The Easter Bunny came early

Margaret won an 11 lb Belgian chocolate bunny!!!

Flood

We took a walk in the park to look at the highest water levels we've ever seen.

mini figs

It was the semi-annual reconnecting of all the mini-figs with their heads and hands. I'm down about 20 hands but suspect they might be squirreled away in a bag somewhere.

Will Nye the Science Guy

The oddest thing I've done this week, so far, was to alter the voice and on-screen text of the Disney show "Bill Nye the Science Guy" into "Will Nye the Science Guy" for William's presentation in the morning.

not funny any more

Snowed all night. Didn't melt much. Worked at home, trying to get taxes and choral dvd and grading all figured out. Only went out for short while in pjs and rubber boots to build snowman.

new mini figs

Worked on my taxes in front of my backlog of "Republic of Doyle" all evening. William got the punk rocker with his first series four mini-fig.

Brrrrr

Dan and Les drove back to Winnipeg today. They had to drive on sections of the #1 highway covered with a few inches of water. Back in Regina, floods give way to blizzards. I think winter has finally come... back.

Guests

Artist Dan Donaldson and old friend Les Newman are guests in our house this week. Dan has an opening of his paintings at the Art Gallery of Regina tomorrow. Les is installing with him.

 

Our backyard is still full of water. I bailed a lot of it away again (50-60 gallons) and then Dave from next door lent us his pump because his water is mostly gone.

willim sick

I had an early meeting today and then thought I could take a rest at home. I don't think I've had a rest in a month. When I arrived I discovered that William was sick and home for the day. He and I watched Woody Allen's Zelig. It's one of my favorites. I didn't get much rest though. Margaret needed some help getting ready for Les who was coming in from Winnipeg today and staying with us for a night or two.

water

My back yard is underwater. The house is higher but there is seepage anyway. I spent an hour shoveling water off the lawn into buckets and hauling them to the alley. This helped.

Mad Men season four

I finished watching season four of Mad Men. Paul gave me the first seasons for Christmas and I got the fourth recently from Amazon. It was a much better season than the third, getting back to the humour and the advertisements and less on Don's marriage and issues. The packaging on the first three seasons was ellegant, bring appropriate detail to match the content. The fourth is just the folded cardboard package with the plastic portions already falling off. The whole thing was just shrink rapped, shoddy and unattractive.

Party

This is the last day of a week in which I had multiple deadlines and time commitments. The morning began with a set of meetings with William's teachers. This was very informative but the timing could have been better. On the way back to the office I stopped and shipped the poetry videos I made to Bulgaria. The mpeg video render of the Sock-Vile project worked out so we were able to watch the 2 hour cut I created in class today. My students came over to our house for bbq. William was a great host, keeping a check list, announcing their arrivals, and giving out Lego door prizes.

My Birthday

Breakfast was sweet. Day was exhausting. Finished a rough assembly of all 15 episodes of Sock-vile and documented Courtney Milne event.

tired

William woke up this morning with a bad dream around 5. I thought he'd gone back to sleep (which is what I did) but he actually eventually went downstairs and listed to the new Eddie Izzard cd I bought him (when you start to tell me what a bad idea that was, I have to tell you that I was voraciously listening to Cheech and Chong when I was his age). Anyway, he is very tired now, as am I. Worked a very long day. More on that later.

poetry videos

I got my entries completed for the Bulgarian poetry video project. I had hoped to have six entries but only had time to finish three and those are a bit below par. My Sockvile deadline is screamingly close so I cannot afford another hour on them, even if my brain was capable.I don't know if they are worth shipping but that's probably just the despair talking.

last photography class

End of term for photography. A couple people will have late work to hand in.

Golem of Socks

This afternoon I recorded William doing the voice for the Golem of Socks, the last remaining character for my separate version of Sockvile. I wrote it a couple of years ago (notes are likely here in my blog for anyone who cares) with the intention of practicing some 3D After Effects. It is in 13 one minute serialized melodramas. I went to copy it to my portable drive off the older Mac based ProTools suite and surprise of surprise, the two wouldn't work together. Can't I go one day without facing a mac/pc conflict?
Yesterday I chose the update to the blog editor and it  allows much more manipulation of the posting, moving photos around and changing their size and so on. 

