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. 

I am old

By the end of the second day of shooting with these young hooligans (Erik Sirke, Geremy Lague, Stephen Macauley, Matt Ellis, James Lague, and Luke Patterson) on the project "Mighty Morphin Orphan Stories" I am exhausted. It wasn't that many years ago that I could do a twelve hour shoot,drink a litre of water, hit the bed for six hours and do it again. However, those days are gone. Shooting is going well in spite of me. There is good energy and many new gags coming as shooting progresses (although everyone is worried about introducing new plot twists or concepts once forty percent of the film is in the can). 

10 years of blogging!

Ten years ago today I began this blog. I began because Chrystene Ells, who was a grad student at the time, suggested I should. I figured it would be a lot of trouble and be very complicated, but one evening while William (5 years old at the time) was having a bath and was old enough to no longer need my help so I thought I'd see what I could do. I looked up "blogger", followed its instructions, and within 5 minutes I'd posted my blog. It was really that easy. My initial intent was to talk about my filmmaking as I was just about to begin a sabbatical. However, most work, even creative work, is the same routine every day. I could't maintain daily posts about my work, so I started talking about family and friends and anything that I wanted. That's still what I do.
Today I worked on a film I'm producing with Erik, Geremy, Matt, Luke, Stephen, and James. It's called "Mighty Morphin Orphan Stories". I'm also an actor in it, although I didn't perform today. We were in front of the green screen for 13 hours and will be back at it tomorrow. I posted to Instagram a few times. Here are some more pictures.

Recording for a new film, edits to an old film

I had two talented theatre students, Tyler W. Toppings and Gabrielle Dufresne, running some lines from A Midsummer Night's Dream for me today to use in my new OTS8 project "Puck". This afternoon Erik Sirke was over and we looked at The Green Man (some very cool and bizarre cuts to the films). Films are coming together, a new step every day, although there are also setbacks. Erik becomes the fourth person to not be able to make my stereoscopic viewer work and now I question whether all the people who said it worked were entirely accurate in their assessment. It works very well for me. More testing is needed. This evening I really enjoyed "Pandora's Box" by Pabst. Thanks Christina for programming this one, I'd never seen it before.
Also picked up new contact lens today. 

Photos using strobe light

We did some pick up shots of Canister and Sawboy in the studio today while Erik is still in town. I also wanted to play with the strobe light a bit. We worked in complete darkness to get a few long exposures. It doesn't have as much of a throw as I'd hoped though.

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):

Canister about town

Erik helped document Canister finishing my table today. He can be quite handy when he isn't bent on world domination. 

Violence on Campus

On campus today we witnessed an intense fight between the dread space pirate Squidmulon and Professor Delusia the Nochturnalist. It appeared that Delusia left the victor, having strangled Squidmulon with a poisonous snake, but the pirate proved not so easy to kill after all....

Canister the Robot versus Kynth the Vampire

Kynth/Canister Colouring page

While re-staging some scenes from Angst in 3D with Sunny Adams we were interrupted by the jealous robot who wanted to be the only star of my projects. Looks like nothing will stop him from fighting with all of my characters. Luckily no one was hurt.... this time. 

French Friday continues

This morning I recorded Eric Hill's voice to complete my soundtrack for "Rockem', Sockem, Canister", my one take super-8 film which will premiere next week in Saskatoon. It amuses me to blur the line between the two Eric/ks, with Sirke playing Canister's on-screen nemesis and Hill playing the same character's voice.

Gerald Saul in Canister helmet performing lines for Erik Sirke film.

While I have suggested that Fridays this summer be changed to "Foreign Friday" where William and I would watch an non-English language film, the past two weeks have continued to be French. Last week we watched "Asterix and Obelix: God Save Britannia" with Gerard Depardieu. Today was William's pick. He passed over a lurid Italian comedy for "Les Enfants Terribles", written by Jean Cocteau. I think William was shocked by the seemingly unmotivated, inexplicable actions of the characters; lying to their friends and causing each other crisis after crisis. It was a fun way to spend a hot early afternoon. 

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).

New 3D negatives

I had my recent roll of stereoscopic film developed today. Bird film accidentally cut the negs so they did the pricey transfer for free. I was going to do this myself today, so I've pleased. I haven't studied all of the images to see if any of the frames got trimmed through the cutting, but I suspect that they will all be workable. They reported that my camera probably needs a cleaning as there seems to be scratching. Here is one of the first shots on the roll of me and Geremy, taken by Erik Sirke.

Something repeated and something new at the Ngoc Van Vietnamese restaurant

Margaret and William at the Ngoc Van, January 2014

All week William has been asking to go to the Ngoc Van (Vietnamese) restaurant again. With the weather finally turning nice and an otherwise uncommitted Friday evening, we went. As fate or luck or design would have it, we were seated at the same table where Erik, Geremy, and I were seated on September 7, so I took a stitched photo similar to the one from that night. Food was good. William tried a spring roll, which he is usually averse to. This has become the restaurant which symbolizes "trying new things" for him.

