The Deck

I'm a bit under the weather today, but mainly stayed home and watched cartoons (Space Ghost - original series) and fiddled with my Modern videos. I've been watching a few things of note: "Ryan", a very slick dvd out of the NFB featuring the Academy Award winning short film as well as "Walking" and the other short films by Ryan Larkin, the subject of this animated documentary, and other films by Chris Landreth, the animator behind "Ryan" and a documentary about Chris's process and relationship with Ryan by Laurence Green. It's all convoluted and worthwhile. The incomplete and fragmented 3D computer animated images are luscious to look at as well as conveying the idea that the portrait is incomplete and the subject is being deconstructed.
A must for animators. There is a dvd at the RPL (well actually it's at my house but I'll return it soon).


We exchanged one of William's presents that he had a double of and bought Operation and Kerplunk games! I've never owned either of them before, and although they are both loud, they never fail to satisfy.

17 x 3

William turned 6 today and Margaret began a month long job as a full time temp admin position at the Dunlop, so I took William to "Underdog" which hasn't been getting good reviews but we both thoroughly enjoyed, him for basically everything about a super powered talking dog, live action with fur rather than the old animated version which is simplistic, hairless and "freaks him out", and me particularly for the performance by Patrick Warburtan whom I personally remember most for being "The Tick", although he was apparently in Seinfeld as well, but I have seen so few of those that I think I missed him but might go back and watch for him because he is certainly, in my mind, the perfect superhero, although technically he is a supervillain in this, or actually just a villain, or perhaps more accurately he is a henchman, but his hair is great, which makes this whole Underdog thing more about hair again as William will not watch even a minute of the old Underdog series but loves the live action, and loves the live Disney versions of Inspector Gadget far more than the original, even though he's been watching those finally as I can record them every morning, commercial free, off of YTV.

Gerda came to visit this evening and brought a card that featured images of the wood and wool sheep that she brought William as a birth present from Estonia, so we sang happy sixth birthday to both William and "Bricks" the sheep and had a great time until William overpowered Gerda, knocked her into the stairway, and darn near gave her a concussion. The boy is growing up fast.

Hawaii

After building a 1000 piece Lego batcave, I really get wondering about how someone who is retrofitting a crime fighting lair into an existing subterranean area could get so obsessed with symmetry?

square week

Spent the day jumping between the kitchen and the computer, rendering "Modern" videos and preparing foot for William's birthday party; salsa, guacamole, cheese cake, chocolate cake, rice krispie cake, hummus, and chocolate chip cookies, and or course there is the wrapping of the Lego.
Huge storm sat on top of us, thunder that sounded like gunshots above our heads, but it's supposed to clear for tomorrow.

2 days

We just go back from Saskatoon, went for a couple of days to shoot film and visit a bit. The high point was visiting the studio where Dennis Jackson is shooting his Wapos Bay series. They are in hiatus right now, but will start shooting season three in a October. Season two will be starting to air on APTN this fall. It is a puppet animated series based around a fictitious first nations community in northern Saskatchewan. I was honored to be involved on the pilot episode (the one hour "Christmas at Wapos Bay") in 2001 at the same time William was born. He was given the nickname "Wapos Papoose" (FYI, that rhymes). They now have a much larger studio so there can be 10 scenes shooting simultaneously. The armatures are now much more sophisticated, I've taken extensive photos so as to be able to steal lots of their ideas. It's shot digitally now, rather than on 16mm as "Christmas" was, so there is much less tension about missing shots or errors. It was a great tour and they gave me a hand, yes, a hand, one of the new wire filled latex hands, soon we'll all be using them.

On the less happy side, I dropped a light meter with dire results...

47

I've been writing about formalism in experimental film. What is formalism you ask?

It's everything!

46

William lost his first tooth today. It was pulled actually. It was loose and then about a week ago the adult tooth emerged behind it so he ramped up the wiggling but to no avail, it still didn't come out. He had a dentist appointment today and he really wanted it out as the tooth fairy event weighs heavily on him, so she popped it out for him and let him carry it home in a plastic necklace shaped like a tooth. He has a special pillow with a pocket in it just for this event.


Wikipedia says this about the tooth fairy: "The most commonly accepted belief by academics is the fairy's development from the tooth mouse, depicted in an 18th century French language fairy tale. In "La Bonne Petite Souris", a mouse changes into a fairy to help a good Queen defeat an evil King by hiding under his pillow to torment him and knocking out all his teeth."
I'm not sure how the mouse was supposed to accomplish this task. The only version I've found so far, an English version on line called The Queen and the Mouse does not include the pillow and tooth part. This site contains better info on the tooth fairy.

45

Just watched the John Hughes penned film "Baby's Day Out". It was all fresh and exciting for William and, recall my midlife crisis of being 6 again, I got into it too. Where are the Adam Robert Worton twins now? All reviews point out how cute there where, but not another film in 13 years. Washed up at 9 months, very sad.

44

Work. Today I filmed myself working and thus have officially burned the candle at both ends, having made a one minute colour 16mm film created from over 1200 two second time exposures which should result in rapid ghostly movements, and I have painted the garage (just one end of it, yellow oil paint). It might be part of my "Grain" series as a reference to the black and white sequence of me smashing up a sidewalk beside my house in the first part of "Toxic", but it might just be a side project (I'm thinking that everything I do is a side project and that I've not started a real project yet).

age

Drove out to Moose Jaw today, shot 100 feet of colour print stock (mylar base, tungsten balanced, with filter need to be treated as iso 0.75). Left it in car while lunching at the fabulous Nitt's Thai Food on Main St (best Thai food in Saskatchewan) to run 2 second time exposures for part of the roll. A problem I anticipate with the roll is that this final time lapse/time exposure sequence was shot from the back window of the car, in direct sunlight, with a black coloured Bolex, over three hours. The camera was so hot that I could barely touch it. Colour film does not react well to being heated like that. Should I even bother storing it in the frig?

THE answer

A few days ago I was giving William a bath. He wanted me to ask him questions so I was quizzing him on things like "what is 2+3?" and "what do you get when you mix blue and red?", but after a while I started to run out of interesting questions until I scooped a clear glass of tub water up and asked him "Is this glass half full or half empty?". He started to answer but was startled by the complexity of the question; he paused for a moment, staring at the the glass and then slowly said: "I think it's half full".

41

I sent an email to a local magician the other day, trying to book him for William's birthday party, and I'd not heard from him so I started looking through my junk mail to see if it got sent into there, and I found a misdirected email from the Antimatter Film Festival in Victoria accepting my film "A Spin in Turtle Park, after John Porter's Cinefuge" that I made on super-8 for the One Take Super-8 Event last year, in the style of John's film, created by spinning a camera around yourself, a technique John says he can do without a problem but that I was absolutely floored by, as I seem to be far less able to spin in circles than I thought I could, but therein lies the magic.

