new Sock-Vile "material"

Working on Sock-Vile every day. Sometimes just an hour or two, sometimes eight or more hours, but always progress. I want to make it as good as I can while staying in the spirit of what it began as, so when I needed to re-build the laundromat interiors with machines running, I remembered that Erik had done some really jazzed up digital washing rotations. I wanted that but realized that it was too slick so I photographed some socks then created new spin cycles with them. There is so much material for this project but almost daily I discover something missing. If I was doing this project again, I'd have someone assigned to be in the edit room for the entire shooting period, assembling and creating lists of missing shots or desired closeups, backgrounds, and foregrounds. Regardless, I'm increasingly happy with the outcomes. 

Sock-Vile progress

About 10 years ago I did a course with a great bunch of students which was entirely focused on one project, an episodic puppet tv series called "Sock-Vile". Everyone worked really hard and the results were magnificent, expect the follow through. We managed to work together to write 15 episodes of the series, each about 10 pages. The class worked in teams, some creating puppets, some refining the scripts, some building props, some casting and pre-recording voices, and everyone on set shooting. The script was recorded in a sound studio and edited as audio and then lip sunk on set with puppets against a green screen. These short cuts allowed us to shoot the 150 pages of script in 3 days. I put together an assembly with no green screen replacement by the end of the 13 week term.
Then things slowed down.
Some students continued working on backgrounds.
I worked on and off with Erik Sirke to shoot background and edit, but the project was just too big and admittedly a bit too inconsistent. About 4 years ago I sat down with Erik Sirke and Geremy Lague and we re-considered the entire project. Instead of 15 chapters with numerous threads tying them together, we resorted it so that it would be just 3 longer chapters, each focusing on particular season-long stories. I began editing but time was not my friend. I got distracted and then let it slide. It is a very complicated project and cannot be picked up and put down without repercussions. Progress stopped again.
Three weeks ago I began work in earnest. Today I got the first pass of effects for the first of the three episodes (about 30 minutes). I still need to render it and certainly there will be fixes needed, but the quarantine has given me some time at home that this project needed. 

Mrs Stoattoadlich takes on Canister

Armed with a surplus of the dreaded "common sense", Mrs. Stoattoadlich banished Canister to the time vortex where he would not be able to get his hands on Frederick's plans for the unstacapacitor. 

Sockvile and Geremy's basement

Geremy, Erik and I (with a bit of commentary from William) made some significant editorial decisions about the perpetually uncompleted "Sockvile" puppet program I made with a group of 15 students in a course five years ago. I've been feeling that the 15 episode structure was just not working. It was uneven with some episodes rushed, others crammed,and storylines getting lost. I'd decided to try to tighten it into one long film but this weekend we started realizing that some of the subplots, specifically some of the better subplots, were not relevant to the primary plot and should be removed if we were really intent on making a feature. Today we decided to create three stories which intercept each other, taking place at the same time. I'm confident this will be more satisfying. Now the real work begins (again).
After burgers at Five Guys, we went to see Geremy's house. He basement will mess with you (observe):

Super-8 has been shot

 

This afternoon, after four days of planning, I shot my annual One Take Super 8 film (to be screened in Saskatoon in early July). These photos are the first, ultra-secret, behind the scenes images of "Rockem, Sockem, Canister" taken from the undisclosed location in the Film Department studio where, with the help of some of my graduate students, An, Jingyi, and Geremy, I have reinvented cinema (not really. actually I'll be lucky if you can even tell what is going on).

Camera Lucida

I purchased a prism and have been trying to figure out how a camera lucida works. I've started to get the basic principle. The prism allows you to see a double image; a combination of your drawing surface and a space in front of you. This allows you to basically trace what you see. Lighting, as with all of these pre-20th century optical tools, is vital. Also, a steady and workable structure needs to be built. This one, constructed from metal bits, begins to work except that it is too upright, forcing you to draw only the right side of the image, and it is very difficult to align the prism, since it is held willy-nilly using an overstretched clothes pin. 

Sleeping Man Walking

Don't go into the light little fish, you are much too young.

I woke up at 3:00 am, haunted by the many tiny deadlines I have this week. Unable to actually do anything about any of them, I thought I'd relax by going downstairs to watch my new fish for a spell. However, one of them was lying on the bottom doing nothing. Was is dead? Killed by the same event that killed my other two? No, it was just sleeping, but it made me feel increasingly angry and uneasy (a bad combination). I went back upstairs and typed on a side project for a couple of hours until at 5:30 Margaret made coffee and we both went back to sleep (no, it was not decaf, I cannot explain this). Suffice to say, I felt like a wreck at my meetings today but managed to put in a couple of hours on Sockvile at the end. Also shipped off a new video, "MNDR" to a gallery in Romania who invited me to participate in a project. You just can't turn down mysterious Romanians, even when they intrude on your other deadlines. Baked some ginger snaps for William's school carnival tomorrow while Margaret was out at a work meeting. Now, before the last bits of whatever is keeping me going wears out, I have a couple of references letters to write. 

