This Big World 3D begins

This evening was the first session of the 3D puppet workshop/seminar for This Big World, led by Chrystene Ells. I'm participating in this over the next four months. Not sure what I'm doing yet. I got thinking about very small puppets. I'll need to hit the library and look through the Prairie History room books for ideas (they are also part of the process). It looks like this will all lead up to an event one year from now.

Not a snow day ... or is it?

Busy all over today; Trevor Grant did his very enthusiastic end-of-term presentation regarding his MFA status (spoke at length about the films he made in the summer with my course). I met with Erik (after a certain degree of kerfuffle around cars not starting) and had been planning on getting him to copy all of the Sockvile sessions into my computer so we could both be working and discussing them. However, we realized that he is working on a higher version than mine so this will be difficult. We'll move a copy into the university next week, but since Evan left the process of purchasing a high end PC to run HD footage is on the back-burner. The work Erik is doing looks great. In many cases, the eye is completely fooled into believing that the puppets are in front of complex sets: the project will certainly look grander than it started off.  This evening I took William to the Filmpool to see a set of animated films with filmmakers Xstine Cook and Jesse Gouchey  present to show and tell. They also did some workshops at William's school recently but he either missed them (he was sick once and also took a half day to go to Agribition, so perhaps he wasn't there or perhaps they didn't come to his class). Anyway, he loved the work and asked questions. Tanya was there and he got to ask her questions about chemistry as well. We bought the Oilfields of Catan add on set on the way home. I then made good use of the speed of my new computer to compile a set of all digital photos we have of snowmen since 2004. There are over 1100. We certainly have another few hundred on film since we got obsessed with this in 1991, but that will need to wait until I can scan large numbers of my old negs. Here is one from 2004:

Filmpool premiere screening 2

Last day of Film 412 today. This evening was a Filmpool screening and Christmas party. Attendance a bit low but had some good chats with Eric Hill, Chrystene Ells, Berny Hi, Adrian Dean, Janine Windolph, and others.

Filmpool Premiere Screening

This evening was the first of two Filmpool premiere screening events, held at the Artesian. I'd seen a few of the films before but there were a number of great surprises. Jason Britski's film "Witchcraft" was excellent, featuring x-rays, very old home movies, and the sound of an optical printer. Ian Campbell presented a video called "Warm Iced Tea" which was short in a very fluid fashion, partially through a drinking glass, with every frame being a bold and dynamic compositional masterpiece.  The Art of Fire Showcase by Rob White laugh out loud funny. I had lengthy conversations with Rob Miller, Jason Shabatoski, Stephen Onda, Rob Hillstead, Janine Windolph, Chrystene Ells, and Jason Britski. I went alone, Margaret having a commitment at OSAC and this show being severely inappropriate for William who stayed home to watch the three hour Terry Pratchett film "Going Postal" for a third time this week.

Day tripper

William had a doctor's appointment this afternoon. He finally got a proper check up and they'll be investigating his cough further. He opted to stay out of school after that and run a couple of errands which included trips to Rona and Home Depot. I bought the tiles for the tub. Nothing fancy, although we might get some detail tiles for highlights. When we got home, the birds in the tree above our house were really really loud but were quiet along the rest of the block. I recorded them and am trying something new. I've uploaded the audio to my website: here is the link. I left it as a wave file so it is a bit big. I suppose I should have made it an mp3. Perhaps I'll replace it later. I've done this because it is difficult to find a place to put audio without video on the web. You can't do it in this blog, nor on Facebook or Youtube. You CAN do it on Myspace (and I have a profile) but thought I'd try something I could organize myself.
This evening we went to William's school for their welcome back BBQ. We saw his classroom and talked with his teacher and also saw the "time machine" which is part of the upcoming centennial of the school. William has a drawing inside it. Janine Windolph and Gerri-Ann Siwek are involved heavily with this.

Janine Windolph

This afternoon Janine Windolph, whom I have been co-supervising through her MFA in Interdisiplinary Studies, successfully defended her thesis. She did very well, everyone was impressed. Her project included 6 short videos, each containing a narrative by one of her family members (mother, aunt and uncle), primarily recounting events of their childhods in the 1960s and 1970s. The methodology was central to the project, that the western model of bringing the stories together for comparison/contrast was abandoned and each of the stories and storytellers was given the space and the respect of self contained films. She has some minor revisions on the support paper to complete and it is done. Great work Janine.

finishing touches begun

Margaret started repainting the area above our door and front window today. When we painted last year we designed all the colour patterns after a plan of the house from a distant perspective. However, the house is most often seen from a close up, low angle perspective (basically standing in the front yard or at the front door) so the result is that the blue of the second floor is not well seen and the whole thing is off balance. The solution is to change this area from yellow to blue. It will need a second coat, as will the door, but it feels great to get this step closer.

Janine did her public presentation of her thesis film today. It holds together quite well. I'm very happy with what she has been doing.