40

This is the 40th day of my sabbatical. I turned 40 a few years back (3) and had anticipated it being a very traumatic event. Somehow it wasn't. I had a big party, which is very unusual for me, and invited lots of people. It was the last week of classes and I'd also just received tenure, so I pretended that was the purpose of the party so that no one would bring presents, but the cat was out of the bag when the cake came out. I hired one of my grad students to document it on super-8 film, I've not done anything with that film yet but am proposing a screening for this fall. I should have been working on the pitch today but instead I watched the late 70s cartoon series: Superfriends: the Legendary Superpowers Show with William for half the afternoon. Some great commentary tracks, more honest than previous seasons, in which the old writers and the DC historian point out the missing characters, limitations of movement due to the requirement that all movement in Hanna/Barbara cartoons is limited to left and right, the influence of Jack Kirby onto DC in the 70s with the Darkseid character, and the influence of Marvel onto DC shown through the introduction of the Firestorm character and his teen angst. Perhaps my mid-life crisis is reverting back to being 6 rather than 16 and enjoying all the shows I was too old and cynical for when I was a teenager.

B-side to You're My Best Friend

I just found out that Michelangelo Antonioni died the other day, but it was the same day that Bergman died so he seemed to not have gotten any press. He's best known in America for "Blow Up", one of his two English language films. We saw it in film school, it is great and highly influential film. One film that I always think about is "The Red Desert" which I was asked, by my favorite professor from my undergrad days - Szymon Choynowski - to edit the commercials out of after he taped it off of French tv. He'd been looking for it for a long time and that was the first time he'd been able to get his hands on it. I was very pleased to do some work for Szymon, especially something as interesting as this. Unfortunately, the version was in Italian with French subtitles and I speak neither language, so I continue to be in the dark about the plot, but the images were beautiful. I'm certain I can find a copy easily now, we probably have one in our department collection, but my experience of it could never be improved upon.

XXXVIII

I'm not sure what to think about Facebook. I registered onto it a couple of weeks ago and log onto it now and then. Even on sabbatical, I get the feeling that I don't have the time to waste on it, but then on the other hand, it seems like an interesting little release/distraction and I wish I did have the time to dive into it, zombifying friends I've not seen in years, writing on their walls, and making up lists. I guess I'm feeling a little divided whenever I sit down at this machine, I have email that I want/need to do, I do this blog, I have a writing project I'm trying to do (a project that is still pretty early so I've not mentioned it here yet) and working on more computer animation for my "Modern" project. Sometimes at the university, I work with two, three, or even more computers at once with graphics rendering on one, dvds burning on another, and writing on one as well. In those cases, it sometimes is fun to have something trivial on the side, no one could accuse you of slacking off when you're running so many machines at once. On the other hand, it's not like I'm not wasting far more time than I possibly could on Facebook by watching tv, reading comics, and staring at the wall. So won't you be my friend?

signal vs. noise

.
We went to the farm today, Margaret's brother's family and ours. It's easy to find, you drive north past Southey then turn at the farm that isn't there anymore and onto the road with the tree that used to look like a chicken. See picture below.

crucifixion

I stayed up late last night reading the seven issue comic book series The Eternals by Neil Gaiman (published between August 2006 and March 2007). I've not followed Gaiman's work for very long, I'd been buying comics in the 80s pretty much stopped in the early 90s when the collecting mentality brought cover prices up while my personal income was at an all time low. However, I was aware of his Sandman series and had glanced at an issue or two but had not been engaged enough to start buying them. However, a couple of years ago, Margaret borrowed the entire Sandman series in graphic novel form from the library and we both devoured them. Since then, we've looked at many of his stories and generally enjoyed them immensely. Earlier this year I listened to Stardust as a book on tape, read by Gaiman himself, again staying up half the night, unable to turn it off. Similar to Sandman, the Stardust story twisted and turned, it excited and amused, it drew from the long history of a particular genre (fairy tales) and took it somewhere fresh. Gaiman is a good writer and would have my vote for the best (English language) comic book writer, that is until last night. The Eternals was a comic book series written and drawn by Jack Kirby in the late 1970s, published by Marvel. It presented a new set of characters, new comic mythologies, and represented an important return of Kirby as a central creator for Marvel. I bought them all and still have them stashed in the attic somewhere. They weren't all that great, I think Kirby wanted to draw lots of "deviants", monstrous people each of whom had entirely different physical characteristics, fighting against the eternals who still dress like the Greek heroes they were many millenia before. In other words, it got stale very quick. Gaiman has proven himself very apt at reworking tired old ideas and bringing depth to minor or forgotten comic book characters. I had high expectations. They were not met. I'm not saying that these were bad comics, I was taken with them, they were page turners and I jumped from one to the next. However, I was never really carried somewhere new. They were a bit more sophisticated than the originals, and certainly more creative in the violence performed, but in the end we are left with the same problems and lack of conclusion Kirby left us with, the domination of the god-like celestials who stand in judgement over the world. Like so many traditional comics before it, character development ends when superherodome begins, the insomniac character struggles with overwork, loss of love, etc until he accepts his super powered existence, then he runs off like a testosterone filled teenager, racing around the world with his buddy. Gaiman does suggest a certain religious standpoint, but his characters spend too many pages discussing and concerning themselves with the trivial that they become trivial, human, and non-heroic themselves. When they transform back into eternals/heroes, I don't buy it.

HP's first pocket calculator

On the topic of mini-series, I also just finished "Prehistoric Park", a 6 part show out of Australia (I think) by the creators of "Walking with Dinosaurs" that uses the fictional pretense of a time travel mission to retrieve extinct animals to create a contemporary animal preserve as a way of presenting engaging computer animation and paleontology and scientific theory about the lifestyles of numerous animals from 10,000 to 200 million years ago. It's got some funny moments although I can't quite recommend it to an adult audience. It was really fun to watch with kids as they get very engaged in it, William can't stop talking about it, even while it's on. I found the science rang true although it could have been denser. William seems to have absorbed almost all of the facts after a single viewing and he's not quite 6, so they certainly could have pushed the envelope more. My favorite moment is in the extra features when the producer, asked about time travel, says that Einstein often talked about how difficult time travel would be but he knew, as do the film producers, that all you need are a couple of sticks with lights on top of them. William never questioned the practicality of time travel which is good because none of the regular issues seem to be addressed. It's just a device, and its more fun that way.

POST SCRIPT REGARDING HP POCKET CALCULATOR: When I wrote this blog post six years ago, I began by numbering the posts based upon what day into my sabbatical the post was written on. After a while, I began replacing the number with references to that number. In this case, on day 35 of my sabbatical, I refer to this early calculator, the HP-35. In hindsight, I'd have been better served by naming the posts by something that I'm actually talking about. My apologizes to those people who  have hit about this post (and this has recently become a daily occurrence) under false pretenses. 

Selenium

I've been watching "Jekyll", a new BBC show that I've been downloading. It's a modern version/continuation of "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde", which begins with a stylish opening episode with some good dialogue but I initially had grave doubts about. It seemed to be a simple updating of the original, the haunted doctor trying to protect his life and the world from the monster within himself. However, by episode 3 it had become a very twisted, imaginative program that had me riveted. I rarely knew where it would turn. The ending episode, there are only six, was a bit disappointing, but episodes 3-5 are some the best TV I've seen.

−2,147,483,648 through 2,147,483,647

William says that a hot summer is like spices in a frying pan.

