recording

I recorded music in the studio today. With Jeff Looysen I recorded a new pass for "Modern" as well as the incidental music I need for "Grain" and will also be able to use some of the session potentially to replace the lost music from the Film Frenzy workshop film I made last year. This evening I recorded trumpet for "Modern" with Nigel Taylor. It sure takes some lung power to play continuously for 15 minutes.

Incredible

(Image: William and cousin's on Tom Sukanen's ship)

I am starting to get back on track with my projects. I think it takes the completion of some important tasks for me to start feeling positive about what I'm doing. For example, today I had the music from yesterday under my belt and was able to start laying it out with the picture and suddenly I'm able to imagine finishing the project (Modern) rather than it being another albatross around my neck. As well, I think the long End of Life documentary is a step closer; I reviewed a work in progress today and it is able to go to it's next step (audio correction and sweetening). Next Tuesday we record again and I should also be able to get some incidental music for "Grain" recorded and be able to complete that film. On top of all that, I went out and had a wonderful time with William this evening, walking as he rode his bike. We dropped off William's old Dash (from the Incredibles) jacket for Gavin's son Jack. Jack burst into tears when confronted by me and his dad trying to put a jacket on him; completely inconsolable. I figure Jack must have thought the jacket was to correspond to leaving and that he didn't want to leave, especially with a stranger. Or perhaps he's just not as into the Incredibles as we'd be led to believe.

326

Busy busy busy.
Most of my day focused around my screening tonight, but there were a couple of other events. Mark Montague, who was a student of mine about 5 or 6 years ago, is doing a tv show about Saskatchewan filmmakers and did an interview with me today at my (yes, very cluttered) office. We talked about the university, the Filmpool, and in independant filmmaking in general. I also had another optometrist appointment where we think he finally has the correct shape of contact lens to fit my left eye without it giving me significant halos and double vision. The screening went well in general. Eric helped set up. The sound guy was late and we didn't know if he would have the correct connectors for us to patch the recorder into his board. It required XLR to RCA, not a common cord. I went to the university and searched and searched. I finally gave up but when I went to turn off the lights in the equipment room, I discovered another rack of connectors and managed to find what I needed there. Once we were all set up, we were able to go look at some of the street fair. I had a lengthy conversation with Ryan Hill and Brent Brataan who were sitting on the patio at the wine bar. Time travel mostly. Just as I left there to try to find Margaret, her cousin John Bessai from Toronto found me. He's in province to attend the Yorkton festival but decided to spend tonight here to visit and see my screening. We had ice cream, even though I had no jacket and was getting pretty cold. The parade came next; as Margaret was an organizer, I walked with William. He was getting very tired to we stopped at the Cathedral Centre where the band and films were to play and waited for Margaret. Lots of people came including a number of old friends. The band, Intergalactic Virgin, started at 10:45 and I ran my films on a paper screen suspended from the ceiling. Many of the more subtle films didn't show up well due to the throw and the abundant ambient light. However, a lot of it did look really good. Here is a clip:

325

Today I followed up on a system Alex MacKenzie introduced me to a couple of years ago, that is to use a flatbed editing machine as a contact printer! A flatbed is a table with multiple platters that hold rolls of film that run through a gate area where light shines on it and reflects the image up onto a view screen. The machine can go fast or slow or hold on one spot. By running unexposed film bi-packed with film that has an image on it through the machine at the same time in such as way that the light shines through the image on one film and onto the raw film, you expose it. Of course you must stop light from hitting the film when it is on the platters or leading towards the gate, so this morning I purchased a metre of black, opaque sable suede cloth ($25) to drape over everything. I had Eric there to ensure that the platters were able to turn without tangling the cloth. The next big trick was exposure. I used low speed black and white film (Kodak 7363 hi-con) which I rate at 6 iso under tungsten light (as this was) and ran the flatbed as fast as it would go (about 4x speed, reducing the exposure by 2 stops), but still measured it as too bright. I used a one stop neutral density filter to try to compensate the rest. The results were not bad, although perhaps a bit overexposed. The image was steady and clear (of course you also should try to print emulsion to emulsion, which was easier due to the fact that this stock was double perf and thus could be loaded in any direction). This is part of my Grain film project.
Eric is working on transferring the work to video so I'll be able to post a clip soon.
Tomorrow night I will be showing about 30-40 minutes of Modern at the Cathedral Arts Festival at 10:45 at night in accompaniment to Intergalactic Virgin.