First day back to school

Today was William's first day back at school. He started grade 3 with a teacher who is new to the school and is in a grade 3/4 split. In the morning we all walked to school together, including the cat so his friends could see her. We have a leash and harness for the cat so she can go for walks with us. I think she's nervous about the outside so maybe she'll be more of an indoor cat. We got to the school a minute or two after the bell so most kids didn't see her, but we'll try again. William seems to have enjoyed his day.
I had a good meeting with Janine and reviewed the 9 short videos she has made that interconnect as her MFA project. Really starting to work. Strangely, she is pulling farther and farther away from the shockingly violent aspects of the stories and gravitating towards small anactotes.

The cat we got yesterday, Sylvie, is really small. She's apparently 5.5 months old but is not much bigger than a kitten and some people have pointed out that she should be bigger. She won't eat the dry cat food that they were giving her at the Humane Society but is really hungry. I am suspecting that she was surviving on the small amount of wet food they gave each cat as a treat in the morning. She ate a lot of raw beef and chicken today. Last night she slept with, and sometimes on top of, William. She is with him now.

Apples and pie but not apple pie.

Day began with the George's girls waking up and me jumping out of bed to feed them, but not myself. I zoomed off to get some blood work done to test my tri-glycerides again (remember my liver tests six months ago). I've kept with my near-pop-free diet for 4.5 months so we'll see how that worked. My new hard drive finished formatting at about 8 am, about 10 hours. At work I met with Janine (who couldn't make it Tuesday). Gave her a copy of Marian McMahon's article "Nursing History" which may be important to Janine's thesis project which involves studying her family history using photographs as her guide. Email was down all day at the university, making it a calmer environment. Met with Eric for a while and primarily talked about a superhero idea we initiated yesterday. It's based on an idea he pitched years ago to Incredible Story Studio and was accepted but then never made for reasons unknown. Of course our version will be a bit more twisted, but he's been doing the most work on it. Went home early, stopping at Safeway. Why do people try to back up into diagonal parking spots? They constrict the lane as they do it, then when they leave (supposedly easier) they are facing the wrong way down the row so are idiots twice with that one action. Is it that hard to back out of a spot? At home I moved all the dvds into my new shelf. Finally back in order (alphabetized by director except box sets and animation/superhero). I picked all the apples from our tree in time for my parents, Margaret's parents, George and the girls back from the farm, and Paul and Mike to arrive for desert. Margaret made pies. After everyone left, I processed all the apples and made apple sauce.

big storm and murder

Yesterday there was a murder three blocks from my house. The police had the whole block roped off all day. I've not read about it in the paper yet since I had to race off first thing in the morning, as
Tuesday is my teaching day, which means I meet with Chrystene in the morning (great progress on the editing, she's cut about 1/3 or more of the Sisu project) and Janine in the afternoon. However, Janine was away today so I was supposed to meet with Eric but he got delayed at the Christian hard core concert in Montana, so I was on my own. We went as a family to shoot some pin-hole images but the clouds had started forming and I needed six seconds per frame. I got 150 before deciding it was not a good use of time so we drove back in. The storm, of major proportions, followed us. I had a Filmpool meeting and just after I arrived, the wind and rain and hail just crushed everything. We watched chairs from the patio below on Scarth street get blown down the block. Amazing.

teaching

I began the two courses I'm teaching with two graduate students today. Chrystene will be working on the post production and animation for her feature film Sisu, and Janine will be working on photography in many forms. It seems that the Flipbook animation program doesn't work with an HD camera, so it may require an upgrade for the footage shot with it to match Chrystene's project. After work we did lots of shopping including the purchase of hooks and stuff to hang the hammock we bought in Mexico, some stacks of DVD-R on sale for $3.97/25 stack, some chocolate to paint the biscotti I baked last night, and the bionicle Toa Ignika for William.

LXXXIII

Nice day of reconnecting with grad students, first with Janine Windolph whom I've not discussed before. She is doing a video documentary project which has evolved significantly over this past year to be a very brave look at her family and family history. Today we discussed some new revelations as two of her family members are discovering repressed memories of violence from years ago. If the project is as engaging as our conversations, it will be amazing.

This evening Chrystene Ells and Raul Viceral came for dinner. Chrystene told me a variety of tales of problems and annoying activities on the set of Sisu that she wouldn't even mention in her own blog such as .... well perhaps if she doesn't publish, I shouldn't either. We talked quite a bit about her thesis and potential critical discussions for her support paper. She suggested a slightly maligned idea about "community" which on further thought might not be bad, especially in regards to community coming together to celebrate a mythic figure that the community distrusted and destroyed just a generation before. How does a community collectively redeem a person over time?

Raul brought me a copy of the September 2007 issue of "Real Valuable Comics" (this one called "Valuable Comics from Space!" with his first local publication. He's a great illustrator, he did hundreds of storyboards for "Sisu". His story is really good, a clever opening chapter to some sort of robot cop story that I'd definitely look for new issues of if I thought there were any. The print run is much smaller for this issue so you'd better run out and get it. In exchange I gave him a copy of "To Be Announced" #1 published by paul Stockton and his company Strawberry Jam Comics from back in the 1980s. I rewrote "Strawberry Fields Forever" to be "Strawberry Jam Forever" and it's printed on the back cover -- my first (and only) comic book publication.

We ate espresso cheesecake.