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:
