drip drip drip

Just when the end was near, there is water leaking in the bathroom by the toilet. By the time the specialist toilet plumber arrived and determined that it was the shut off valve to the toilet and not the toilet itself, it was too late to bet a new valve so this is put off until tomorrow. It also requires removing the baseboard (which George managed to do without damaging it) and perhaps cutting the wall. I spent the day in the house, getting my grading done and submitting "Rerun Amok" to the $100 Film Festival.

Shooting super-8

I made my super-8 film today, with the help of William. He performed the narration and then we worked to the playback of the narration when we shot it at the university. It took 3 hours, even though the film was shot in one go (3.5 minutes). The set up and clean up were murder. I'm not even sure it worked very well. Fingers crossed.

warm feet sharpens the mind

Margaret bought me a pair of alpaca slippers yesterday, responding to my months of agony over cold feet around the house. It allowed me to focus and completely rewrite the dialogue for the super-8 film I'm trying to make, a Sockvile inter-season teaser in iambic pentameter.

catching up

Last night I was at Kevin's house and he'd been trying to get his daughters back onto school schedule; they'd been staying up until 10. He was starting to get them up early so they would get back into the right schedule. Of course when I got home, close to 11, William was still awake even though he was exhausted all day. Taking a page from Kevin's book, I woke William before eight this morning. He's still up as I write the (nearly 10:30).
I thought I was going to go to the office today but decided to send out an email or two before I left, just a couple of things that could be done from home that I said I'd do before classes start. The day evaporated under a barrage of "little things". I suppose it didn't help that William watched the same scene from "The Twelve Tasks of Asterix" off Youtube over and over again on the computer beside me for two hours -- more than a bit distracting.
I shipped off my film "Cake" to The 8 Fest in Toronto; it will be screened there at the end of this month. They are only screening original film so of course I shipped off the super-8 roll.

Calgary Festival

For anyone in Calgary tomorrow evening, my film "Cake", a 3 minute super-8 film about baking a cake that is accompanied by a narration by William, is opening the $100 Film Festival at 7:00pm at the Plaza Theatre.

352

Eric was late coming in this morning, assumably because he was up late last night frustrated with the optical printer eating my film, which also happened for me when I reloaded it so it wasn't just a simple error, but it did not eat the dummy roll I added later, nor the next roll I put on, so I will have him finish with an alternate roll instead of my 40th birthday roll I wanted him to explore as a random time study, running forward for a few seconds then pausing for a couple of seconds, suggesting that our memory of moments is more random than we want to believe. I won't know if it was effective until we develop it later in the week. The original rolls were shot by Lisa Rae Vineberg while she was a student here. Anyway, Eric and I worked on more surrealism and in particular on the Melies style films, but this time in front of a green screen on video rather than traditionally in the studio on film with black screen. I've still not edited that, but hope to do so tomorrow.

212

I got 9 rolls of super-8 film back from the lab, including 4 rolls that Margaret shot of the harvest for me back in September. I seem to have been shooting with a lot of grey skies, so I'm not as excited as I hoped to be about all the footage. However, there are certainly some high points. Margaret got the grain being augured into the bins, flowing like liquid, the exact stuff I was needing for "Grain". I'll be optically printing some of this stuff. Speaking of super-8, my film "A Spin In Turtle Park (after John Porter's Cinfuge)" (yes, my longest title ever) will be playing in Calgary at the $100 Film Festival in mid-March. I'll be running the original super-8 film (not on video) and might modify the soundtrack if I can think of what to do with it (I've never been completely happy with the sound). It's supposed to be -50 tomorrow and I agreed to go to work for a meeting that I could have put off to the end of the week, ayiiiiii!.
I had an appointment with my eye doctor today. He said he was amazed at how well I could see, and that my bad eye has improved on some levels. He order me in some new lenses and he's talking about reading glasses as well to make final corrections for close up vision while my lenses are in. Only after I left did I realize what he'd actually told me which, obviously, is not what I want. I want something to help me read in bed before I go to sleep when the light is dim and I'm straining, not for a minor adjustment during the day when I'm wearing my eyes and have near perfect vision anyways (except for all the f@*#%ing vignetting that goes on). Those are not ordered, so I'll talk to him in a couple of weeks when the lenses arrive.

gold

Yesterday I took William to a birthday party and then later to the Filmpool event (I've not seen any replies to the trivia yet) but also really needed footage of the harvest on Margaret's family farm that I didn't think would be happening until later due to the rain, so I was without any 16mm cameras and was going to shoot some super-8 then optically print to 16mm for one of the four "Grain" films, so I workshopped Margaret on the super-8 camera and she went and shot three rolls for me, a new chapter in our collaborations. I can't wait to see the footage.
I'm looking through a number of old film programs and am feeling a bit annoyed about the length of some people's bios that they have submitted for publication (these are most often written by the person it is about due to frequent shortfalls in time by the short staffed organizations planning art events.) There is inevitably one or two overly long bios that strike me as being done by tremendously ill informed individuals or by ones who overcompensating for something. I think they should contain the sort of information you might tell someone whom you've just met who asks "what do you do?" or something like that. When I see someone listing awards from three years ago or a job history beyond the current job, I have to think that this is someone I don't want to get cornered in a kitchen party by.

USA

Got a haircut today, Margaret thinks its shorter than usual but since I only get around to it very 9 months, one must be extreme.
The 50-104 Festival began, I screened three films from my "Mr. Saul's Utopia" series to a small crowd at the Museum. They repeat tomorrow at 9pm. Other films I saw tonight that impressed me included Jason Britski's even more formal than usual two new pieces, and a really wonderful silent film of the Niagara Falls by John Price "View of the Falls from the Canadian Side". It was a generally odd bunch of films, perhaps because of the high number of works from artists or at least from people coming out of visual arts and/or design background/training. 4.5 hours was a bit of a stretch, but enjoyable. The only food available was popcorn however, and as I can no longer eat that, it's lucky I snuck in a peanut butter cup.

Highway 61

William and I ate KD and pistachios in front of "The Flintstone Flyer" today during his lunch break.

I went down to the Filmpool and dropped off "Loose Screw" and also got word that "Mr. Saul's day at the Beach", "Mr. Saul's Definitive Portrait of His Family", and "Mr. Saul on How to Be a Father" are all to be screened at Festival 50, 104 in a couple of weeks. This is the first time multiple films from the Mr. Saul's Utopia series have screened at the same time, so it's a bit weird. They are super-8 films of my family at different times and places, aware of the camera, waving and posing in front of places we have gone or pretending to have fun. Accompanying the films is a voice over by a character called "Mr. Saul", a man of limited vision who is more than a bit certain that everything is does is correct. He is particularly proud of his prowess with the super-8 camera and the accompanying zoom lens. I've performed a number of these live, but the jury does not seem to have asked me to do a new work, and those are usually the only ones I perform with verbally.

to cube or not to cube

This evening I previewed Tyler Banadyga's first feature film "Zip". Tyler certainly takes the notion of "rough around the edges" to its extreme with this loosely knit super-8 drama. The cast consists almost entirely of Tyler's friend and collaborator Jason Hipfner (and two short cameos including one by Tyler himself) as the film follows Jason as the title character on a road trip without destination around Saskatchewan while reading passages from novels. The camera work is usually shaky, giving the film a nervous and uncertain tone. Focus, when it occurs, seems unintentional. In that, I refer to both the working of the lens as well as the clarity of the character's motivation and the connections between the voice-over and the image on screen. The character/audience connection is further jeopardized by the consciously dispassionate readings of the texts. We are presented with a character that, even after two hours (less three minutes) of solo screen time, we do not know. It is a highly challenging film but one that offers some interesting rewards for the work a viewer is asked to put into it. A sequence near the beginning of a back-hoe tearing down a house was fascinating; I always see something alive in these machines as they destroy as well as caress the wood and brick. An image of the wasp trapped in a jar near the end of the film, a shortened version of the film Tyler made for last year's One Take Super-8 Event, is a poignant metaphor, perhaps of how we blind ourselves of the traps we are in and of the pointlessness of our lives in favour of simply continuing to move forward.