324

Today in the darkroom, Eric and I processed the last of the colour film that I've shot, meaning that I am completely caught up in processing my films for the first time since I started teaching at the UofR. The optical printing of super-8 onto vision colour negative is looking good although a lot of the colour print stock looks like it doesn't have much colour range. I got him started telecining all of the recent work onto video. I'll soon be able to put some clips up on the web from the 16mm versions of Modern.
Watched Donny Darko last night. For those who have seen it, it seems at first to be strewn with odd coincidences, not the least of which seemed to be the fact that I watched it after Battlestar Galactic and that the title character's mother is the same actress as the president. Hmmm, how did they plan that...?

317

Eric and I developed the Modern work from yesterday plus some colour negative from optical printing super-8 and 3 rolls of colour print film for Grain (totally 800 feet). It started raining so we only got half of it dry, the rest was in buckets. I'm on the hunt for good jugs for chemistry so I had Eric drive me past the janitorial supply place on Dewdney on the way home but they didn't sell any. There was an interesting story on CBC about youtube "virus" videos, videos that seem to get thousands of hits per day and where they came from. The case study was a rather absurd, but earnest music video called "Speak The Hungarian Rapper", it's pretty ridiculous but fun. The back up singers are apparently all popular Hungarian pop starts, now a bit past their prime and down enough on their luck to take part in this. After I got home and started hanging up the wet film I had in my buckets up onto the clothes line, Margaret came home and casually said "so you must have found the car". "What do you mean", I asked. She then explained that she left me two phone messages saying she was leaving the car in the parking lot for me. I didn't notice the messages so I had to get a ride back to the university to get it, then quickly home to eat and then to the Filmpool for a short Board meeting then a meeting with Christopher Dray, who is in town to advise us on a capital campain to acquire a building.

316

Eric and I set up to kinescope more Modern footage today. He's got some graphics work on the new Stephen King movie shooting in Regina now, so after the camera battery died I let him go and work on his road signs while I charged it up. Shot a 400' roll, that's another 11 minutes. It's made up mostly of new material, although it does have a couple minutes of stuff from a couple of years ago that I never included before including some with Tanya Dahms' microscopic surface images captured with a laser. I was amused by one video I created that has this image with descriptive text floating across the screen slowly enough that it takes on a deliberate video strobe/shift. While not really video, it is astoundingly video. This afternoon I worked on End of Life video stuff, starting to get really tough on it and trimming it to the bone. I'm getting braver and happier with it. I couldn't stay awake tonight and basically passed out between chapters while reading to William at 7:00.

313

I worked on creating some new videos for Modern today, I want 11 more to kinescope on Monday. Sometimes I think I'm repeating myself, they all start off derivative of my previous work, but then I work it and work it until it is new again. They make me happy. I have about 6 or 7 new now, hope to finish tomorrow. I might have finished the set had I not been so tired, I sat in front of the computer while it was doing a five minute render and drifted off in my chair, had a wild set of dreams about Lego until the computer chimed and woke me with a start. Had supper at mom's tonight. Margaret booked us a trip to Toronto next month on air miles (free but for the $700+ in taxes). She's found a Lego store there, will be a thrill for William. I put my birthday present from William to use finally, it is a small metal lunch box, about 4x6x3", with Spiderman on it. Joe and Roland helped me fit it with foam and today I cut it to hold my mp3 player, my memory cards, some ear-bud headphones, and my pen drive. Tonight's episode of Battlestar Gallactica, which promised answers, really didn't. I've been getting tired of the slow pace of it. All grit, no plot.