The result of the heat is that we are already picking our apples which are too small and transitioning from green directly to over ripe. It will be apple sauce canning until midnight! Last year we did apple sauce for the first time. It was initially very difficult as we didn't have the right tools. I started to use colanders and sieves and Margaret wanted to go buy the proper device for straining the cooked apples but they didn't seem to have them at the economical places like the hardware and grocery stores, but only at the specialty kitchen boutiques for a price that makes you think very carefully about the price of each jar of resulting sauce. I did without, but when I was going to do a second round with Margaret's mother's apples, my mom asked if I wanted to use her saucer? It was the perfect, classic device, now highly overprices, with a strong metal cone and a solid wooden wedge, and my mom never uses it so now it's mine! The result is that we can process the apples much quicker and more usefully than making juice or cutting them up for pies/baking. We actually ran out of the vast amount of sauce we made last year. We need to sweeten them with some brown sugar because they are "challenging" without.

10000

William and I did a drive-by radio appearance today. While coming home from swimming, we were listening to Margaret and Carle talking about the fair within their topic of "tight pants" on their live community radio show so we decided to stop in and give our two cents. While he's been on television a handful of times already, this was William's first radio broadcast. He talked about his favourite rides and introduced a Loverboy song (as they said, hasn't everyone seen Loverboy at the fair?). William declared that we should wear shorts that are loose so we can have lots of air in the summer and perhaps tight pants are for the winter because shorts are too cold then. Margaret paraphrased that "tight pants are to keep us hot". It will re-run Friday at 9am.

skat or blitz

I assume that some of you are aware that a new, the last, Harry Potter book came out a week or so ago. I wasn't initially a fan and didn't know anything about the character until the first movie came out on dvd, but it grew on me and the past three books became special events in our household as Margaret and I read them out loud to each other, forcing us to stay on the same page, to digest every word, and to take moments to share thoughts about the book as the story unfolds. The movies are interesting as well, although not so much so that I'd made the time to see the newest one, but will eventually. Anyway, the process of reading out loud is slow but, as we are a bit obsessed and persistent, we completed it in a week. I was pleased with the book, it was paced better than the last couple, it kept focused on the central three characters without undue distractions, and tied up details that I did not believe she had the capability to reconcile. So there are a couple of more movies to go but then what? Rowling has already demonstrated a willingness her willingness to licence the characters through the creation of a theme park, although never through writing, but I got to thinking that a good television series based at the school could be really go for developing many details there. For example, what does it mean to be placed in Hufflepuff, outside of just being a loser? Can a member of Slitherin have a heart? Some good tv, when guided well, can have enough time to explore new issues and break down stereotypes. What if Joss Whedon, or someone of similar calibre, were to produce such a series, we might discover strength and weakness in all characters, not just the black and white world painted by Rowling. I understand the Rowling intends to write something different next, but even if she returns to the Potterverse, she will be unable to tell a simple small story that reveals intriguing truths about the characters and the history, she will have to embark upon a big new quest that will never build as well upon the human beings that could emerge from her characters.

NTSC

Ingmar Bergman died today. I wouldn't call my self a scholar of Bergman, but I certainly would go out of my way to see his films. The first I saw was "Cries and Whispers" in Film 100 back in 1982. Terry Marner questioned the class about the symbolism of the colours in the film, but I'd have to admit that this line of inquiry was initially lost on my just-out-of-high-school self. In the years that followed, I saw everything I could and was particularly taken with "The Seventh Seal", although initially more for the visual approach than for the densely metaphoric tale. If there was every a film I wished to emulate, this was it. In 1990 I was living in an apartment behind the Golden Mile (south end of Regina) and was going through a long drawn out and depressing break up (certainly we were breaking up for longer than we were together) and there was a video store in the Gold Square (don't remember the name of it) that had a surprisingly huge collection of Bergman films to rent, at least a dozen different titles. Each night that my girlfriend and I had a fight, I would go rent another Bergman, at first to dwell on the dark side of life but I quickly fell in love with his earlier funny films. He was a filmmaker with a huge range and I will always remember nights he lifted my spirit.

... and holding

Paul and I stayed up late last night, he until 2:30, me until 4:30, reassembling William's Lego. He has about ten different sets and he's disassembled and reused the pieces over the past couple of months to create one massive bin of pieces. When he discovered what we'd done, he declared (on camera) "This is the happiest day of his life!", and set to work taking them apart again. Pictured below is his very own Ghost Rider lego figure which he designed using parts of three other figures based solely on the dvd cover as he is five and has not seen the movie.

... and counting

Paul and I stayed up late last night, he until 2:30, me until 4:30, reassembling William's Lego. He has about 10 different sets and he's disassembled and reused the pieces over the past couple of months to create one massive bin of pieces. When he discovered what we'd done, he declared (on camera) this to be the happiest day of his life, and set to work taking them apart again.

28 Days Later

In the fall of 1987, to promote some Filmpool screenings, me and a couple colleagues shot three TV commercials revolving around the image of the anvil, chosen for purposes of absurdity and for convenience as we happened to have a 175 lb anvil of our own that we purchased for the film Wheat Soup that was premiering around that time, and so there I was, letting machismo get the better of me as I hauled this brutal steel object up a snowy incline not once, but twice, to drop it onto an (unsuspecting) television set below, and then I was surprised to start having strange pains running down my leg in the months that followed that only increased as months passed and flare up from time to time to this day. The last two days have been very painful as this 20 year old back injury is debilitating me once again, but of course it was worth it, we got the shot.

three by three by three

This afternoon, William had his friend Teagan over and at one point it seemed a good idea that they watch a movie. William wanted Batman but she didn't. I intervened and suggested a number of titles including Little Nemo in Slumberland (not the classic Windsor McKay work, just the 1980s pale feature). It seemed a good tie-breaker since neither of them had seen it. However, Teagan vetoed it BECAUSE she hadn't seen it, you see when her movie night at home comes, she wants the movies to be a surprise and thus she does not want to see any new movies outside of movie night and spoil the surprise! I was sort of caught in that my only retort would be that Little Nemo is a bit substandard and rather old and is very unlikely to be a selection for movie night, but I figured this wasn't really going to sell it so I put in The Cat Returns instead.

William wanted to pretend today was Christmas. I think it actually comes down to having this interesting little box that slides apart easily and has a bow on top, making it very easy to put a small object in and present it someone. The ease of gift giving creates a strong interest in gift giving. He constructed a tree from pillows, put a colourful toy on top as a star, we read a Christmas book, went to "sleep", woke up and went downstairs to open this fabulous gift of two kites for dolls, or so I am guessing them to be. Oh well, tis the season.

Double luck (or not)

Yesterday William was complaining that all the movies I take him in at the movie theatre are cartoons (even though we went to Fantastic Four the other day, but perhaps it really is more of a cartoon than I perceive it to be) so today he was delighted to go to Nancy Drew which, in my limited perception, seemed more based upon the 1950s movie series (which I recently saw a couple of) than upon the books (as described to me since I rarely get around to reading good books let alone ...), and I suggest this due to the relationship she has with the boy co-star, the lack of the chubby girlfriend, and the preponderance of 1950s style of Nancy's clothes and car. Fun in some ways, not a complete waste of time and curiously not available on dvd for another seven months. My son liked it as he is the right age to find the journey down a secret passageway by flashlight to be highly exciting. Don't we all miss the Munsters?

two bits

I went onto Margaret's radio show, Radio Delarte, for an hour today with Chrystene Ells to contribute to the discussion about her project "Sisu" which is shooting next month. As threatened, I mostly sat quietly and waited for my opportunity to strike with that one killer statement... but we ran out of time.

