Evan Rust

I found out yesterday that Evan Rust is no longer the administrator for the New Media Studio Lab at the UofR. This is a huge blow to me, he has been tremendously supportive of work in the lab and is skilled and well informed about media and media technologies. His background is in sound recording and mixing and worked on "Wapos Bay", "Tideland", "Little Mosque", and many other shows. He was key to the success of getting Sockvile recorded and the playback established. He also volunteered to mix the sound for "All the Boys are Called William" last year. With my sabbatical coming up and Sockvile in post production, I had high hopes of working much closer with him over the next six months, which would certainly have been a pleasure since he is both nice and capable (a rare combination some days).  It is certainly a shame and I am feeling rather powerless about it.

work comes home

This morning I developed the colour 35mm that Erik and I exposed over the past few weeks; a total of 10 strips of 8 feet each. They turned out extremely well. I kept running into the counters in the dark room, either because I am off kilter today or because there is a new glowing clock there that was installed two feet away from where the old one was. I was short on time and had to bring the film home and dry it in the back yard.This evening Derek Olsen came over for supper. He's been in town all week doing some experiments with HD compression and blue ray discs through the NMSL. His feature is set to rendering last night but will take over 100 hours so it will need to be mailed to him.

new camera

The New Media Studio Lab just got in a new Canon EOS 5D digital SLR camera. A mighty machine. Erik and I took it out for a test run today. We shot some "Neighbors"-style pixilation which works really well when you can expose at 1/8000 of a second. We also did some long exposures. Here is an excerpt of an 20 second image of me moving around a dark room with a very filtered flashlight.

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We went into the studio and shot the interviews with Angie and me for the documentary on the Aboriginal End of Life conference we shot last month. I've tried to stay out of the limelight on this project but since the focal point of this project is to be the process of researching using video, it does make sense that I say something. Angie also brought her sister, another Dr. Baydala, whom we also interviewed.
Finished up the session just in time to join the NMSL meeting where I found out that our lab downstairs in the Riddell Centre is going to move to much smaller space in the Green house gasses building very soon. I agree with the logic, but it will be highly disagreeable to the students of mine who will be using it, especially in the winter when they have to go trudging a block outside to get to the edit room. For myself, I like the Greenhouse Gases Building when I'm not teaching, I can pull up to the parking lot, go in, work, and leave without seeing anyone, isolated with no distractions.

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I worked on a little video with William's drawings today. It's also basically his script, I just prompted a few things and recorded him. The backgrounds on the planet are from my "Modern" series. I've worked mostly in Adobe After Effects with a bit of photoshopping to separate the inconsistent blue screen from images of William (I've got a blanket close pinned up between a door and the window behind me that we used for a blue screen on the weekend.) William thinks there should be a chase scene next, so I've called it as "Mission to Fluutonia, part 1", and we'll do another chapter later. I am the uncredited voice of mission control as well as the theremin player (yes, I am sampling yet again from the same first recording I did months ago as the machine is at work and I never get around to completing its construction). I think the big breakthrough in creating this video is having this little M-Audio Microtrack recorder at home, I have been doing a number of little recordings and it's so convenient to record and to put the files into the computer. This is a little hand held unit that records good quality audio (new purchase for the NMSL). I've created a 1/4 resolution version of it below, the details are so poor you can hardly see things, but hopefully it will give an impression.
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