Trading Card party

Today was the 8th anniversary party for the Artist Trading Card (ATC) group that Margaret is an organizer of. I finally started on some new cards although only one is ready, the first card for series two of my Rerun: Canister the Robot collages. Here is the central image:

I also spent a lot of time stressing about the video files for the choral work on Courtney Milne scheduled for later this week. The videos I've been sending to David Gerhard have gone into the dropbox as 720x480 but he downloads them and they then seem to be only 1/4 that size. I changed compressors a couple of times and as inexplicably as it started not working, it started working.Is it another mac/pc thing? I don't know.

too much IS too much

April Fools Day: This morning I helped William make coffee for Margaret: boiled water with dark food colouring. Yum. He wanted a crayon in it but we didn't go that direction.
When I got to work I discovered that I can't transfer files larger than 4Gb from the Mac where I've captured the Sockvile footage into a hard drive formatted to pc. This just further drives home the idea that a Mac computer can easily do anything you ask it to do so long as you never ask it to do something that it can't do. The list of things it can't do is kept secret and left for you to discover one item at a time.
In class, instead of being able to watch footage, we took a break to watch Darrell Prohor do a talk on his research into historical photography in western Canada. Then we did some improvised music in the studio.

Too much is never...

I spent all day viewing and labeling clips from Sockvile. We didn't slate any shots but I can actually figure out where each clip goes after only 3-5 seconds in most cases. I didn't quite finish the job as we had dinner guests, Leif and his girls, but am close enough to finish in morning. I bought a new 2 terabyte hard drive with numerous interfaces including firewire 800. This will be able to hold the Sockvile data (raw tapes come to about 600 Gb) and additional images and footage we'll need.

Turtle fundraiser

William is busking to raise money for the class pet.

The devil made me do it

Or was it Colten?

There be leprechauns

In class today I managed to set up a last minute tour of Don Hall's photography studio. We also spotted some leprechauns.

cat and mouse

Stayed home all day prepping class, grading, and other stuff in front of the computer. Sylvie also hasn't gone out as she still isn't using her left paw. Getting a bit stir crazy.

Erik audio recording

Erik needed follow-up voice work done for the scenes where my time traveler character is wearing his helmet and preparing to depart from the 21st century. When he shot it, we were running late so insisted that the character put on his helmet at the beginning of the scene rather than the end of it. After that, I just pantomimed the bits and they also used a body double to shoot extra. To get the right sound, we recorded with the helmet on. Yes, I could hear through the head set.

Limpy

Three days ago Sylvie, our cat, came home with a limp. It appears that she has injured, perhaps broken, the finger on on one of her paws and doesn't put any weight on it. There is no cut or blood and she doesn't lick it and there isn't any significant swelling, so I don't think there is an infection. However, I am concerned that the limp looks like it is getting worse today. She is in a good mood, purring and so on, except that we won't let her outside.

Filler day

Today I had three meetings, each of which was canceled or postponed. Here is a behind the scenes clip from Sock-vile instead of something to represent my non-day (although I did make good use of some free time to return scaffolding with Margaret's dad).

Fancy dress day

William had fancy dress up day at school. I think every day this week has a theme. Tomorrow is retro-80s day but we are unfortunately out of white sports jackets so he'll have to settle for a leather tie.

confusion

We are a couple of days into spring and facing a nasty blizzard. Margaret had trouble on the road trying to go to Rouleau to do a ATC workshop. She got home safely but had to cancel the session.

the morning after

I had a difficult time sleeping last night: was all wound up after the shoot but couldn't let myself watch tv because I had to teach in the morning. Was a zombie in class. Now I am feeling overwhelmed by something but I don't know what. I feel like Ive forgotten something very important and have the guilt feeling in the pit of my stomach but I can't figure out why. Likely I just need to get some sleep.

Sock-vile wraps

At 12:40, Sock-vile completed its final shot. The studio was wrapped 35 minutes later. Everyone is very tired but it looks like we got it all. Total of about 5 hours of footage.

Charlie Fox visits Sock-vile

This photo is from yesterday actually. I have lots of photos from today but I am very tired and cannot think clearly.

Sock-vile and paper cutting

My only break from the Sock-vile shoot was to go to the Dunlop opening with Ed Pien. He creates amazing paper cut installations. On the Sock-vile front, the team dressed a sausage in a paper dress.

St. Patrick's Day in Sock-vile

Actually, I didn't set up a St. Patrick's day episode. We have a Halloween, Christmas, New Years, and Easter episodes, which is a lot considering we only have 15 episodes. Perhaps in season 2?
Shooting resumed. We got a full day in but are behind. I had to lay down the law and declare less cinema and more efficiency.

Sock-vile Day One shooting

Four hours of set up and eight hours of shooting. There has been a puppeteering learning curve that we're confident we'll beat.

pre-production

As with any production, the various elements are still in the works and will not be finished until shooting has started. Last night I tried to assemble the scaffolding but I had I some of the wrong size pieces so this morning I needed to exchange them. I also plastered and painted the background for the green screen and met with Evan and Roland and worked out the details for the camera and external monitors (2). I was also building the transformation chamber and the Partybot5000 today, with Margaret's help. The bot uses magnets, the chamber uses glue. I bought a glue gun yesterday, it is my new friend.

Photoshop

We spent some time in class creating fake portraits and learning some photoshop basics. I've been so busy with Sock-vile and other stuff that I don't have time to blog.

Christmas on Easter Island?

William went tobogganing with his cousins today to Douglas Park hill. He ran into a tree and got bruised on the first run and sat out the rest of the session. I've never see the hill and am surprised that anyone is tobogganing where they can run into things.

More cousins

This afternoon William's cousins came to visit for a week. I spent the day shopping for props and editing my second episode of the audio for Sock-vile (9).

props

Carl left this morning. It was a wirl-wind visit but certainly successful. I ran past William F. Whites (motion picture supply) to see if they had green screen coloured tape but they didn't. They did, however, have some left over green screen paint that they gave me for free (thanks Ron Jacobs). In class today we spent almost the entire class listing of props we need. This evening was the visual arts BFA show at the MAG. Most of the work was of exceptional quality.

Fathers and Sons

I spent the day with Carl, touring him a bit of the university, feeding him at the club, getting Don Hall to take his picture for our wall of fame, and setting him up to meet with a bunch of students and talk about their work. This evening Carl premiered his film "Fathers and Sons" at the RPL theatre. I introduced him. I am always bad at these sorts of intros unless I can fit it into a good anecdote which somehow I couldn't even though I've known him 17 years.

Carl Bessai

Today Carl Bessai came to Regina. Our department brought him in as a guest to talk with students. He did a lively lecture this evening. It was very successful. Carl asked me what he should talk about and I only told him he should give them hope. He told them to move to L.A. Ummmm, I don't think that was really the plan, but actually I think that they were quite inspired by the talk and all the advice. The best gage is always in the number of students who linger afterward to get some extra chatting in; half the class were there for an extra half hour.

Editing audio

I edited the first episode of Sock-vile audio today. It ran over 10 minutes and I had to trim about 3 minutes out. I kept all the content but got rid of a few jokes and stuff.

Ghosts

In class today we did more low light work, this time primarily considering intermittent light, 19th century ghost photography, and the contemporary work of Winnipeg's Diane Thorneycroft. See many more images on our class wiki. The images are large so it might take a while to load up.

Choral

This afternoon I observed the rehearsal of the choral presentation dedicated to the late photographer Courtney Milne. I've been editing his photos together into videos to run in the background for the show.
I took a break and bought a pop and candy bar from the food court which is now run like a cafeteria. They were out of quarters and dimes so I got 80 cents change in nickels. Heavy.

Sock-vile recordings conclude

This afternoon we recorded Amy Dakue as Mrs. Stoattoadlich, which means that the 160 pages of scripts the students wrote have all been recorded!!! I need one more voice, which William agreed to do, to complete mine (which won't be shot with the others so it isn't important to do other than the general need to move forward).

cyborg puppets

Today in class we got verrrry busy. Chrystene Ells came for the first half hour and gave us an amazingly useful workshop on puppeteering, I wish I could be that concise when I teach something. Everyone agreed that it was useful and for once, I think they were telling the truth. We also went to the recording studio and put some of the final voices (but for one) to tape. These included the crowds, the single line random puppets, the giant chicken, and the glove monster. Additionally, Rob Hillstead came to class and did a workshop for the camera team on lighting a green screen. Most of the puppets are complete now and I think the final few will be ready by the end of the weekend.

Two more recordings

This evening we recorded Jerry for Nick and Joe for New Simon as well as a couple of incidental voices. I spent all day editing a demo version of a photo montage of Courtney Milne for a choral presentation next month. We are doing a run through on Sunday.

oh

my....

Recordings today: Marsha and some additional Simon lines.
Had meeting regarding Milne project and got collection of images to assist in creating video.
Had meeting with Evan to figure out external monitor on camera.
Had meeting at Filmpool to discuss 35th anniversary book project idea.
Had meeting in morning about new courses and so on.
Had meeting with Brett about what makes a film complicated for different people.
Time to watch tv now, am in mid third season of Man Men.

my office, my shame

This afternoon my office was turned into police headquarters for Chips Ahoy!