Bottom of the Ninth

A classic solstice today in Regina. Blazingly hot so that we could stay up roasting marshmallows until well after dark, which is pretty late for my 5 year old who's still tossing around in bed. I telecined Chuck's film "Steel Motion" today using a simple set up of a 5 blade shutter projector, a mirror box, and a Canon XL-1 camera with manual focus lens. I used to have a lot of trouble doing this with an autofocus lens as the manual override was never absolute and it would still look for focus during dark moments. I didn't watch it all the way through as Chuck came in and watched it with me. He'd been having a pretty bad day with some information been given to him incorrectly so that some of the work needed to be redone in the rewiring of lights he was doing (as I mentioned yesterday, he is no longer a professional filmmaker but rather is an electrician). I pointed out to him that I can't tell the difference between when he's happy or angry and he equally gruff and foul mouthed both ways. He denies enjoying yelling at people but he doesn't fool me. On the topic of "Steel Motion", I was surprised about the range of images that I'd forgotten about. I knew that there were a lot of strobing, silhouetted, superimposed, and abstracted images of parts of trains, creating a formalistic study of the "steel" and "motion". However, I'd not remembered the amount of beautiful prairie landscapes contained in the film. A puzzling and thought provoking mixture.