A day

Another scorcher, 35 degrees plus humidex makes it feel like 45, the hot spot of the country. I recorded some theremin tests but could not figure out how to upload them to this blog. They look like this:

skidoo

As the heat wave continues (35 degrees in the shade) I sought out the comfort of the University and tinkered on the Theremin some more, finally making sense of the tuning instructions with successful results! While the volume function does not yet work, the machine now produces sound when you move your hand close to the right side antennae.

skidoo

As the heat wave continues (35 degrees in the shade) I made sense of the tuning instructions on the Theremin and got it mostly working!

double double

The rain and hail yesterday turned into a heck of a humidex today, which made even videotaping dancers a chore, let alone the actual excretion it takes to dance. Ron Stewart did some incredible performances which were highly physical with a verbal, partially improvised performance aspect to them. These were a highlight for me, his work was fresh, exciting, and funny. Another delight was the return of Michele Sereda's "Moss Lady" performance which I'd not seen since the Secret Garden Tour in 2000. At that original show, I was also videotaping but was also shooting hundreds of feet of 16mm film which was part of the initial research and filming for my "Toxic" films. I have a two second clip of the moss lady on colour, hand-processed film. It was at that secret garden that I first met Dr. Tanya Dahms, a biochemist at the University of Regina who I thought was just a dancer with an interest in photography until she contacted me a few months later to see if she could see the footage. We hit it off and have collaborated in the laboratory and on the dance floor a number of times since then (no, I have not been dancing).
Pictured below, a voyeuristic moment with Michele Sereda and Ron Stewart.

blackjack

I spent a good portion of today, at least the portions that weren't raining and hailing, videotaping dance performances at the New Dance Horizon's Secret Garden Tour, and will be doing more tomorrow. As I can't wait to get back to Harry Potter, I'll have to leave details for tomorrow.

keep score

I completed the Theremin today, plugged it in, and it didn't catch fire! I needed to go to the electronics store and buy a new switch because I wrecked one by being too rough with it, and I need to make some adjustments to make it work, but I did get it to create a range of tones using the dials, although not yet by using the antennas. The adjustment instructions are using words that they don't define, so I'll have to put it aside until Roland is back next week.

The other day I registered into terminus, a site where artists can post artwork. I posted a couple of images but there are many others there worth looking at.

Bernie Howgate came to the door this afternoon while I was home with William and his friend. This is the third time I've met this Newfoundland writer who travels the country following the publication of each of his books, selling them door to door. He's got the sort of face or voice or mannerism that makes you want to invite him in, and I did. While I admitted to him that I'd not read his first two books, even though I'd purchased them, that I would take a look at this one. Sitting in the backyard under strong (dry) prairie winds, I read the first two chapters of "Around the Rock in a Bad Mood", they flew by quickly. He relates the tale of travelling around the Rock (Newfoundland) by kayak, of the weather, and of the hospitality. The weather seemed both foreign and familiar, the hospitality required no explanation.

Drinking time.

I went to see Guy Maddin's Brand Upon the Brain tonight. It had some outright belly laughs in it, which is different from the usual-sly-weirdness-that-never-ceases-to-amuse tone of Maddin's other features. It's basically a traditional silent film with intertitles and no sync dialogue, but included a recurring narration. This reminded me of a trend with distributers in the late 20s and early 30s films in which silent film footage was recycled for the age of sound, using a trivial voice-over to give the audience the impression that they are watching a sound film but are really just being told about what is readily apparent on the screen. I have a short documentary like this where an African travelogue is voiced-over and repackaged for a new audience ten years after silent films had gone out of style. Perhaps it would better be compared to Chaplin's Modern Times which began production as a silent film but came to contain sync sound elements and was released with a married soundtrack and score. An element of Brand Upon the Brain that I felt was disconcerting was the occasional use of dissolves which seemed formally disconnected from the shooting and editing style of 90% of the film, feeling more like moments from a 1940s film. Maddin premiered this film last month in Winnipeg the same night that I was there screening my own films at the Winnipeg Cinematheque, but I regretfully didn't attend. I like to believe he stole my audience away from me, even though I was very happy with the reception I had (thanks to Dave Barber).

gets my vote

We went to see Brad Bird's Ratatouille today. It hasn't been getting the authorship hype that I attach to it, but considering that The Incredibles was William's favorite film for a year and I probably watched it fifty times and even included it as one of the two mainstream films on my five must-see films in a book project a couple of years ago, and that Iron Giant contained one of the most endearing portrayals of an artist in American cinematic history, then it is amazing that the film was in theatres this long before I saw it. I've not read much reviewing it yet, but it certainly works on many levels, for kids and for adults, and I'm certain will hold up to multiple viewings (I'll let you know at Christmastime). Beyond the general praise for quality, humour, character, etc, I got to thinking about the role of the mother within the film. While Bird's other two films both had strong, intelligent, active, and present mothers, Ratatouille falls under the inscrutable Disney pattern of killing off the characters' mothers. The main rat has no mother, although his father has a strong presence and family is discussed as highly important. The main human character enters the film upon his mother's death and we only gain insights into his father. However, the mothers exert a strange and invisible domination. This young man is criticized for chopping vegetables like a mother in a kitchen rather than a professional in a restaurant. The restaurant critic's Achilles heal is nostalgia for his (faceless) mother's cooking. This pattern of dead dominating mothers has been discussed in critical papers elsewhere, but my question is, why would Brad Bird, who I think is one of the most clever storytellers of our day, fall into this Disney trap?

17

It's one of those days that I fiddled and fumbled, I read a bit of this and thought about bit of that and at the end of it all I cannot put a finger on anything I actually did. I look around the room for clues and notice that everything is rearranged since yesterday, this must have had a purpose, but then I recall that movement is not necessarily action.

of age

I took my son and niece to the Silver Surfer movie today (yes, it is a Fantastic Four movie but even the promoters knew that it was the Surfer that would sell it, as evidenced by the initial previews which barely mentioned the FF) and I enjoyed it very much. It got me thinking about the comics again and how when I was my son's age (5) I got to choose a comic for a road trip and, unlike most choices I made when I was young, I did not pick something that would satisfy my older sisters such as an Archie or Richie Rich, but instead I picked out an interesting superhero comic. The cover was quickly lost but I held onto that comic for years, with its full page image of a silvery character on the first page. However, Atlas shrugs and that comic was lost, maybe thrown away, maybe traded to a friend, unseen until I was a teenager with a part time job and ordering comics sight-unseen from Adelphe's in Winnipeg. My delight could not be greater than the day my $12 mint condition copy of Silver Surfer #2 arrived and I opened it to find the image from my childhood, the Surfer lying on his board, floating in the upper atmosphere until an asteroid storm struck him down.

the third hand

More house cleaning; I emptied out a closet that has contained the household art supplies, primarily Margaret's paints, brushes, inks, etc, as we are going to move William's bedroom from the small room he is in now into the larger room we have been using as our office/guest room, and during this move/cleaning I found a small plastic container which holds the objects shown above, a number of screws, a couple of 3/4" plates, and a 2" long pin, all surgical steel, and all previously residing in my left hand. Back in 1987 when I was working at IPSCO, a (then) locally based steel mill when my industrial accident took place, leading to three surgical procedures and gave me sufficient worker's compensation to live as an artist for a year or two, I was not as interested in (or perhaps not brave enough for) filmmaking as personal identity. I no longer carry enough trauma about that situation to milk it for a film today, just a blog or two.

