"Kim's Convenience" author Ins Choi in Regina

I can't believe there wasn't a packed house for the reading and talk by Ins Choi, the playwriter and actor who is currently famous as having created "Kim's Convenience". He was charming and funny and I'd have loved to listed to him hour hours.
 

Errands

Even with last week off from classes, I am far from being caught up on so many tasks. One thing I finally got back to was acquiring supplies for an animation pedestal for the stop motion room. I went to the lumber place and hardware place Jessie recommended and started stuff "rolling".(see great selection of castors below)
 

Painful ankle

All weekend my ankle was really soar, perhaps something gout-like. It was a bit better on Monday but when I went to pick up posters for the new film courses, the pain increased greatly as I began back. It was a searingly sharp pain for a couple minutes and I needed to just keep walking until suddenly it stopped hurting. There is a bit of tenderness, but in one fell woosh, it just fixed itself.
This gave me the strength to stop and see Derek and discover that he'd just got the replacement belts for the projector. It progresses!

Coffee with family

Downtown for coffee with my parents, sister, and her family. Topic of conversation was mostly around William's drawings. Got home to fine Nick high on "the nip", which he rolls in.

Lemon Drop fundraiser

The Lemon Drop fashion show and fundraiser for the Open Door Society was this weekend. William and I created videos which ran on the wall, one vertical and the other horizontal to fit the space. The work is untitled but were basically two videos, each about 6 minutes long, and each manipulated in a series of ways so that each of the two projectors cycled through about a half hour of variations and then repeating. As the videos are slightly different in length, the combination of the two screens is never the same (at least not within this three hours). The images were primarily 1940s/1950s industrials and and commercials downloaded from the Prelinger archive. The event was pretty good. Everything was yellow themed. Clothes were great. The event was held at a new escape room space beside Don's Photo and the area I was projecting from (beside the band) was still under renovation but we managed.
 

German Expressionism meeting

Met with Christina and Chrystene for first time in months to discuss new directions for paper we were working on for a German Expressionism publication. There is a huge shift but I think its a good one. Now the trick is to find enough time. 

TinWife by Travis Neufeld

Film program alumnus Travis Neufeld presented his luscious short film The TinWife at the Rainbow Cinema this evening, along with Mattias's "Gas Can" which I discussed in a post a few months ago.  TinWife is the sort of film we all wish we could make, and given enough hard work we could. Shot over the course of a year on weekends, crowd funded, and created with equal parts blind passion and meticulous care for details, Travis creates a strange 1950-esque distopic future filled with characters we actually care about and empathize with. The trailer gives away many of the plot points (it is only a short film after all) but it still contained a few surprises that I left the theatre thinking about. Wow. Huge congratulations to Travis and everyone involved in this film. 

Thums Up

William and I lunched with Mike and Geremy at the university. We picked up some pop and samosas on the way. I had a "Thums Up" which is made in India by Coke and is all right (I'm a cola snob and hate 80% of them). Geremy's new radio show on CJTR started this evening where he talked about movies with two others. Fairly animated. I think the others were more prepared or more aggressive than Geremy and dominated the time, but it was fun. 

Mike in town, telling stories

Mike made a sort of surprise trip to Regina this week. We played some story cubes and some Dr. Who Fluxx and a short game of Carcassonne.

William drawing of me with knife

William has a lot of drawings and paintings to do over the break. This is a pretty good set of homework, something fun and nothing heavy but a deadline none the less. He was drawing a figure from memory and I thought he could do better from a figure so I posed for him with a knife (his character has a sword) and made him draw. It was only a few minutes but I'm jazzed over the result. 

Franz Kafke video game

A few weeks ago William struck a deal with me that if he finished reading all the Kafka books that I would buy him the Franz Kafka video game off Steam. Having read The Trial, The Castle, Amerika, and Konundrum (a collection of short stories), I ordered the game today. It looked pretty cool, even though it didn't take him long to play (started at lunch, we broke for 3+ hours for Black Panther and them supper, and he was finished by 9:00). It was mostly odd puzzles. He had fun. Once scene was set in Lynch's black lodge.