Halloween

Fortunately we did a lot of preparation for Halloween this year because I spent my whole day on a variety of deadlines. Erik is going away for a while so he gave me the hard drive of all of the Sockvile material so I can work on it myself. I put a number of entries in for consideration for the Filmpool premiere screening. I got an introduction animation/collage segment created for the French SF conference which has preliminary events tomorrow. I also did some shopping for the cocktail party on Saturday night. My film loop for the Halloween   window was created in colour 16mm from a kinescope of video shot at the zombie walk. It ran 3.5 hours without breaking. 

Sockvile car crash

Erik and I shot a dozen or so shots we still need to fill in gaps with Sockvile. I think we have the first five episodes ready to assemble finally. Here is a behind the scenes of the car crash.

Sock-vile Soup

Assembled and photographed Sock-vile soup cans today to create some store displays. Erik came over for a while, had a bit of food and a martini. 

background details

Today I built a button chandelier for the Baron's castle in Sockvile, as well as the book cover for the opening of the series" "Book of all the Socks" in Thomas Phinney's restored Cristoforo font laid out on top of a cover made of the skin of a sock puppet (or more precisely, from an image of Matt's sock mask he wore in the puppeteer episode).
Our new individual garbage cans arrived today, replacing the large communal bins. More hassle remembering to get it in place every week, but no longer have to contend with Don filling it to the brim with his loose grass clippings (don't know how he does it, no one has a lawn that big around here). 

Summer slipping past

Bad night last night, woke with a headache I couldn't shake at 5 am. Fell back asleep for an hour around 7. It seems that now what I have stopped making a video every day, my summer is slipping away a bit too quickly.. I met with grad students this morning, met with Erik about Sockvile and other stuff this afternoon, and went to "Ice Age 4" for the early evening show. When we got home we picked our raspberries and I built some Bionicles with William. I guess it sounds like a lot, but it doesn't feel like it,

Stormy weather

William and I had a wonderful sit down under some minimal cover while a huge thunderstorm took place above our house. Very loud.
Met the new neighbor, Patrick, today. Seems nice. He has a mouse and we should lend him Sylvie.
We ran a bunch of errands and shopping this afternoon.

Gertrud found me an old saw blade which I'd hoped to cut in half and turn into a pendulum for Sockvile, but I ended up creating the sequence digitally (with a scan of  the blade) instead of a practical. Hope it works.

Studio visits

 I worked at cleaning up my basement over the past couple of days. I fortunately discovered that a heavily laden shelf of films that was tilting oddly was doing so because the particle board bottom had become wet sometime recently and needed to be discarded. I have been trying to shoot some small pick-ups for Sockvile, but also have some other plans. Feels good to be able to turn around down there, it had become filled with boxes from every unfinished project for the past decade.

 This evening we also went to Rob Bos's gallery/home and purchased a couple of his Robot Duck paintings (done under the pseudonym Stan Channing). Rob is returning to Chicago this fall to finish his MFA and currently raising funds to make sure that happens.

Sockvile progress

Met with Erik today to look at and discuss progress on Sockvile. Started making a list shots and elements we still need.
I created the credits for Grain 2 using the laser printer technique. They will be random but hopefully legible.
This evening we watched the first episode of season 2 of Sherlock.

working on films

Busy working on projects today. Shot a video of the city through the budding leaves to represent transition times here. I'd been waiting for my new lens adapter to mount my old manual focus lenses to the digital camera but gave up and shot this without it. Later in the afternoon, it arrived. I have also been going through SockVile one episode per day and sending notes to Erik so he can progress with them. I also bought some pieces I need to finish building my puppet for my Big World project (some reading about the set used in an early Brothers Quay film has me fired up about it). William was home from school but we didn't make a video together. Perhaps tomorrow. On my vhs dubbing project, I copied a bunch of episodes of Utopia Cafe I had worked on. I doubt that I'll look at them any time soon, but I would hate to through them out without a copy and not have the option of watching them.

Shooting super-8

I made my super-8 film today, with the help of William. He performed the narration and then we worked to the playback of the narration when we shot it at the university. It took 3 hours, even though the film was shot in one go (3.5 minutes). The set up and clean up were murder. I'm not even sure it worked very well. Fingers crossed.

warm feet sharpens the mind

Margaret bought me a pair of alpaca slippers yesterday, responding to my months of agony over cold feet around the house. It allowed me to focus and completely rewrite the dialogue for the super-8 film I'm trying to make, a Sockvile inter-season teaser in iambic pentameter.

Evan Rust

I found out yesterday that Evan Rust is no longer the administrator for the New Media Studio Lab at the UofR. This is a huge blow to me, he has been tremendously supportive of work in the lab and is skilled and well informed about media and media technologies. His background is in sound recording and mixing and worked on "Wapos Bay", "Tideland", "Little Mosque", and many other shows. He was key to the success of getting Sockvile recorded and the playback established. He also volunteered to mix the sound for "All the Boys are Called William" last year. With my sabbatical coming up and Sockvile in post production, I had high hopes of working much closer with him over the next six months, which would certainly have been a pleasure since he is both nice and capable (a rare combination some days).  It is certainly a shame and I am feeling rather powerless about it.

Sockvile gets political

 This morning Erik and I went to the legislature building and shot photos and video of empty hallways for backgrounds in one episode of Sockvile. Margaret had a day full of prep for another big art social as well as an artist trading card session (Halloween and stitching as a theme, which William was excited about), so I ended up taking him along. He's never been inside there before so it was a cool thrill.