for teen

The Rob Bos painting is gone! Perhaps it was removed during the set up for the murder/mystery party taking place tonight next door. William and I just came home from the Sylvie Blocher opening at the Dunlop Art Gallery (who was assisted during her production last month by one of our students, Nils Sorenson) and were called over to the party because it seems that one of the guests, a cousin of my next door neighbor, is Drew Reimer, an ex-student of mine and very funny and talented animator. He's a designer and animator now, seems almost respectable (but I know the lurid thoughts he could only express with his cartoons -- blouse button popping fantasies, oh my, oh my!). Nice chat, finally saw the renovations inside their house, wow. Sylvie's show is pretty interesting, Living Pictures with Regina city police officers. I was around while it was being shot as she conducted the video interviews in the recording studio across the hall from my office. She was lucky to get both a participant on her very first day as a police officer as well as another on his very last day before retiring. In the introduction this evening, Sylvie discussed her uncontrollable feeling of guilt whenever a police officer arrests her (her mistake) approaches her (she corrected herself), and how the uniform is an object and makes the wearer into an object who attempts to remain neutral and impartial, even though that is naturally impossible. Our police chief also spoke, reiterating the problems of presenting and representing the police due to the mythologation of the authority of the uniform. A good talk, but it does not give me hope that the mystery of the missing Bos will be solved.

Lucky day

We attended the opening of my son William's first show at the MacKenzie Art Gallery today. He was displaying his recent sketches and mixed media sculptures developed during his "artist retreat" this week. One critic was misheard to describe the show as "divine".

Nooner

Today was shrouded by another headache, not a migraine but sort of a mega tension/dehydration/neck-ache sort of thing. I was up at 6am, took a mitt full of Advil, watched some Supranos, took some more and put ice on my head, went to work for a few hours (finished the wiring for the Theremin but not the case yet) and took some more Advil so that he headache finally subsided enough that we went and did some berry picking (two gallons of huge, sweet Saskatoon berries at $12 per gallon if you pick your own which we did in about an hour since they were so abundant), and home.
We found a Rob Bos painting (that is a painting by Rob Bos, not just some Rob Bos actually dong a painting) hidden in the alley behind our house, one of his current projects, so we took it and replaced it with another of his paintings from the same text series from our own collection.

11th hour

More housekeeping, some of it real. I spent some time sorting junk around the house as well as reviewing the calendar of the summer to figure out when I'll be best able to travel some more. At the lab, I was in a rage about a glitch that seems to have emerged in the new Avid. It seems that importing audio files from cds will go to the D drive, which is where a lot of the Avid software is stored. Later, if you try to use the capture/record tool, it creates an error that requires you to reboot the program. During that reboot, the audio files are lost. Of course they still appear to be on the timeline, but they are hollow and silent. I put together the telecine transfer of the Filmpool Film Frenzy films (see my first blog entry for image) and, since I had done some manipulation of the image since its screening, I figured I'd better correct/finesse the sound as well. End of story is that I lost it and had to start again. This losing of sound happened to me earlier in the week with "Inspector Gadget vs the Zapper", but I didn't know the cause. Anyway, after the second time building the soundtrack for the Frenzy, I recorded it to tape and did a mix down of my group's sequence so that it was stored properly. The files were soon lost, as predicted.
The other housekeeping I completed was with my computer files (not photos or media) that I've compiled from my home computer (files since 1999 but see below), my department head computer (2004-2007), my laptop (2003 to present), and my university office computer (1999-2004) with a total of over 7500 files, many, many of which are duplicated between the computers or that each has different drafts of the same files. I'd been through a similar sorting in 1999 when I upgraded my computer from an IBM 286 that had no mouse, no windows, and a very small hard drive. Back then, I stored all of my files on diskettes so I had boxes and boxes of them. I sat down at this new machine and taught myself to use a mouse by sorting these hundreds, probably a thousand, files. The problem then was that I did not think to keep the well sorted individual diskettes as individual folders but instead threw them all into a big pot together. I ended up with multiple files called "invoice" or "letter_to_lab" and so on. Anyway, I now have 1.2Gb of data that is the sum total of my writing for the past two decades, the stories, the love letters, the grant applications, the invoices, and most importantly, the memos.

X marks the spot

Today was a boy and dad day. Margaret went up to the Mendel Art Gallery in Saskatoon with work and left me and William to fend for ourselves. The day began with a fantastic 4 dollar breakfast at the Novia. There was a bit of a chill in the air so he opted for the hot chocolate and was amused that it came in the exact same cup as my coffee. He accused me of trying to switch them (which as certainly true, but only after he gave me the idea, he's such a bad influence). We then went to the lab to finish off "Inspector Gadget versus the Zapper", as it has been hanging over my head for some time, but we did not succeed. The Mac at the next table was under repair so William spent his time "helping" me, rather than watching a show of his own. On top of that, I had some sort of glitch with my previously imported audio files resulting in my sound effects being missing and I didn't have the disc with me, so I couldn't fix it. I also spent some time beginning to figure out this new way of exporting from Avid to make dvds. It seems that you send some file or guide out of the Avid, rather than having he Avid render out the Mpeg file itself. I'm sure it will eventually work for me but I found it nontransparent today. The rest of the day was a mix of playing Hot Wheels, watching cartoons, and finally finishing sorting ALL of my computer files. I believe the document folder is now down to about 7600 files, not including photos or any media. This is compiled from four computers, each containing between 2 and 5000 files each. I should be able to re-load my office computer so that, at least at this point in time, the two main machines I use will have a common filing system and common files. This sounds dull, and it is, but it's one of those necessary steps in trying to focus on moving on with other projects.

nein

Perhaps the weather change, perhaps the relief of stress, perhaps from staring at computer screen for hours this afternoon as I was trying to sort the files from my four computers into one and create a master filing system of the 10 thousand files from the past 18 years that I've been using a computer, but I came down with a migraine tonight. I've not been getting them very often over past few years, Margaret things only one other since William was born, I think two. When I get them, get lots of pain and blurred vision but most profoundly, I lose the language centre of my brain. Sometimes cannot speak or write at all. I recall getting one the day after my thesis defense when I was invited out to a cottage over night. It felt so great to have the defense off my back when suddenly I was in blinding pain. They never last more than 12 hours.

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.

Seventh heaven

Another hot day. Yesterday was actually 36.9 degrees, a record, so the heatstroke I had was not unpredictable. William's caterpillar turned into a moth in his jar. I have never managed to do this, probably due to being impatient or perhaps because mom threw them out before they had time to transform. He set it loose after supper with an audience. I spent part of the day watching cartoons, primarily Batman, with William. I find that many of his shows tend to put me to sleep, probably due to the tones of the voices, the friendly repetition of the music, and the lack of any dramatic tension. This is wonderful when you are having a tired day and you need a nap; you can doze in front of the TV and never feel that you've missed anything. It's Saturday and I think the first day I've really taken off since my sabbatical began.

Sixth sense.