We changed the water filter today. I always mean to make not of it in my blog so I know when I did it last but always forget. Now I have. The chamber was too tight to open but Margaret suggested wrapping a leather belt around it and that did the trick (just a normal person-belt). 

relaxing day of working all day... at home

It was my intention to stay home all day today. We'd talked a bit about taking a trip but I'm really glad we didn't as I'm barely able to stay awake through the day. We watched some tv and read and William drew. I worked on the videos for the Lemon Drop fundraiser which is only a week away. My tests work and the video is almost there. One projector will be horizontal, the other vertical (above).  

overhead improv

I have a mental block about preparing for certain things like when I want to tell a story using the overhead projector. I've been thinking about this for two weeks, have had many many ideas, even wrote down my plan, but still refused to let myself practice. I think this one started to take shape in the last hours before I did it.
 

Williem Wennekers

For our third meeting with a animators, Diane helped connect Haley and I to "Fugget About It" creator/writer Willem Wennekers who has made a pretty amazing career for himself since finishing his film degree here. We Skyped for about 40 minutes and learned a lot about him, his process, the industry, passion, motivation, drive, and patience.

With one day left before the break, I can hardly hold my head up. William made bread sticks. Paul came over. Class went fine (more Bolex work). 

Student jump to it

We were shooting with the Bolex in Film 200 this week. I think this is usually the turning point in the term when we go from lecture learning to fun learning. 

new bathroom lights, again

This afternoon we replace the bathroom lights. We put some in only four or five years ago but they turned out to be sort of lemons. They looked a bit like these but narrower. However the similarity stopped there. The old ones had a separate glass cylinder for each of the four lights. The cylinders had a threaded metal band attached to the glass. As the lights heated and cooled, the metal/glass join would crack. The result was that almost any time you touched them, and especially any time you tried to change the bulb, the odds were very high that the glass would come apart from the metal and you needed to replace the glass. The company fixed the problem but the new units were 99% the same. The same look, the same mechanics, but the new less breakable glass didn't fit into the original fixtures. We had a bunch of glass they sold us for the old method (for a discount I think) but last week we ran out of them and now we have a new thing. Very bright (the light, not us). 

strobe lights and short exposures

More fun in grad class today. Brought out my headache creating strobe light and also explored the world at 1/4000 of a second.
 

Work feeling good

By the end of today I was completely exhausted but having been feeling fairly good about stuff. Class with Haley today was a conversation with animator Adrian Dean at a coffee shop. It's difficult to label such a nice morning as "work". I noticed as I left at 6, having done actual work, the office chart in the hallway is finally updated with me listed as head. Details like this please me.

Shape of Water

Wow. Loved this film. Margaret managed to have the night off from work (she's been working lots of Tuesdays) and Allan was over, even though he's coming down with a new cold. Our new car is in the shop and the old car was in its first accident (William was scratched by some girls practicing they parallel parting by the school, thankfully not enough damage to even call damage, literally just a scratch an inch long - see below) so we were able to all go together. The crowd was small so if anyone wants the theatre experience on it, they better go.

Xincheng's 3D printing

Many interesting things emerged from my back to back to back to back meetings today (some planned, some just happened as I sat at my desk trying to mind my own business). Xincheng's 3D printed objects are coming along. Still needs paint and detailing, but I'm confident.

Happy February 5

Cat's ear

The ear medicine for Sylvie is nearly done. She shakes her head after getting the drops so her fur is saturated in medicine residue. We tried to wash her a bit, but the success was limited (unless our goal was to annoy her).

Taste of Cathedral

Cathedral Festival fundraiser "Taste of Cathedral" was a really nice event this year. In particular, the music by Ava Wild delivered a sensuous background to conversation, eating, and bidding. Ran into Lynal and talked about a crazy-terrible film from 1991 called "Cast a Deadly Spell" that we're definitely going to find and watch (detective Herbert Lovercraft, the only 1948 cop not using magic, must find the necronomicon).