June's tough day

Today June and I had arranged that I would speak to her class in St. John over MSN or instant messaging or whatever. We'd done it before but of course we re-tested it the other day (had a great chat) but of course when the class starts today we were unable to make it work. Personally I suspect her university server (I was at home) because often streaming video is difficult at our university, especially in the middle of a teaching day. In the end she showed some of my films and I answered some questions by typing as fast I could into the text message thing. A tough birthday for June.

comic day

Tomorrow is comic book day, go to a comic store and see the wonders and get free stuff!
There is also a comic book conference at the university. My friend of over 25 years June Madeley is in town from St. John to speak at it about Manga. She is staying with us this week, will have lots of time to catch up on stuff. At the conference, there will also be presentations by local comic artists including my friend and neighbour Gerri Ann Siwek and an ex-student of mine Brent Braaten, pictured below.

too many rooms

Worked with Eric most of the day, we kinescoped some material and tried to do ray-o-gram titles for my film (one inch out of 50 feet worked out, which is not enough to brag about), and we processed a few rolls of black and white film. It occurred to me that I have stuff spread over five rooms in the department that I need to clean up, so I got my stuff out of the optical printing room, the large classroom with the green wall, and the equipment room. That leaves me a couple more for next week.
We had a few people over this evening, including Jason and Marla Childs who are friends of friend June. Jason is with the economics department. We had a fire and some super-8 in the back yard.

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Today I spoke for about 3/4 hour over a web cam with June Madeley's media course in St. John New Brunswick. She showed three of my Toxic films then I said stuff like

"I will be using the term “experimental” to refer to a large range of alternative approaches to media, with a focus of celluloid film. The term experimental is often contested due to its inaccuracy; an experienced “experimental” filmmaker generally works with known variables with predetermined, calculated outcomes and is doing no more experimentation than a narrative or documentary filmmaker may be. Another term often used is Avant Garde, but this too is often criticized. Its original usage is military, referring to a troop which goes in advance of the main army, and was brought into use as a reference to innovative artists in the early 20^th century. While some artists feel the term lends respectability to their craft, others are uncomfortable with the association with military and some feel that the term continues to be tied to early 20^th century art and the labeling of current practitioners similarly is both pretentious and ostentatious. Other terms have also been used without ever managing to unify the entire arena under one banner. “Independent”, “fringe”, “non-mainstream”, “micro”, “alternative”, “art film” and other labels are equally inaccurate and are have been used to describe a range of non or less commercial cinema that has been created outside of the large television or studio systems but continue to be based in traditional dramatic or documentary approaches. The continued debate about semantics is best left for another paper. I will henceforth use “experimental” to refer all this milieu and all quotation marks will be dropped from this point on. "
.... and so on, and so on...
June says some of them must have been listening since she saw them checking out Michael Snow's Wavelength on Youtube. It is a really horrible unwatchable copy ..... and not enough
of it (there is only the last 10 minutes of the total 45).

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Very cold here today, about -52 degrees. William spent his first lunch at school, he didn't really enjoy it. He usually has either a hot lunch (grilled cheese, macaroni, soup, etc) or peanut butter. None of these choices are available to him at school. Besides that, he seems to have been seated at the back with no companion, and on top of it all, no Lego. We thought he might do better without the trip through the cold, but now I'm doubting it.
I got back to my silkscreen-style videos today, working out a 9 colour Leesa Streifler that I'm pretty pleased with. I also met with Mauricio about his courses towards his MFA and afterwards asked him about Dreamweaver. He gave me some start up pointers that I've begun to play with. June and I did an MSN test for the class I'll teach in St. John tomorrow, I'd better dig out my notes. I finished the Nero Wolfe novel "Over My Dead Body" today, it seemed very close to the tv adaptation until the last couple chapters (unless I fell asleep during that portion of the show when I saw it).Publish Post

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Margaret took care of lunch so I spent the whole day in the edit rooms, the morning working on End of Life, and the afternoon finally getting a start on a video of a dance performance by Tanya Dahms that June Madeley and I shot earlier this summer. I had the material all in the computer and started at the beginning. At 4:00 I had a really elegant opening 5 minutes when suddenly I lost half of the footage! The media went off line and I could not manage to relink it, so I'll have to re-capture that tape next time and hope that it goes back together without me having to redo all the work I did. This evening William and I watched "Here Comes Peter Cottontail: The Movie". I think they were going for a bit of a Rankin and Bass sort of thing, complete with a friendly on-screen animated narrator (voiced by Christopher Lloyd), but it all seemed a bit rushed. It was slick, but all too uniform, the characters move through the scenes with a smooth precision akin to Mario Brothers within a game environment. There was nothing really bad, but there was also nothing really good, the characters and plot were properly assembled but certainly conventional. Neither William nor I were inclined to turn it off, but I'm not sure if/when it'll be replayed.

