cold returns

Perhaps it was the rain, perhaps something else, but I was cold and unenthusiastic all day. I did manage to shoot more backgrounds for Sockvile but only after sitting and staring at them them for most of an hour. I did a couple of variations on the opening title, on strings and again on sticks.This evening at the festival the Filmpool did their screening under the stars. I showed a shortened episode of Professor Delusia because they were looking for one minute films, twenty in all, to celebrate the festival's 20th ear. It was raining and cold and the blues band (and I should note that I'm not a fan of blues bands at the best of times) played too loud and ran an hour past the scheduled end time. William didn't mind it for a while, he grooved with the tunes (see video below). Filmpool had to wait to screen after that. Ug.

Cold screening

Tonight was the Filmpool's "Screening Under the Stars", as part of the Cathedral Village Arts Festival. They claim it is the 19th but it's actually the 18th. One year the festival organizers simply never made contact with the Filmpool and asked SMPIA to organize the screening. By the time the shit hit the fan, there was already someone committed to selecting and hosting the screening of projects from the industry to present. It was a cold night like this one and I missed it. We all went tonight though, weathering the cold and rain. The screening for the past couple of years have been on video instead of film and have been shorter. While a bit less romantic, this is certainly more practical for the event and venue. They showed the Film Frenzy film I worked on last year; it was nice to see it again.

This is my 1000th blog entry under my regular blog.

research day 1

Erik started with me today. We talked, did some preliminary thinking about "Rerun", looked at the 3D scanner again, and developed some film. I invited Berny hi to join us and develop some film too as I won't be able to join up with the Filmpool's film frenzy this year so he'll need to take charge. We dried the film outside but it had grown so cold that the drying war very slow and painful on our our hands. I finally processed two rolls I shot in September 2008 of macro close ups of grasshoppers; it will be important to my fall episode of "Grain".

meetings

This afternoon the screening of the workshop video to the elders went well. I stopped at the Filmpool on my way home to review my notes with Gordon regarding the Filmpool five year plan as I couldn't attend the meeting this evening. I wanted to get William to sleep early so I had him in the shower at 6:15 when the Filmpool called, unable to get quarum for the Board, I conferenced called for 2 hours. Bed is now finally made after big milk spill in it this morning, so I think I'll use it.

big storm and murder

Yesterday there was a murder three blocks from my house. The police had the whole block roped off all day. I've not read about it in the paper yet since I had to race off first thing in the morning, as
Tuesday is my teaching day, which means I meet with Chrystene in the morning (great progress on the editing, she's cut about 1/3 or more of the Sisu project) and Janine in the afternoon. However, Janine was away today so I was supposed to meet with Eric but he got delayed at the Christian hard core concert in Montana, so I was on my own. We went as a family to shoot some pin-hole images but the clouds had started forming and I needed six seconds per frame. I got 150 before deciding it was not a good use of time so we drove back in. The storm, of major proportions, followed us. I had a Filmpool meeting and just after I arrived, the wind and rain and hail just crushed everything. We watched chairs from the patio below on Scarth street get blown down the block. Amazing.

317

Eric and I developed the Modern work from yesterday plus some colour negative from optical printing super-8 and 3 rolls of colour print film for Grain (totally 800 feet). It started raining so we only got half of it dry, the rest was in buckets. I'm on the hunt for good jugs for chemistry so I had Eric drive me past the janitorial supply place on Dewdney on the way home but they didn't sell any. There was an interesting story on CBC about youtube "virus" videos, videos that seem to get thousands of hits per day and where they came from. The case study was a rather absurd, but earnest music video called "Speak The Hungarian Rapper", it's pretty ridiculous but fun. The back up singers are apparently all popular Hungarian pop starts, now a bit past their prime and down enough on their luck to take part in this. After I got home and started hanging up the wet film I had in my buckets up onto the clothes line, Margaret came home and casually said "so you must have found the car". "What do you mean", I asked. She then explained that she left me two phone messages saying she was leaving the car in the parking lot for me. I didn't notice the messages so I had to get a ride back to the university to get it, then quickly home to eat and then to the Filmpool for a short Board meeting then a meeting with Christopher Dray, who is in town to advise us on a capital campain to acquire a building.

