Week 3
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| Week 3 |
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Monday 7th October 05 -18°C |
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Web blogging and updating day all day until 1am. That'll teach me to be social at the weekend won't it. |
Tuesday 8th October 05 -10°C -20°C -35°C? |
| Weather forecast today says it is going to feel like -35°C but it will actually only be -20°C but our thermometer actually only says -10°C - so how does that all work? Wind chill apparently and our thermometer is totally out! Experimenting with different animation ideas and styles. I was cutting out shapes and then putting other textures behind them and drawing on them to see how that all would look. Photographed them all and then adjusted the colour and size of each one individually to jig it about a bit. Brought all the frames into Image Ready and then exported it to Quicktime. Brought it into IMovie to add scratched film effect and to trash it a bit.
Worked out a master plan for the development of community involvement and animation work and what I am going to talk about at the artists talk I will be giving on Thursday - yikes! Went to the film evening at the Tr'ondëk Hwëtch'in Cultural Centre to watch The Take about Argentinian factory workers co-operatives that were evolving from companies going bankrupt. It followed one particular group of factory workers who were trying to get the right to take over their factory where they had lost their jobs when the Argentinian economy collapsed. It was produced and directed by Naomi Klein of No Logo fame and was a really interesting story of community industry as empowerment as an alternative to capitalism. There were two films that night - the other one - Two Winters by Carol Geddes, an animation and live action film that tells the First Nation story of a continual winter that lasted over a year. It was great to see loads of different animation styles in one film which combined live action, drawn and flash animation. It was pretty trippy but really beautiful. Somehow it was 3 am before I got to bed. |
Wednesday 9th November 05 -18°C |
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Preparing for talk so didn't do much else. Chatted to Mike about sorting out school and community involvement for the project. Saw Joann, art teacher at Robert Service School to try and work out when I could start doing some work with the school so hopefully in a couple of weeks time. Matt's birthday so he was having a party at his house where his family and friends were round. Very funny evening chatting to people about Canada and the UK whilst eating piles of lasagne, garlic bread, cake, laughing at family photos, listening to Johnny Cash and Roy Orbison very loudly. Before listening to Roy Orbison very loudly, one of Matt's family friends, Russell was talking to me about hunting moose. He demonstrated his moose call that he used when moose hunting (I have just realised I have been spelling moose mouse - that would be fun mouse hunting in the snow????). It is kind of a nasal grunt, like somebody blowing their nose and grunting at the same time, it's a very interesting, weird and powerful noise which I will try and capture at some point. I asked him what it meant in moose language "come closer, come here so I can shoot you for meat" he laughed "Where's the Roy Orbison CD? I want you to put it on". So after the moose calls we listened to Roy Orbison and Russell singing - effortless transition. |
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In the meantime Matt had disappeared in the toilet for ages whilst we all needed to go to the loo. There was much banging on the door, until after about 30 minutes he emerged with a towel on his head. Him and Stew his cousin had shaved his head into a mohican. His mum and dad were not best pleased. It was also Erin's last night in Dawson so we met up with everybody in Bombay Peggys. Erin wasn't at her own leaving do. She was busy logging 9 hours of footage on the computer. She turned up later for a few last drinks in Peggys and then off to the Pit for another late night. 4am asleep.