Geremy and Erik in September 2013

Grain trailer and Grain: Seeds optical soundtrack gif

The Red Dirt International Film Festival, who programmed "Grain: Seeds" in October of last year, is profiling a different film from the festival each day on their Facebook page. It looked like the other filmmakers mostly had trailers so, even though the film is only 5 minutes long, I made a trailer for it. I used the demo music that I videotaped Erik Sirke playing on an old upright piano in the staff lounge on the second floor of the Education Building. I left his image in the standard def mode I must have shot it in (don't know what camera I used) and inserted footage from the good transfer along with overly dramatic text pages.

Video here is a cropped and 90 degree rotated version which emphasizes the image of the optical soundtrack, which I have cropped from the exhibition versions. 

Canister green screen mishap

Geremy requested Canister to perform in front of a green screen for a project today. Geremy took the images for this stitched photo together. It seems that part of Canister's body must have been lost in the time/space vortex through which he is so fond of travelling (see video example)

Dinner and "The Making of Empire Strikes Back" with Erik Sirke and Geremy Lague

Erik is in town for a while, on a break from the Banff Centre where he will be for the next year. The three of us met up at Ngoc Van for supper. I shot this set of images to stitch together and did so with a couple different variations. One variant, shown only in an excerpt, has Erik obviously wary over Geremy's lack of face.
 

After supper they asked to watch "The Making of the Empire Strikes Back" on 16mm, something I'd promised them two years ago. As it seemed warm, I invited them to a backyard screening of it. The event didn't begin smoothly as Margaret had begun pickling in my absence, but William joined us and I grabbed the two cans of film I'd acquired from Darrell Prohor's items he left behind after he'd retired from our department. Only when I went to load the first reel did I realized that I'd never opened the cans but had simply trusted the label on the outside. Somebody should make up a saying about covers and believing the contents because if they did, this would be a time use such a saying. The first reel was three variations of a puppet public service announcement from 1985 to stop smoking. The commercials then repeat in French. Reel two was something else about racing and the film began jumping right away, obviously due to the reel being used for found footage, so we didn't watch it. Instead, I switched over to super-8 and began to run "Zamba", a 1949 film which Melanie Wilmink gave me a feature length silent version of. Based on the somewhat lurid cover art on the super-8 cans, I had believed that this was a 1960s European film but instead was a version released with German subtitles. Silent, black and white, and boring, we watched until the family landed inexplicably together after parachuting from a plane onto a tropical island. The boy seems to suck on his mother's cheek for a moment before they basically throw him from the plane. Surprisingly, the boy was played by Beau Bridges in one of his earliest features. I continued to put up random reels including the ending of Metropolis on standard 8, a shortened version of The Wolfman on super-8, and "Anansi the Spider", a peculiar 1972 African folk tale on 16mm (also courtesy of Melanie). It rained for a couple minutes but the projector was under the umbrella and the canopy of trees lets very little through, so we were okay. I think we ended up having a good movie night without really watching any good movies.

90 Gigs of "Grain"

My 2k transfer of my new 35mm film "Grain: Seeds" came back today. The only flaw is that the drive they sent was reformatted as a Mac drive and won't mount on my computer. I had to take it to work to check to make sure it is there. It seems to be. The files are stored as individual frames (about 7000 of them) amounting to about 90 gigabytes. I couldn't copy them all, having not brought a large enough backup, but will get it all sorted out soon. I'll be able to use these images to construct multiple aspect ration versions of this film including the original 1.33 to wide screen options. To my surprise, I can also include the optical sound stripe as part of the image (see above). 

One Take Super-8 event a success

One Take Super 8 in Regina, 2013, photo by Christine Ramsay

Tonight's 11th One Take Super-8 Event, hosted by Alex Rogalski, was great. I would have to say that it was a good batch of films, both technically and aesthetically, with a nice mix of experimentation, comedy, camp, and thoughtfulness. One of the highlights was Geremy and Erik's film, recreating Tampopo as paper folding instead of soup, and subtitled. I'm told that their subtitling was better than mine (we both used my overhead projector). Their's was certainly funnier and garnered way more applause. Well done. 

Clandestine meeting on Boot Hill with Erik Sirke

I had a meeting on what is called by some people, but not on any signs, "Boot Hill", the high point in Regina located south east of Candy Cane park (which IS called Candy Cane park on signs and has tell-tale giant candy canes as landmarks). We spoke about the future. 

My new "Grain" film

Gerald Saul with Film "Grain". Photo by Gerda Osteneck

My newest film, "Grain: Seeds" on 35mm with music by Erik Sirke arrived from the lab last week. I hope to be able to preview it tomorrow morning. Until then, I have to content myself with just holding it up to the light.