log boom

Blurry detail of a big painting I'm working on.

I finally got a small thermometer that I can strap to my shorts so I can track the temperature of the ocean on my daily swim-attempts. Today it was 8 degrees Celsius. That's actually a lot warmer than I thought it was. So I'm not as afraid of damaging myself now. It's about pain tolerance, and swimming close to shore in case I freeze up and stop moving.

Hoo-aa!

While I was away this weekend, three or four hundred Scoters showed up on our rocky beach.

They use those big beaks to pull out and crack mussel shells - their primary food source. This makes sense because there's extensive mussel beds along our beach. There are already significant drifts of cracked mussel shells along the shoreline, and those fuckin' Scoters have only been there for a few days! I wonder if they'll clean up the mussels on this beach and move along.

Hoo-aa!

vancouver part eighty million

Just got back from another ball-snapping triplex of days in Vancouver. Watched an illegal boxing match that my friend was in, bought art supplies, two art meetings, visited family. Butter chicken, greasy spoons, twenty five cents per four minutes of parking.

It's impossible to go into the city without spending money. I easily live off $15 / day on this li'l island, but I must spend $30/40 per day in Vancouver, not including the ferry ride. It's just not possible to spend that kind of money here, unless I was getting drunk every night.

Speaking of getting drunk, I quit drinking coffee (and anything caffeinated). The first day was a bitch. Total withdrawal symptoms - big pressure headache, laid in bed all day, cracking joints.

batman

Last weekend I watched Batman Begins for the second time and I really enjoyed it. I've always wanted to go through a film and reverse-engineer it back into storyboards. I want to do it with No Country For Old Men, but I got the hankerin' tonight, and next thing you know I'm boarding Batman Begins.

As I work through, I've realized that the director/editor/D.O.P. team is making sure every shot asks a question. It's fantastic. If there's not a lot of direct suspense in the acting, the camera frame will open on something unclear, then move onto something. So you start the shot with a question - needing to keep watching, even just to understand what you're looking at in that single shot.

Bruce Wayne doesn't just climb down into the Batcave. Every shot looks dangerous. In the last shot I drew above, Wayne is sliding down a subterranean slope with rope. Right before the cut, you see him slip over a dark ledge. Even for that tiny moment, you're left in suspense, needing to see the next shot to see what he's fallen into.

I'm also learning a lot about directing actors by watching the film this way. You see what an actor needs to do in that one shot. If you look at each shot individually, you only see a tiny action - a glance, or the turn of a head. It's only when you piece it together that you start to believe and be taken in.

There's lots to learn about lighting, composition, and camera moves. And it's good sketching practice - lots of different body angles n' stuff.

This is a tonne of fun! A huge team of very experienced people came together to make this film. By doing this, I feel like I'm learning lessons from all of them.

Maybe I gotta start doing this for an hour a day or something.

shitsicles and magic

Foggy days on the island. A distant foghorn calls out every few minutes. The shoreline is grey, and the horizon is ocean, fading to white only a hundred yards offshore. Sloshing, subdued, and mysterious.

The skies have been calm, but this evening the wind picked up and blew around the trees for a it. I thought we were in for a storm, but it ended up being only a few minutes of hard rain.

It's amazing how different the weather systems are between here and Vancouver, which is only fourty kilometers away. I can read the weather pretty well in Vancouver, but I feel a little blind over here when it comes to the flow of air and water. I'm learning slowly, though.

I'm so grateful to be able to step outside and piss off my deck and hear nothing but the wind. To take deep breaths of clean fresh air.

When I was living in the Yukon I didn't have indoor plumbing, so I was forced outside to the outhouse no matter how cold it was. Cold enough that you don't use a toilet seat in your outhouse, because your ass will freeze to it. (The substitute for a seat is a piece of rigid insulation with a hole cut in it.) