One Take Super 8

This evening was the tenth annual One Take Super 8 Event. Good crowd, mostly good films. It is interesting to note that some films felt short and others felt long even though they were all the exact same length. Who invented this reality thing because it seems so screwed up. Berny Hi (in audience to right of frame reading his program) made a film about his cat was one that Margaret and I were talking about on the way home that we felt we'd like to have heard more and had it go on longer. Charming and beautiful even though I didn't quite understand what he was cooking or how he got an ear infection. My film and William's film turned out well. There were a few who suggested that I "cheated" although no one presented me with a rule book governing the event. Dianne Ouellette, pictured above, also had a new film about the end of her relationship with a tall guy who's name happened to be Gerald. It might be time for me to write about Dianne again, haven't discussed her films in two or three years.

The Great Pumpkin

William and Omi went to Lumsden after school and picked out pumpkins.

Perfect attendence

The weather was perfect and I had all 24 of my Film 400 students in class today for the first time (it is only the third class but there is bound to be someone missing most weeks of a term) so at the end of the session we headed outside for a couple of quick snaps just in case they don't all get there for the official portrait next month. Joanne came to class from the new SCN to update us on stuff like their newly announced date for their CRTC hearing which is miraculously soon.

restored Sullivan

Today was the celebration and official unveiling of Françoise Sullivan’s restored sculpture, Callooh-Callay. This sculpture was donated to the University of Regina in 1968 by the House of Seagram after having been built for Expo ’67. It was damaged and stored in pieces at some point during construction of the Riddell Centre about ten years ago. Sean Whalley headed up a restoration of it. Sullivan, now 80, is pictured above with Whalley, Sheila Petty, and Leesa Streifler. I missed all of the proceedings but caught the tail end with photo taking and meeting the artist. The weather was perfect today, sunny and hot.

art takes a turn

After a frustrating morning not getting my session for my Godard project to open at the university (it is Sunday morning so there was no one to ask advice of), we spent a nice afternoon at the MacKenzie Art Gallery where I watched Godard's "Hard and Soft" and William unexpectedly took on a leadership role and taught people how to make art with a salad spinner.

Regina Beach?

William and I took our longest bike ride ever today. Much of the path has been re-paved since earlier this summer, probably just prior to the marathon. We stopped when we reached this peculiar beach. Obviously man made but no amenities.

too busy to blog

Long day today. In my class we talked about super-8 and optical printing. Loaded and shot with both. This was followed by a meeting about equipment purchases and then our first year orientation. I almost forgot to grab sound effects cds from Joe on my way out so that I can finish off my One Take soundtracks this weekend. Margaret was in mid house cleaning when I got home and I threw in and sorted Lego for over an hour before Paul came over for "Thursday" supper which is now moved due to William's acting class last night. We watched the third and unfortunately last of the season episode of "Sherlock". Wow, good show.

Lego Me

Met with David Gane today, talked screenwriting. He showed me his new Ipod touch which has a camera in it (why didn't they before? Everyone else asks the same question). It has a free Lego Cam application. This is me.

talking

After a long day of teaching and meetings I almost slept through going to the Art Gallery of Regina for the new fabric based show curated by Wendy Peart (pictured here). Some good conversations and William got to run around doing spy stuff with Xander and Daniel.

what's new

I went to Don's Photo today to brainstorm ideas for my photography course this winter. I played with the new Canon camera which has some odd little features like the fisheye function (see above) and a function for making buildings look like toys.
Robin Schlaht came to my Film 400 class today.

memory problems

I'm trying to edit my Godard project but now my computer crashes due to the pigload of memory needed to deal with this uncompressed HD video.

It's Alive!

William went to Daniel's birthday party at the Laser Quest today, a first. Loud, certainly loud. I went to a Filmpool meeting that didn't get quorum but we had some good discussions anyways. The cat, as far as I know, slept.

proletariat

Workers of grade school unite!

Godard

The Jean-Luc Godard Sonimage started at the university today. I was able to attend a few of the papers being presented. Pictured here is the first panel, chaired by Philippe Mather with Gloria Monti of California State U and Douglas Morrey (standing) of U of Warwick in the UK).

school bbq

There was a bar be que at William's school today, followed by visits to classrooms and with teachers. It is sort of a more casual parent/teacher interview thing where not all parents come so you can set your own agenda and monopolize as much of their time as you want. Of course that is what we did. Things are actually going very well and I'm not expecting any real problems this year. We did discover that his teacher, Jeremy Black, is a big Calvin and Hobbes fan so there is yet another connection they make.

heavy metal

Rare sighting through the bush of the elusive modernism.

Class

Film 400 began today. As usual on the first day I talked too much. I managed to shut myself up long enough to hear from each of them for at least a moment or two.
While I have numerous deadlines, I found myself doing updates to my website again this evening. I've not gotten to the films of the past two years yet, but I filled in numerous blanks about curation and screenings. Funny thing; I was surfing around on my own site and clicked on a link I put in for my artwork, which was to a site I registered onto called "Terminus". I had put a number of photos from productions on there including some animation artwork. Somehow this has become a porn site. I just removed the link. Obviously very few people really explore my site. It is part of my idea of hiding amongst the shear volume of everything that I've taken to heart this past few years. Between the 150 pages of my web site and over 1000 entries in the blog, where am I?

eight times two

William had some homework today, some math, and so to assist him with some of it I made him create a times table. Next thing is to repeat it enough times to memorize it. We also dropped our two rolls of super-8 film off at the Filmpool for the One Take Super 8 Event which will take place on September 30.