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Thursday 10th November 05 -18°C |
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| Spent the day preparing for talk, writing it rehearsing it and putting images together so they made sense - but I don't think they did. When it got to the talk made a joke about being born in Nova Scotia (for those of you who don't know the story ... in Tofino, Vancouver Island, me and Em, went sea kayaking and the instructor did NOT want to smile for anyone and was pretty serious. He took ages to tell us what we needed to put on and where we were going. Everybody just wanted to get out there before we were bored to death. We all got kitted up and the instructor insisted on getting an idea of all our experiences of kayaking. "Lets just go out and do it" we were all obviously thinking but being far too polite we nodded in agreement. He was going to start the ball rolling "I was born in Nova Scotia ..." blimey how far into our sordid non kayaing past does he want us to go into? " ... my parents were sea otters and I was born in the water ..." He didn't really say the second bit but we hoped he would so that we could all laugh. As a consequence it became a catch phrase.) Lots of people asked questions during the talk and had been on the web site so wanted to see other things that I had done which was good. It is always quite strange to talk about work you have done. It is sometimes easier after a long time after projects - I found it harder to talk about work I was doing at the moment as most of the time I just experiment with images and layers and so what do you need to say about that??? I introduced the idea of the project that I have started whilst I am here and the webshite (as I accidently refered to it) I have been developing whilst here. The plan is to allocate part of this site to a virtual community map of Dawson and the landscape. I will start at the school working with the students on what is important to them about living here and making small images or interactive works to go in the site. I will then hopefully work with some of the community on a creative lab session where people can make something quite simple to load online. |
Friday 11th November 05 -20°C |
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| Not much use today. Stayed awake until 8am drinking from the previous night because I was so nervous about the talk and then once it was over booooooom. Not a good idea to do. As a consequence when the phone started ringing at 11am I wasn't all too fresh to answer it. To add insult to injury the janitor was due to come so I knew I had to get myself together. Ideal day for research so nipped to get some animation examples from KIAC's film resource. Developed the worse hang over and head ache in the process and the chemist was closed because it was Rememberance Day and so everybody had the day off work - I was totally out of ibuprofen. The janitor eventually arrived and we chatted before he started to use the loudest hoover ever. I gave in and eventually had to have a bit of sleep. The door bell went and Mike called for the house laundry. I jumped up so fast that when I got to the door I was spinning and thought I was either going to pass out or vomit. Thankfully did neither just looked totally green. Had signed up for animation workshop at KIAC which started at 7-9pm. Went to that feeling slightly delicate but glad I went. We watched a few different types of animation styles and then some of Dan Sokolowski's film and animation work which was really beautiful and awe inspiring. In bed by 9.30 pm yeeha! |
Saturday 12th November 05 -22°C |
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Animation course started full on with Dan. The first hour was spent finding materials, rushing around preparing things, making plans and ideas. I wanted to try something a little more abstract and playful so I tried not to plan too much but just went with the materials I could find and what was available, rooting through boxes and cupboards. Don't disturb these serious artists at work!!! Everybody worked on their own animations using Frame Thief which you just connect the video camera to and it allows you to capture frames 1 at a time. It was a great atmosphere to work in where everybody was helping each other out and exchanging ideas. Everybody was really focused aswell which gave the room this huge creative energy. |
Whilst at the animation course I was asked to judge the local poetry writing competition which is held every year in rememberance of Ron McFee a local fella who had died when his truck rolled onto him whilst he was taking a leak in the snow. So I turned up at the Pit to read the poems with a lady called Lydia and a chap called Cave Man Bill, (who does actually live in a cave). Entrants had half an hour to write an original poem and then Lydia, myself and Bill had to judge them - how hard this was in reading 19 really good, original funny poems. Some of them seemed to be a bit too good to have been written in half an hour but it was all good fun. We chose the one that seemed to be of the moment which was a poem by Dylan and Jenna about being broke and entering the competition to get some booze money. Most of the entries were then read out which made them come alive.
We headed off to Peggys for Open Mic night where there was a great crowd. Ched ('Ya know like the cheese Cheddar') a gentleman I had a memorable meeting with on the second evening here (as he broke wind introducing himself) sang a few songs. Kyla and Rachel got up and did Dolly Parton's Joleen followed by Rachel doing a quirky little guitar solo.
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Finally back to the Pit for the last one of the evening where this gentleman chatted to me for a while. I have no idea what he was saying unfortunately. The few words I picked up were 'ladies' 'government' 'bush' - so I'm not quite sure what to make of that? He did a lot of smilling so I asked him if I could take a picture of him. Suddenly he stopped smiling. "What for?" he asked. I explained I was an artist that was in residence at KIAC and I was doing this website and it would be great to have a picture of him on the site as he had a great smile. "Oh that's OK then" he laughed. He asked where I was working and I told him. I think because I took a photograph he told me he had some photographs that needed to be developed and he was going to bring them over. He was going to come to the studio on Sunday and let me take some more pictures of him and develop his film. |
Sunday 13th November 05 -30°C |
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Animation set up that I was working on - really basic and organic but it was great to work on something really fresh with lots of hands on materials. Click on the image to view the completed animation. | |
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Despite the fact that Lulu had said she was going to come to the poetry competition on Saturday evening she had arrived and none of us were there to meet and greet her so she went home. She felt she had missed out so wrote her own on Sunday for me to judge. Whilst of course drinking a bloody something with a phallic asparagus. Truly profound.
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