At 35 degrees, it's too hot to really work so I blew off the day running errands. It's about midnight and my computer room is still at 27 degrees so this must be short, the machine is only adding to the heat. Margaret inflated an eight foot pool and then found a hole in it so we had to go back across town to the big box store, exchange it, and fill it again. It was key to cooling off. We stayed up late watching tv as the bedrooms are upstairs where it is too warm. William started watching "The New Adventures of Batman", the series for 1977 with Batmite in it. I really hated these when I originally saw them, but I was a cynical teenage, not a five year old. We took a break from tv to go outside and tell ghost stories by the pool. This is what William looked like.William fell asleep at 11:30 watching, and enjoying, Laurel and Hardy.

Trouble at the fifth estate?

I met with a research team I've been a member of for the past few years where we create videos on the subject of First Nations end of life care. This may seem quite distant from the other film and video work I tend to be involved with, and I suppose it is. It all started about five years ago when I was contacted by Dr. Angelina Baydala who had just joined the Psychology Department at the U of Regina, coming from Edmonton where her husband, Pete, had been friends with my wife's cousin John Bessai, who is a filmmaker in Toronto with his company Cinefocus. I've worked for John and his company a couple of times including, coincidentally, as animator of another First Nations health care film "The Story of Turtle from Turtle Island". So apparently Angie, Pete, and John all got together in Edmonton sometime before Angie and Pete moved here and it was suggested that she contact me, so I got a call. We sat down over a coffee and she told me about this project she wanted to do but how impractical it was seeming. You see, if you are not a filmmaker but you need a filmmaker to work for you, they are hugely expensive. If you have a filmmaker friend, they are often extremely economical. I think I get into more projects through friendships than any other way. I will either work with people I like, or I'll work alone. Working with/for people I can't communicate well with is almost never worth the trouble (for more about trouble, skip to the end of this blog). Given that my income over the past two decades has been through teaching, animating, or personal grants, I have been able to maintain this as a reality for a long time. Thus it came to pass that I got myself involved in a series of documentary/instructional films that has been able to attract funding and have expanded in scale and scope in surprising ways. The people involved are quite good hearted and I enjoy meeting with them. The videos are made by committee, which I've previously only seen fail, but with much of the heavy lifting of shooting and editing being done my a number of keen students, and with a group that seems to have significant mutual respect, the projects take shape. Today's meeting was regarding the video to document and contextualize a one day conference we will be hosting in mid-September. The video will assist other research teams to understand the process of doing sensitive research involving First Nations people.

Theremin is coming along fine. I started the wiring but am missing four of the quarter inch sockets, so will need to pick them up before I finish it.

It was extremely hot today so we ate on the back deck and played Trouble afterwards. In the photo below, you will see that William (green) won the game, Paul (yellow) did very well, even though he'd had a very rough patch, I did very well (blue) with my last peg only one space from the end, and that Margaret (red) had all four of her pieces still in the beginning base. I've never seen such luck.

Go forth

The continued construction of the theremin occupied much of my day today. I made good progress, much to the credit of our department technician Roland Bourgeois. Roland is one of our hidden secrets, he keeps the machines afloat and the software (relatively) bug free. His background is in electronics but he has kept up with the changing needs of the department and is very well versed in the maintenance and operation of all of the computer-based aspects of the department, the Avids, the Final Cut Pros, etc. Today he pulled me out of the fire by finding me a replacement resistor and a replacement capacitor that my Theremin kit was missing. He has been hugely generous with his time and experience, teaching me how to solder, lending me tools, and giving me loads of advice. My hat is off to our unsung hero, Roland Bourgeois.

a crowd

Two very interesting things today, first I learned to solder and began to assemble my Theremin. What and Why you might ask? Well, the what can be found by the link above. The why is related to a project I'm working on called "Modern" which is a series of silent films based upon Modern art. I've been very interested in the notion of "modern" in that it refers to a movement in art that was very important throughout the 20th century (dates will certainly vary depending upon who you talk to) but that it is a movement that has become outdated and old fashioned. However, the label of "modern" remains with it and, for all I know, my stick for centuries. With my films, I create nice, clean modern-esque animated images such as colour fields and lines using computer animation, then I transfer the video to film and process it roughly by hand to demonstrate the decay that has overcome this artwork over the past few decades. To accompany screenings of this work, I have been looking for a variety of music but most of all, I'd like to include the sound from the Theremin. It is a truly 20th century instrument. It is unlike anything from previous times as it is played by moving your hands through the air near it. The Moog synthesizer was based upon the principles of the Theremin but corrupted the purity of the design by integrating the electronics with a keyboard interface so that the playing of it would not be so foreign to classically trained musicians. The electric guitar is similarly new but based on older interfaces. I say that the Theremin alone is the instrument that epitomizes the modernist objectives of purity of form. Therefore, I wish to have my films accompanied, at times, by the music of the Theremin. Only problem is, these are not manufactured but need to be build from kits. I ordered and received a kit a few months ago but it has required the sabbatical to give me the time to start working on it.

The second event of the day is experiencing the first complete run through of the storyboards for Sisu, the film project to be shot this summer by Chrystene Ells. Her husband Raul did the 600 or so panels based upon the script and upon ideas discussed by him, Chrystene, and myself over the past couple of months. It was some stellar work and the project is very close to ready. If the actual performances are at least as good at the charcoal style still drawings and Raul's stiff reading of the text, then there won't be a dry eye in the house. At least one person was in tears just during this reading, but since she came with me and she's downstairs in her pajamas, I'd better not say who she was.

Just a second

One of my colleagues told me that she spent the first three months of her sabbatical sleeping. I agreed that I would also probably do this but secretly I swore that this would not happen to me. With the number of commitments I've had over the past few years with administration, teaching, and family, I have trained myself to maximize the small pockets of times I get to do my own creative filmmaking. I figure that if I continue to use that focus when the other duties have been removed, I would do well. However, this "three months of sleeping" is sounding like a very good idea today. We drove home from Cypress Hills, stopping at a number of places but, due the the deferred day for the July 1 holiday, most stores, art galleries, museums, and tourist sites were closed (except for a little "old-timers" museum in Maple Creek where they had one of Geraldine Moodie's actual cameras on display). The sighting of an eagle as we left the hills notwithstanding, I felt increasingly defeated by the day. By mid-afternoon we had surrendered ourselves to just driving and, although the light and colours were perfect, I felt no temptation to pull over and drag all my gear out of the extremely tightly packed trunk and capture any of it. All I could bring myself to do was pull down the window and snap off a few without slowing down. The fields are all green and in bloom, the sky is dark with storms, the contrast was amazing. The image above contains no adjustments, it just looked like that (the blurriness is due to the 120kph motion). I thought I would grab every opportunity that came my way, but sometimes you just have to put your own sanity first and let the light live only in your memory.