Sunday in the sun

This morning I got the final touches completed for my One Take Super 8 film project "Rerun Amok". I hoped to do some fun creative stuff in the afternoon but went outside with William for a minute to watch him fly his airplane in the school ground. He ended up meeting a kid and hitting it off pretty well while talked with the other dad for a couple of hours. A couple of errands to the east end (where they were out of buns at the Chinese bakery -- sorry, come back next weekend) and my afternoon was gone. Got some fresh air, not many days like this left this year.

Saturday post

Hung at home today, worked on a video project. William got a haircut yesterday. Sylvie didn't.

Art discussions ramp up for fall

Today classes started for me. I taught experimental film and reorganized it to introduce formalism on day one. I also showed them the Pixelvision 2000 camera but I didn't let them used it because it is best used outside and it was raining the whole time I had them shooting surrealist-style video. As per tradition, my watch broke. After class I caught the tail end of our faculty retreat. This evening we went to a Neutral Ground show curated by John Hampton. One piece was a lawn with automated light, cutting and water created by Robert Hengeveld. They served cupcakes that look like hamburgers and cookies that look like french fries.

Belated birthday

Paul's birthday was on the weekend. I had lots of family in town and so did he so it took until today to make a cake. I used my new icing bag and nozzle to write with whipped cream on top, this is my first successful attempt at cake writing. With whipped cream it was quite easy. The cake was chocolate cheesecake, one of the better ones recently, probably due to the simplicity. We played some Lego Minotaur and some Munchkin after supper then watched the pilot episode of Caprica that came out a few months before the new series. Neither Paul nor I had seen it. It was okay but not as interesting as the show seemed to be.

not today

This was a few weeks ago but I forgot to post it. We thought she might be some sort of witch, traveling with her own dead trees, but we have no real evidence. Perhaps they were stolen from the Yorkton gallery?

another fine mess

Iwas determined to work hard all day editing my video project only to discover that one of the important audio files is corrupted. I went to the university to see if anyone could help fix it but everyone felt that it was a lost cause. The file has a size but just won't play. Very frustrating. While there I cleaned up the classrooms that I'd been using as work rooms because they are classrooms again as of tomorrow. My office is now an even crazier mess. The image above is what it looked like last week, so you have to imaging what it is like now.
So this evening I looked at my email and Roland sent me a message pointing out a help forum where it was suggested to import the file as raw data into a shareware program called Audacity. It worked! Now I won't need to try to dub the film and I might get it done on schedule. Thanks Roland, you came through yet again!!!

rain rain went away

Last night the power in our house went out for an hour from 10-11 and again a few minutes later for an hour and a half. It rained all night and was forecast for rain all day today. I took a chance and continued on my scheduled film shoot and got very lucky. Not a spot of rain from noon until four, allowing me to shoot both my Godard film and my One Take Super 8 film. Erik was a real trooper, thanks. Here we are shooting with Teagan and William using the Canon 5D and recording with the Ederol.

Rainy day activities

Margaret made pickles with Marla today. William and I hung out doing random stuff like making space suits. The Riders played the Bombers and concluded their match before the rain began. I bar-be-qued in the peak of it (see steam coming off lid!) and we watched Shaolin Soccer afterward, what a rush.

magic

There is something about Saturday night that makes me not want to blog. I've never figured that out. If you were to review my past two years I am certain that I missed more Saturdays than any other day. It would be difficult to tell I guess because I often post later and change the date. It's just something about the diversity of what I end up doing that it already is too full to take on something else. Today was one of those days. This morning I revised my Godard script and sent to to the Leif for Teagan as I hope to shoot on Monday. Then William and I shot his One Take Super 8 film in the back yard. See below.Then we bought two new and very beautiful spotted pictus catfish. I got some more advice about how to keep the the ammonia in the tank down to make them happier. William named them Glacier and Phantom. We've not figured out which one is which yet because they move all the time.
It was Paul's birthday today so we stopped at his house and threw a ball around in his living room with his family for a while. Then we wen to my parent's house and visited with my sister Maureen and cousins and ate lots of cake (which I later was told was made with corn flour so I'm going to pay for that tonight). In the end, I'm too tired to contextualize any of it into a coherent blog entry.Above: Mom, cousin Shirley, Lori.

Personal flight

William designed this jet pack using the ingenious nuclear gravity vacuum as the main thruster. The fuel store are just to get you started.

coming into focus

As the summer comes to an end, I finally start coming into focus. Erik and I finished the main part of the A/B rolling of my 35mm "Grain" film today. I met with a new student. I got some solid work done on my SSHRC application and returned to the archives to study more footage for some tests. Here is a test that isn't working out for me although Erik suggests that I can strengthen the lines using the Path tools in photoshop. I couldn't get it to do what I needed it to, but perhaps I can live with having lost two hours of my life on Monday trying to create it