296

We had a Filmpool Board meeting today and (you better write this date down) we finished approving the policy book!!!! To give a bit of history, the group has never had a policy manual even though we've talked about it for 20 years. In fact, I went through all of the minutes in the late 80s and photocopied everything relevant at that time and compiled it. However, the lazy board that existed then wouldn't even read it, let alone begin to revise and work on it. It came up over and over again throughout the years. It began taking off again under a GM in 2001 or 2002 but she didn't last long and most of the material she helped create was overly detailed. Mostly the manual was built over the past 3 years under Felipe. It took up a portion of every Board meeting for these past three years, sometimes over an hour each time, but no more. While it is to be a living document with ongoing updates, the big grunt work is over and we can report this success to the General membership at the AGM next month.

262

I posted my new video today, the third last in this "She Said..." series. We coloured Easter eggs at our house this afternoon (I know June will flag this as another "egg" event, but what am I supposed to say, that we coloured Easter doorknobs?). I had to cut out early as we scheduled a Filmpool meeting for 3pm. This evening we watched the first 3 episodes of the Munsters season1. I enjoyed it, not profound but fair innocent tv, William was into it and kept asking to see more episodes. He refused to watch even a second episode of H.R.Pufnstuf, which I value for nostalgic reasons but am fascinated by today for it's audacious surrealism hiding beneath a candy coating.

261

Screened my new cut of the End of Life project, it went generally well although I feel strongly that it remains far too long (I cut it from 2.5 hours to 1.5 hours but think taking another 30 minutes will do it good). We also met with an artist who is going to do some interpretations of Elder Betty's dream that she feels is associated with this project; I think this will help us set the tone and separate the project from other informational films.
This evening I went to the Filmpool premier screening. Lots of good films, but I was certainly struck by both Surviving the Tribulation by Dylan Worts and Brent Braaten and Shuya Show, a gut bursting comedy done as if it were an eastern European film badly translated to English by Jason Shabatoski, David Stefanyshyn, and Jon Tewksbury. This last one I am looking forward to seeing the longer, 47 minute cut of, every scene hit. The only thing that bothered me about the screening was the lack of experimental films. It might just be the timing, but it also might be an affect of the shift to video screenings in some way. More thoughts on this later.

196

Today I worked with Jade Duckett on a film he's making as part of the Filmpool's 60 Second Cinema workshops. I agreed to be Jade's mentor for his film before Christmas but this was our first chance to shoot. We met earlier in the week and discussed his story. He went away with a shot list It is about the mundane, simple images in a house, but is interrupted by an inexplicable fight scene. Last night Jade called to say that his cast had dropped out on him so he was going to play the fighters himself so he needed my help. I got thinking about setting up a simple blue or green screen for a few simple shots such as his arm swinging into the shot to hit himself, but on set today I realized he'd be shooting black and white film, so "blue" screens would not be practical. We gave it a try with his arm in white sleeve swinging against a black background and black sleeved arm against white, but we'll have to wait and see. The camera jammed once so we had to re-shoot the fight master, a precarious slit screen shot (we didn't have a heavy enough tripod to make me feel secure about this, especially since the camera needed to be physically wound between shots). At the end he told me they were to edit with I-Movie rather than Final Cut Pro. We'll cross that bridge next week when we come to it.

Goin' like ninety

After leaving MediaNet yesterday, Scott toured me around a number of other places. First off was Cinevic, the film co-op here. They had good energy and I had a positive conversation with one of the staff. They have about 100 members, making them 2/3 the size of Filmpool, but they run everything through a space less than half the size! What I've been noticing at the co-ops here in Victoria as well as Seattle is how much less equipment they have. I bet Vancouver has a lot, it probably comes with being around a few more years, and perhaps from starting earlier when film industries across the country were younger. They all say that such equipment is fairly accessible from industry rentals when needed. The Filmpool's equipment room is stuffed with lights, stands, grip gear, etc. Also, all three groups I saw had only a single open office area, no private offices.

Scott also showed me a couple of artist spaces and a used camera shop, none of which I'd have found on my own.

Last night I went to the films at the festival. I talked at length with Bruno from Mexico who is trying to convince me to come down there for a trip. He programs two months of the year at a cinematheque, so this could be promising. I gave him a collection of my work. This morning I mailed the last set I was carrying to Heather in Halifax so I've go no more portfolios with me.

Alex MacKenzie did his new film projection/performance last night. He has disabled the motor of a 16mm projector and has replaced it with a hand crank. Each revolution is equal to 4 frames or 1/6 of a second or normal film. However, he shows the film at varying speeds, or even pausing it or running it backwards, along with a prerecorded soundtrack, running 400 feet of film (usually 10 minutes) as a 40 minute show. Anyways, the idea of hand cranking a projector goes back to the beginning of cinema, so I totally cracked up when the image of a birdcage came on the screen, followed slowly by the image of a bird, then back again, then back and forth faster and faster until, miracle of miracles, the bird appears to be in the cage. This is the same image I use with my optical demonstration with the round disc (the thaumatrope?) in the first day of first year film courses or animation.

