he'll have your font downloaded, printed out, and walking around the room within thirty seconds.

This was all an enormous surprise to me, because for me FONT always meant Times New Roman. Little did I know there's a whole world out there in which words like 'dingbat' have an entirely serious meaning. Good to know.