312

Today I demonstrated the optical printer to Eric and had him reproduce some super-8 footage onto 16mm film while I developed some black and white film. Amazingly, I developed all of the backlog I had of black and white, this is the first time I've done that since 2001! Then we developed the colour footage Eric shot; however, the colour developer must not keep as well -- the footage is rather dim (as is the test control strip), so the test was inconclusive. I'll have to start it again tomorrow or Monday. I want to save the new batch of chemistry for the next batch of kinescoped images that I'll shoot next week.
I had Kalyn and her boyfriend over for supper. She figured out how to get me onto the server and allow me to update my own website. I have done a few changes, just minor things such as activate the return to main button on William's page and the Splice magazine page, and to connect the second How to be an Experimental Filmmaker button to its page. I've not figured out how to add new pages yet, but I should get it alter.
After Kalyn and James left, Margaret started falling asleep so Paul and I built Bionicles out of the box of parts, so William will find 10 assembled in the morning, instead of just 4.

311

This afternoon I went to a nutrition session which was supposed to tell me about tri-glycerides, a concern since my liver tests showed only that I have fat around my liver that could be a future problem. Instead, the session told me how to reduce my cholesterol (which is already low) and to eat more fiber (which I cannot do without dire physical consequences). There were about 20 people there and I really didn't feel like making a fuss then and there. On the way home I picked up some romance comics then made some worthwhile new Modern videos that Margaret was convinced were done with colour pencil and ink, even though every texture was digital. I was trying out some masks which are arranged to reveal out of phase versions of itself below itself. I made three that I'm happy with. Margaret was interviewed by reporters regarding the Cathedral Festival and showed off the Ghost Rider lantern than she made with William's help. It's cool.

310

Eric and I got into the darkroom first thing this morning, or at least 10 am or so, to develop the Warhol footage we kinescoped last week. I chose to use the Kodak "Flexcolor" C41 negative developer to cross process the colour reversal film. The source video images had been converted to negative so the outcome will be a positive with no orange masking that is inherent in regular negative colour films. I've had mixed results with this and I was worried this was going to be a bad day after the first test gave me black frames (but great frame lines). unwilling to give up right away (but in the back of my head planning to re-shoot the footage) we reduced the developer time from 4 minutes to 2 (and the temperature had dropped from 36 degrees to 32) and the result was amazing! I probably have the best colour film I've every processed. We did all 800 feet, plus a roll of black and white, and everything turned out well. We dried it all on the lawn outside the Education Building but the sun was behind rain clouds and the wind had calmed. While it didn't rain, the drying started taking too long and I had to pick up William at school and had no car. I couldn't just leave Eric working since he was my ride. Therefore, I gathered the largest piece, a 250 roll, and carried it as a huge mass into Eric's car and he sped to Connaught School, only 3 minutes late for picking up William. I wound the film onto its core while standing on one of the few pieces of grass in the schoolyard. The still above is from Modern, as converted to film from video using my rudimentary systems. The colours are not altered.

305

Very busy day, not the least of which was my sudden urge to create a blog for William so that we can periodically post his Lego news. Here it is: William Loves Lego.
At about 3 minutes before 9am this morning, Margaret and I both left the house to walk William to school and to look at the book fair in the gym. When we got back, we'd missed the courier (who claims to have been there at 8:58, even though the 9:00 bell rang when we were just 2/3 of the way to the school which is only 1.5 blocks from our house in a straight line with a clear line of sight). As a result, I didn't get the stock I needed to shoot the next Modern/Warhol films, which wasn't a big deal since Eric called to say he was swamped by the last thing he needed to do for his last job. It gave me time to get all my ducks in a row for shooting tomorrow as well as other necessities such as mixing up reversal bleach over in Tanya's lab for the weekend workshop. I did stay up until 2:30 last night getting the Warhol 15 minutes of famous finished and packaged to dvd, but I have one flaw that I'm going to work on now.

303

I hired Eric Hill to help me on a couple of my projects. He started today. We got a few things together in the darkroom, although I discovered that I'm out of black and white developers and I forgot my notes for colour work at home, so we canceled the darkroom time. We shot some video i needed and tested the use of a data projector and rear screen for a kinescope to see if it is preferable to using a regular tv.
I came home earlier than I'd planned, which seemed to be a good idea as it was 22 degrees today, and found that they poured our new sidewalk. Someone had already written "Smoke Pot" in ten inch letters in front of our walk. As I worked at smoothing it out, the city crew returned and fixed it properly. I hung out in front of the house, holding my anti-cement writing vigil while William took the next door neighbour's dog for a walk. Margaret went to work but made sandwiches first and served them on the front patio.