Today I went to the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria and saw fantastic woodblock prints by Kiyoshi Saito and the photographic retrospective of Iain Baxter. I just saw Baxter on news world the other day, they were promoting part of this retrospective, even though this is the smaller version of it, lacking the painted tvs. He's totally epitomizes the boomer generation to me. The work is fairly good, but the hype is great. Also saw two dozen Emily Carr paintings from the gallery collection and bought two cards.

I'm at University of Victoria. Scott has shown me around some of the facilities they have, some nice computer labs but the cameras are a definite shortfall. They have a well designed darkroom but he's trying to dream up ways to insure that it keeps being used and not dismantled. He's been hand processing, mostly super-8 negative.

My legs are tired.

Elvis comeback concert

Long day, spent a number of hours at the University trying to find the films that I'm showing at the Filmpool festival in a week to dub them to beta-sp tape, but the newest ones were no where to be found until I determined that they were still in the computer, all much too complicated, I just wanted to make a copy. Got the classy new Faculty of Fine Arts t-shirt - we gave them to new students and all faculty and staff wore them all day. They are just black with a small but colourful logo on the front and a UofR logo on the sleeve. Nice. Made biscotti this evening - I'll have to slice and bake them a second time tomorrow, then it is the feast of triple chocolate. The key is in whipping the butter with the table top kitchenaide mixer. Perhaps I'm a bit tired, but I can't help wondering why William's new heat-vision Superman toy looks like George W Bush?

three score

Today was William's first day of grade one, the first day that he's stayed in school all day long. I walked down and picked him up for lunch, as I intend to do every day, and we ate sandwiches in front of the tv. I looked for Flintstones season 1 at the store the other day but they didn't have it, so I'll have to look around some more. I would like him to have at least one year that reflects my own childhood, and don't we all? I think a key to nostalgia is the desire to convince others to have the same nostalgic feelings we have ourselves. Today William made his own sandwich for the first time. It seemed a bit of a mess as the peanut butter was chilled and the bread was soft, but he made it and ate it, so who am I to criticize?

While he was in school I finally got a chance to watch Sylvie Blocher's "Wo/Men in Uniform" at the Dunlop Art Gallery (see July 14 posting). It's been up for 6 weeks and closes today but to date I've only managed to watch short clips of this 50 minute project that closes today. It was quite engaging, although perhaps both too short and too long. It could not impact with as its maximum potential audience because few gallery goers are prepared to sit for an hour during a stop at the library. However, I know that there were dozens of hours of footage and I often felt it was just skimming the surface. There are short portrait/interviews of about a dozen Regina police officers and her off screen (muted) questions must have been well delivered because each officer broke from his or her expected response and revealed something personal about their relationship to this job. I wanted more, but each was only allowed a few questions, a few minutes, and then fades away. I have to criticize the gallery, although I have a great deal of respect for it generally, for the quality of the presentation; the projectors and air conditioning created an annoying din that made it less than comfortable to listen to the voices. I ended up sitting on a chair, rather than the couch, so that I could sit next to the speaker and be better immersed into the program.

I finished "Loose Screw", a one minute video in a similar style to the five second video I have on YouTube from a couple of days ago. The Filmpool is having a screening of short videos with an open entry with the deadline in a couple of days, so I'll enter this. I will probably also kinescope it and work it into my Modern project.

LVIII

Spent much of my day working on a new video while William played with Daniel, Leesa Streifler's son who is the same age as W. This is probably the first time in 2 weeks that I've been able to work for more than 15 minutes during daylight hours without an emergency (a missing Lego piece constitutes an emergency this week). I'm plodding along frame by frame and having wonderful results now that I've started making new brushes and extracting photo elements (such as my face) to do so. I had a great conversation with Leesa today, our first "sabbatical party" and I was able to show her what I've been doing (even though the program crashed - some sort of disc error - during my demonstration) and she's even cool with me doing a response to her style of work (I'm thinking about her "Normal" series) as a moving image piece in this style. I've been wanting to do this for years but never seen to have the energy and time to even start it. The image above is from this week's one minute animation project; I'm calling it "Loose Screws" and I'm trying to get it done for the end of the week for the Filmpool festival event.