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I sort of knew going into today that I wouldn't really accomplish anything. I wish I could have just resigned myself to that at the beginning, I would have felt a lot better. Basically, I went into the edit room to get some editing done on the dance with Tanya Dahms I shot with June Madeley a few months ago. However, before I could start I had to sort out a glitch in the dvd authoring (Kalyn and I never solved it but it seems better after re-installing it) and I have been having sluggish response from the Avid even though it is a new machine and newest software, so I consolidated files and unclogged the drives. By the end of that, it was time to pick up William and I got nothing done on the dance work. I'll need to hit the edit room hard next week.

Last night I watched the first two episodes of this season of Heroes. They are obviously very confident with the show as it starts really slow. My only observation is about the lack of difference between people supposedly from different parts of the country. The girl from Texas is supposed to be trying to blend in and not get noticed in southern California. Since I can hear the difference between how people talk in Ontario versus Manitoba, I have a hard time believing that no one notices that she's from Texas. However, the characters seem to have fallen under the generic north American accent deceit.

high school grad

I was really tired yesterday and couldn't even summarize my project. It went pretty well. Somehow I managed to fit all of the gear into my Mazda (with its new clutch, boy can it go now), there were three lighting kits (including one new large one that contained 5 lights) plus three cameras (each in a large case) and a video projector, 3 tripods, mic stands, 2 large grip stands, wireless mics, and bags of cables and other gak. I got the perfect spot in front of the hotel, you know the one that you never get, and unloaded. I missed plugging the meter a couple of times but never got a ticket. I forgot a couple of minor things but they proved inconsequential until I realized that the boxes of tapes I brought contain 5 each, rather than the 6 I had imagined, so we would likely run out. The lunch time was a rush as we had to set up lights for interviews in the space were lunch was served, so we couldn't do that until lunch was over, and at the same time set up lights for a third camera in a hotel room upstairs (it was the first time I've ever been in one of the Hotel Sask rooms, you know how it is that you are never in hotels in your own city unless you... well, I'm never in hotels in my own city). After the set up was complete and shooting recommenced, I drove off to get more tapes, leaving the dream spot behind. When I returned 25 minutes later, the spot was still open! The end of the day came soon enough, the student assistants did all the shooting and I mainly just observed and advised. The big work is really ahead of me, to try to weave all of this footage together into something focused and concise and useful to watch. I'll keep you updated.

Had coffee with Kevin at the Bay today. More lucky parking, got the spot right across from the front door of the store with nearly an hour credit still on the meter. The cafe there in the store does a nice cappuccino and they bake their own pies and biscotti. I had the lemon meringue, yum.

This afternoon I paid bills, bought a terabyte drive for the above project, and put together my triceratops stikfas and made an animated film with it using my intel webcam. My friend June was in town a couple of months ago and she was looking for these and thought they might work well animated, Wikapedia says they can as well, but no one seemed to have them but the other day I saw them in a comic store at half price so I picked up a couple. I thought that one was a samurai, but it was a hockey player - that gives you an indication of the degree of detail they have. They remind me of the old Kinder surprises, Pink Panther era, when the pieces had extra plastic to hold them together that you had to punch them out from before building. John Porter saved all of the extra plastic, I wonder if he still has it (who am I kidding, of course he does). So aside from the low resolution, the lack of focus, and the overall badness of this, I think it turned out well.



Got a message from Dawn Henderson this evening out of the blue. We worked on a project, "Angst", back in the late eighties. I still think about those times, the shooting of a film that required darkness and carefully controlled light but we only had a studio with huge windows so we shot only at night for half the summer, it really bent the way we were thinking and had a profound affect on the final film. Great to hear from old friends.