298

This morning I met with the Aboriginal End of Life research group. I had a chance to ask Elder Betty about William's concern that he shouldn't read any books after winter ended. She says that fantasy types of stories shouldn't be told after the solstice (June 21) but education based stories could be told.
This afternoon I finished a version of my website. I'm going to try to upload it with Kalyn's help tomorrow morning. I solved my sorting/data base issue with the spreadsheet in a crude fashion. I created hyperlinks to the web pages within the spreadsheet of titles. I then sorted the page in the ways I needed and exported the appropriate portions of the page for each sorting choice the website will have. Thus, in the end, the website just presents sorted lists, it doesn't do any sorting itself. To add new material, I will need to first add it to my spreadsheet and export it into the necessary choices (each film will be in a minimum of three lists; chronological, alphabetic, and at least one genre). However, after making a mistake with the list and having to redo them all, I found that I can do this update in about 5 to 10 minutes, so not a big deal.
Margaret got her hair cut and when she got home I shot my Warhol video of her. I've not finished all the manipulations of this video set, but I now have all 15 of the source images (see photo: this is not the background I used, I shot outside with a grid pattern from the deck behind her).
This morning the courier arrived with my three boxes of film stock consisting of twenty 100' rolls of 16mm colour negative, ten 400' rolls of 16mm black and white negative, 1000' of 35mm black and white negative, and the super expensive 1000' roll of 35mm colour reversal!
Tonight there was a retrospective screening of Ian Toews's films at the Filmpool. I wrote the program notes and am posting them on my other blog. Ian liked them, which is always the worry about such things.

295

This morning I sat in Atlantis Coffee (downtown) and worked on my program notes I was asked to write for the screening of Ian Toews' films on Thursday at the Filmpool. At 10:30, Maya Batten-Young met me and we chatted about film industry and student films and stuff, and I shot my 1 minute Warhol video of her. She is #14, I just need Margaret now for my complete set of 15. I also ran into Jarret Rusnick there, he showed me a clip of a commercial project he's working on that will use lots of visual tricks such as this five frame per second blending sequence. I thought it was pretty cool and said I should have thought of it. He quipped that every time a friend succeeds, a part of us dies. William's home reading, which is usually a 12-20 page book taking between 5 and 20 minutes to read, was a 108 page multi-story grade two reader that took him over 2 hours to work through. That's another page done for the Mayor's mega-minute reading challenge that he's so excited about. Speaking of the Mayor, my dad heard him speak at his Gyro club meeting the other day and he said that the rail relocation program is in the works (again). This makes more sense now, with property values increasing that strip of land through the city is finally worth something, although I'm surprised I've seen nothing in the newspaper about it.

290

I submitted my taxes today, will get a little bit back, but not as much as I spent today. I placed an order for over $4000 worth of film stock for my Grain and Modern projects. This order included a 1000 foot roll of 35mm colour reversal. That stuff costs about $2.50 per second. I bakes some mini-cheesecakes, gluten free, chocolate. I have to remember the timing for these mini-ones as I have no cheesecake recipe, so here is as good a place as any: one batch of batter makes 72 mini-cakes, bake for 20 minutes. I finished act 1 of my screenplay version of A Midsummer Nights Dream. I need to finish a draft in the next month or so.