Once upon a time

The first official day of my sabbatical. I'd hoped to make it a particularly productive one so with a belly full of re-fried perogies and (fresh) bacon, I slipped away from the noise and into the trees to again study the pine trees. I shot the remainder of a roll of Kodak 7363, a high contrast black and white film that used to be sold very cheap as a stock for making optical soundtracks but is now sold fairly cheaply as a camera stock for optical effects. It is distinguished as a raw stock for its striking yellow base. One of my students ran 30 feet into it thinking I'd attached some sort of leader to it. I had similar apprehensions the first time I used it but just charged ahead. It is tricky to expose as it likes to have bright sunlight, I rate it around 9 or 10 iso in daylight and only about 6 under tungsten light. Anyway, Margaret had pointed out how the deadly straight trees here will sway slightly and how amazing this looks when looking straight up. I shot minute of film in time exposures using my battery powered Meritex and exposed full seconds at about f4.
I took a break from the 16mm and shot more home-movie style super-8 on the beach. It is the father's role, responsibility, and perhaps even rite to select the moments of his families life that are important enough to be preserved forever on super-8 film. The family portraits by the father have been a big concern of mine since taking that role myself five years ago.

My second roll of 16mm for the day did not go so smoothly. I loaded a roll of Kodak 3383, which IS a print stock (as opposed to a camera stock - print stocks are meant to be used in machines to create copies of films rather than in the cameras. They are sold in large rolls for industry use and need to be cut down for camera use). This stock is for colour printing and my tests rate it at about 1.5 iso (tungsten). That means that under the brightest Saskatchewan light (which is damn bright) you need to shoot at f1.4 if you want to shoot at 24fps. I have a plan to shoot time exposures with it but this afternoon my Meritex began to fail and just runs uncontrollably, regardless of ac/dc power and regardless of whether or not the camera is connected. I tried every option and eventually packed it away for repair. That left me in a shady forest that I cannot possibly shoot in normally with this stock. I decided to return to a technique I used a lot in the early 90s in which I use the Bolex rewind crank to turn the camera forward and thus I could absolutely control the speed of the camera movement. I cranked it at about 4 frames per second at f2.8, occasionally running backwards and superimposing. It's a bit of a workout but can give a flickering, inconsistent effect that is difficult to simulate any other way.

none too soon

Today was my last day as department head and the last day before beginning my sabbatical. That wasn't really on my mind as it is Saturday and I've left town. With my cat under Paul's watchful eye, I've packed a Bolex with a battery powered intervolometer, my old super-8 camera, a brand new microscopic sized HDV camera, and a still camera (oh yes, and the family) into the car and have landed myself in amazing Cypress Hills Saskatchewan. The pine trees of the area are tall and straight and I've wanted to shoot them for years. Of course, I had to overcome my own hurdles such as having not charged my batteries and thus could not shoot what I needed. Instead, we hopped back in the car and drove to Eastend, Saskatchewan where Scotty the T-Rex was unearthed a few years ago. It has a museum that is small but beautiful, tunneled into the side of the hill. However, I was not the only one with power problems. The storm last night not only broke hundreds of branches off trees in the Eastend area, it also had 12 lightening strikes on power poles and so when we arrived at 3:00 in the afternoon, there'd been no electricity since 11pm the night before. The town was basically closed. The dinosaur museum was open with tours being conducted by flashlight. For lunch we went into the town of Shaunavan to a cool little diner that is one of those dreamt of places, the well maintained old diner that is retro without trying and still has low prices! While there, we also popped into the town's museum/art gallery where we saw a stuffed albino baby chick with four legs, preserved under a glass dome since 1903.

One day, all this will be yours.

Last night I dashed into the edit room to try to pull the Inspector Gadget work in progress off the computer to show to some family I'll be seeing later today. We changed the machines earlier in the day, which led to some initial panic as I'd not realized that the Avid bins (the basic information that sorts a users project but does not contain any large amounts of actual data) are stored on the C drive of the computer, leaving me with many gigs of video and no road map to use it. Well, it was not a difficult opperation to plug the old workstation back up and copy the bins, which Kalyn and I did in her office with an alternate monitor etc, when suddenly the power in the building went out and there we were, on the only machine NOT connected to a power back up thing, crashing. My day in the office was not as minimal as suggested in yesterday's post as I had a potential student to meet with so could not solve the issues of bins right away but instead left them to the end of the day, too late to discuss with lab adminstrator Kalyn that the new version of Avid, which was supposed to have an mpeg encoder, does not seem to. Bottom line, I need to either find that encoder or face the learning curve of doing it the new way. Perhaps in a couple of days when I'm on sabbatical that would be fine, but a time stressed administrator, I require that all projects we achievable in less than one hour. These past three years I've taken to making films that are between one and three minutes each, and that is often too onerous.
Today I am back to some 16mm. I've got 14 rolls, each 100 feet, and I'm not afraid to use them.

2 Day

Today I placed the master key to the department on my empty desk, closed the door to the department head office, and walked away.

Three to get ready

My office is finally empty. One object I wasn't able to move into my smaller office was a Auricon camera I found under the stairs over a year ago. It has a 1000' magazine and is equipped with the optical sound writer. It also cumbersome, awkward, and weights about 45 pounds. I've seen images of it twice recently, once in a reconstruction of a press conference in "Prairie Giant, the Tommy Douglas Story", and once in a promotional still for the newest Andy Warhol documentary. It is in the first instance that the camera was most often used, but it is in this latter case that the Auricon will be historically remembered and that I was most interested. The 1000' magazine meant that Warhol could shoot 30 minutes of 16mm film uninterrupted. This he did with films such as Empire and Sleep. In his later films he began using the soundtrack and would allow Factory hangers on to perform in front of the camera, often with little or no direction, then he would market it as his film. The sound was written directly onto the film so that no complicated intermediate steps were needed, it came from the camera to the lab to the theatre. Optical sound is the traditional soundtrack for 16mm film and, due to the expense are relatively low quality of it, has been rapidly disappearing. It used to be that you needed to got the step of having one made if you wanted to show your film on the big screen, and only then were you really a filmmaker. In ten years, this gate keeping barrier has disappeared as digital projection eliminates the need for this process. However, for better or worse, now there is very little to differentiate a seasoned veteran from my five year old son.

a four gone conclusion

I baked two cheesecakes this evening with the intention of freezing them for a party this weekend. One is amaretto with a blueberry glaze, the other is Belgian chocolate/Kahlua with a chocolate glaze. It never fails that my baking, which takes an hour or so, will elicit more comments, and certainly more enthusiastically favourable comments, than my films which may take upwards of seven years to complete. It makes one question things. My film "Anger (Toxic 5)" has for its soundtrack a cacophony of noises from the kitchen; chopping, rattling pans, and a squeaky oven door. I used this for the irony that it seems like the best cooking requires angry noise, but that cooking is one of the things that calms me when I've had a very frustrating day.

a fin is a fin

Three years ago I went to a fundraising auction of artist chairs in the community of Lumsden, which is a great little town about 30 minutes from here that is filled with well kept old houses, hippies, and artists, and so I put some bids of 50 or 75 dollars on items I liked but did not feel bad about not getting them, until it came to a big creepy unit that my son fell in love with and climbed up on, even though no one else seemed to dare, and so I put a bid or two in but the numbers climbed until Margaret nudged me and suggested that I could put it in the brand new department head office that was being renovated and that I would be the first occupant of, and so with that idea I bid and bid until the chair was mine. Today I had to move it for the first time in a couple of years and have slid it between the filing cabinet and the bulletin board of photos of filmmakers I know, as just one more item in a rapidly filling office, boxes and pictures climbing towards the 12 foot ceiling. My son remains the only person to happily climb into it multiple times without trepidation.

