catch up

I worked at home this afternoon, finished an article on Ian Toews which is expanded from the program notes I wrote a few months ago. He was over here two nights ago, we had a wine and talked about video and stuff for a while. This evening we had a Filmpool meeting. William went a played Lego at Paul's for a while since Margaret was also at work.

I watched recent episode of Clone Wars with William. It is targeted at 6-10 year old boys but they play it on CTV at 9pm Sundays after Desperate Housewives?!? For the third episode in a row it has a strong message that the clones are people too, they have individuality and feelings and that there is a strong interest in protecting them. I was wondering if the storm troopers are the clones, just a bit older, or if they are regular people drafted into service? I'd like to think they are the old clones and I came up with a new ending to "Return of the Jedi".

GEORGE LUCAS, ARE YOU LISTENING, YOU COULD GO PUT THIS SCENE IN FOR THE BLUE RAY RELEASE...

I think the storm troopers are like the flying monkeys in Oz.
When the Emperor is finally killed and Vader dies, Luke should look behind him and see that 5000 storm troopers have come up behind him. Luke would be weak from the fight but he struggles to his feet and sparks up his light saber to face the mob. Instead of shooting at him, the storm troopers, for the first time, all remove their helmets. Luke walks through them as they applaud in that all-at-once clapping like in military or prison scenes ("hooray for Dorothy, the wicked witch is dead").

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This morning I met with the Aboriginal End of Life research group. I had a chance to ask Elder Betty about William's concern that he shouldn't read any books after winter ended. She says that fantasy types of stories shouldn't be told after the solstice (June 21) but education based stories could be told.
This afternoon I finished a version of my website. I'm going to try to upload it with Kalyn's help tomorrow morning. I solved my sorting/data base issue with the spreadsheet in a crude fashion. I created hyperlinks to the web pages within the spreadsheet of titles. I then sorted the page in the ways I needed and exported the appropriate portions of the page for each sorting choice the website will have. Thus, in the end, the website just presents sorted lists, it doesn't do any sorting itself. To add new material, I will need to first add it to my spreadsheet and export it into the necessary choices (each film will be in a minimum of three lists; chronological, alphabetic, and at least one genre). However, after making a mistake with the list and having to redo them all, I found that I can do this update in about 5 to 10 minutes, so not a big deal.
Margaret got her hair cut and when she got home I shot my Warhol video of her. I've not finished all the manipulations of this video set, but I now have all 15 of the source images (see photo: this is not the background I used, I shot outside with a grid pattern from the deck behind her).
This morning the courier arrived with my three boxes of film stock consisting of twenty 100' rolls of 16mm colour negative, ten 400' rolls of 16mm black and white negative, 1000' of 35mm black and white negative, and the super expensive 1000' roll of 35mm colour reversal!
Tonight there was a retrospective screening of Ian Toews's films at the Filmpool. I wrote the program notes and am posting them on my other blog. Ian liked them, which is always the worry about such things.

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This morning I sat in Atlantis Coffee (downtown) and worked on my program notes I was asked to write for the screening of Ian Toews' films on Thursday at the Filmpool. At 10:30, Maya Batten-Young met me and we chatted about film industry and student films and stuff, and I shot my 1 minute Warhol video of her. She is #14, I just need Margaret now for my complete set of 15. I also ran into Jarret Rusnick there, he showed me a clip of a commercial project he's working on that will use lots of visual tricks such as this five frame per second blending sequence. I thought it was pretty cool and said I should have thought of it. He quipped that every time a friend succeeds, a part of us dies. William's home reading, which is usually a 12-20 page book taking between 5 and 20 minutes to read, was a 108 page multi-story grade two reader that took him over 2 hours to work through. That's another page done for the Mayor's mega-minute reading challenge that he's so excited about. Speaking of the Mayor, my dad heard him speak at his Gyro club meeting the other day and he said that the rail relocation program is in the works (again). This makes more sense now, with property values increasing that strip of land through the city is finally worth something, although I'm surprised I've seen nothing in the newspaper about it.