281 my birthday

It's my birthday so I premeditatedly dove off of my reduced sugar diet I've managed to maintain for an entire week. Today began with Belgium chocolate in bed. I picked up William at lunchtime and took him to A&W where we each had a teen burger (I ate about 1/3 of his) and root beers. At supper, William wrapped me a can of Coke, so it only seemed right that I drink it. I baked a cheesecake, chocolate, and we had some of that later - although in my twisted reality, cheesecake IS a health food.
My horoscope in the Leader Post for the year reads: "You're so powerful this year that it's like you can control time itself. You learn and do more in the next year than many people would do in 10. Believe in your powers to exceed the norm. ..." Well that sure rocks.
So part of my time travel today was to run errands, pick up a hard drive and camera from work, wash the car, put gas in the car ($1.26 or so per litre), pick up issue 13 of Buffy Season 8 from the comic store (funniest issue ever, Xander hanging with Dracula), drank some of my expensive tequila and talked super-heroes with Gavin de Lint who stopped by with his three year old son Jack to drop off a book for Margaret, restocked my herbs, met with Christina at the university regarding Caroline Leaf and chatted about Warhol, did a phone reference for a student seeking a job, and got home in time to do some great work on my videos before William was out of school. Margaret came home with Terry, with whom I was chatting for a few minutes while Margaret went upstairs to print off a file from the computer from her. However, Margaret comes down and tells me she can't find any of her files. I come up here and find that Margaret's entire folder under the My Files is gone! I look in recycle bin and do searches in the computer and cannot find it. I figure I should re-boot and hope that it's just some glitch that will sort itself out, so I tell the computer to reboot. It tells me that I have After Effects running and, realizing that I'd not saved the really nice looking Warhol style piece I did on Gerri Ann Siwek, I hit cancel. I suppose I should have read the question of the screen more carefully, as the computer takes this to mean that it should continue to reboot and my file was lost. I grouched for a while then got back in the saddle (Gerri Ann is shot on William's spring horse), and I eventually find Margaret's folder, which had been moved inside a different folder. I do not understand why it did not appear with a search. I rebuilt my Gerri Ann video: see still below. I used a more feathered edge and lowered the contrast on the initial image, rather than increasing it as I've done on some others. Overall I like the effect of this altered approach. Some of the blue is going to be replaced with real images, something about death such as car crashes or dead buffalo if I can find something appropriate. I read with William for an hour then watched "Shoot em Up", a movie I'd never heard of before Kevin lent it to me a couple of weeks ago. It was fabulously funny. I watched half of it over again with Margaret right away afterwards. It owes a lot to John Woo and Quinton Terantino, but is definitely its own film, funny at every turn with death and mayhem that straddles both the absurd and the emotionally real. HIGHLY recommended for a fun evening (extreme violence warning).
I got 11 birthday greeting through Facebook! More than in real life!

280

I worked on my videos first thing this morning and got my Jeannie Mah - Warhol piece done, as well as the preliminary work on my Jason Shabatoski video. This latter one requires me to insert a video file I have at work for it to be complete. He'll be done as a multiple panel video, nearly the same image four times. With Jeannie I began to pull one of the layers out of registration, like a misprint in a multi colour process. This brings me pretty close to my 15 minutes of famous set.
William and I ran errands today while Margaret was at work. I taught him what "disappointment" means. We did not find good white t-shirts to paint on at the store I thought they'd be at, then we didn't find a new supply of patio lanterns at Canadian Tire. Then we found both the Quinn the Eskimo store and the Old Fashioned Foods stores to be closed. When we got home we began watching Jason and the Argonauts today. It is just right for him, get him nervous about the fights, excited about the effects, and links to the Greek mythology that he's been interested in.

279

William had a play date over today and I worked on my Warhol videos. I finished my overly complicated on on Allan Dotson, putting a montage of ultra-close ups from 1970s comic books into the background, breaking from the colour fields for the first time.Last night I watched episode 13, the final episode, of Jpod, the CBC television series based upon the Copeland novel of the same name that I read last summer. I've been really enjoying the show, even though they made a couple of the characters too soft and the series began a bit rocky. Perhaps it will find some other life. The episode seemed to be designed to be the final episode, with their division being canceled by the bureaucracy for no good reason. It was an apt jab at CBC. However, there was suddenly a cliff hanger closer that annoyed me, wish they were able to end it cleanly.

277

I had another fever yesterday but I managed to have it break before I needed to go out to the MacKenzie Art Gallery for the Thursday night Warhol event. Last nigh, Dr. Christina Stojanova presented two long films, one by New York experimental filmmaker Jonas Mekas which was made up of 15 years of clips of Andy. The third film was a cool documentary in which some German filmmakers go to the town Warhol's family (Warhola) were from and where he often sent artwork. Until the late 80s, they were under the Soviets and were not allowed to know about decadent American art, so knew nothing about him (many paintings and drawings were damaged and thus discarded). Between the two, she played my one minute self portrait in the Warhol style I've been working on. Looked good.

Today I set up a Flickr account and posted 197 photos from my vacation to Mexico last week. I initially chose about 350 photos and compressed the appropriately, but then Flickr informed me that only 200 were allowed (I think this is a monthly quota, but true to form I didn't read the details).