I'd rather have the half dozen

It's Sunday and I spent the afternoon with my son in the edit room working on our latest Inspector Gadget video. This is our fourth and by far the most complex. He plays the inspector as well as his evil twin from the first Disney movie and I play the villains. William loves the two live action Gadget movies and has not seen the cartoon series except in passing (if it's on TV, I've not made the effort to find it). I tend to agree. The insipid Don Adams version just makes you want to kick the TV, there is no sympathetic side to his character. You find yourself cheering for the Claw. The first live action version is all about identity conflict and strength versus strength of character. While certainly a juvenile version of Robocop (could be called Robocopy), it did have some clever moments in its writing. In the Gadget video I was working on today, we had gotten away from the two or three person cast and had recruited additional cast including artist Chad Jacklin whose playful machines based upon the future we hoped for in 1955 became the secret gadget lab. He was very kind to let us come up and shoot one day a month or two ago in the upstairs gallery at Mysteria on 13th Avenue. Anyway, instead of this being the usual 1 hour to shoot plus 1 hour to edit video, it has turned into a 14 minute epic with dozens of effects using green screen, After Effects animation, and miniatures. I guess other dads play catch with their five-year-olds, I make movies.

Feeling Week

With lightening flashing around the city, we trusted vague indications that the storms did not extend westward and we piled our gear and ourselves into the car and headed 250 km to Swift Current, Saskatchewan and their annual kite festival. The gamble paid off and the weather was perfect. The sun was more intense than usual with the Seconic reading 640 with the high slide in. I overexposed a roll of 7240 shooting some antique tractors for my new film project "Grain" at a lot outside of Moose Jaw. I suspect that overexposing (and forgetting to pack a filter) is the least of my problems. I pulled the can from my cold room this morning, I'm not sure where it came from as the writing isn't in my hand. It just said "7240 short end" on tape on the spine of the round metal can. When I loaded it I discovered it has a magnetic stripe on the side, making it closer to 25 years old, not just 20. In Swift Current, the kites did not make for good cinema, as I expected they wouldn't. However, I shot a second roll of 7240 on impressions of wind. This work is all destined for colour hand processing (in buckets) sometime in the next few weeks, which reminds me that I'll be facing new restrictions from Health and Safety at the University as they will not be requiring me to use the safest alternative with all photographic chemicals. I'll certainly be returning to this topic in the near future.
I also shot a half roll of super-8 around the town of Morse where there are vast open fields of salt that look just like snow, and I say that as a Canadian who is not fooled by simulated snow in most movies. There are plows that move it around and a huge plant that does something with it. I've probably driven past it a hundred times in my life but never stopped. As it was, the tourist thing was closed so we didn't actually get information, just a shot of Margaret and William pretending to shiver while standing on top of it. There is also a mile long land bridge across a marsh that is build to hold the water and preserve the wildlife; we drove across it for the first time today as well. All captured in an collection of inexplicable birds+family waving shots that make super-8 home movies the joy that they are.

I can't believe I ate the whole thing.

Another hot day. Spent half the morning sorting papers in anticipation of vacating the department head office next week when my sabbatical starts. Threw out a least a foot of papers. This evening we had one of my grad students, Chrystene Ells, over for supper. Always a surprise to find a grad student in fine arts who's not a vegetarian. BBQed some chicken using a recipe I just made up earlier this season in which I throw lots of herbs onto chicken without any oil or crackers then just bar-b-que it slowly. Fast and easy and deceptively elegant. I think the key is the lemon pepper. Chrystene is working on a really interesting and sophisticated thesis project that will be shot on the NMSL's newest 24p hdv camera in August. Check out her blog. The heat and the allure of old movies on tv are driving me from my office. It's not summer without sticking to the couch while watching an otherwise forgettable b-movies while pumped up on a half-litre of ice-coffee. Tonight will be "Too Many Husbands".

Bottom of the Ninth

A classic solstice today in Regina. Blazingly hot so that we could stay up roasting marshmallows until well after dark, which is pretty late for my 5 year old who's still tossing around in bed. I telecined Chuck's film "Steel Motion" today using a simple set up of a 5 blade shutter projector, a mirror box, and a Canon XL-1 camera with manual focus lens. I used to have a lot of trouble doing this with an autofocus lens as the manual override was never absolute and it would still look for focus during dark moments. I didn't watch it all the way through as Chuck came in and watched it with me. He'd been having a pretty bad day with some information been given to him incorrectly so that some of the work needed to be redone in the rewiring of lights he was doing (as I mentioned yesterday, he is no longer a professional filmmaker but rather is an electrician). I pointed out to him that I can't tell the difference between when he's happy or angry and he equally gruff and foul mouthed both ways. He denies enjoying yelling at people but he doesn't fool me. On the topic of "Steel Motion", I was surprised about the range of images that I'd forgotten about. I knew that there were a lot of strobing, silhouetted, superimposed, and abstracted images of parts of trains, creating a formalistic study of the "steel" and "motion". However, I'd not remembered the amount of beautiful prairie landscapes contained in the film. A puzzling and thought provoking mixture.

Ten days and counting

I saw Chuck Gilhooly today. Chuck and I were in film school together back in the mid-80s. He came from one of those neighbourhoods where people didn't usually go to university. When the rest of us started to think that we were being radical, painting a campus room black or staying up all night or stashing some Kahlua in a locker, we could just look at Chuck and know we were all just lame. I never saw him do anything illegal or even immoral, but I never had a doubt that he'd done things I'd ever dreamed of. Perhaps it was all imagination, but I doubt it. Anyway, Chuck got out of the film biz, it was never kind to him. He's an electrician now, which is probably more satisfying in some ways. He's getting some software and a computer to work on some videos on his own. Go ahead and Google him, nothing seems to come up even though he did a brilliant film called "Steel Motion" back in '93. I wrote an article on it that you can try to find under articles on my web site, even though Google doesn't see it. It is a powerful, visceral 16mm film about the rhythm of the train and about his connection to his father who worked his life on the rails. He taught Chuck to love but to respect the trains. He's going to bring me a copy tomorrow, I've not seen it in over a decade but it still makes an impression on me.

minus eleven days

Greetings. My name is Gerald Saul, I am a professor of film production at the University of Regina and I'm setting up this blog to chronicle my activities for the forthcoming year as I embark upon my first sabbatical which it to begin in 11 days.
The image here is of me portraying a robot defending the earth from alien urban renewal in a hand processed 16mm workshop film called "Conquest of the Vanquished Urban Renewal Experts From Another World" which I made with a keen little team consisting of Anna Hansen, Jade Duckett, and Gabe Boyko. In this film, we dared to tell the naked truth about international plots aimed at forcing us to live in better houses. However, the powers that be are intent on silencing our voices to the point that our film lost out in the competition against a film about a guy looking for the bathroom. You decide who's being paranoid. If you are brave enough, contact the Saskatchewan Filmpool Co-operative and demand that they put the vote of best film to a new ballot.

During this next year I will be creating a number of 16mm films as well as some videos, some super-8 projects, and at least one screenplay. As well, I am going begin work on a book about experimental filmmaking. There are a lot of other things on my to-do list such as updating my rather stagnant website: www.geraldsaul.com
Thanks for joining me on my inaugural posting.
Gerald Saul, Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada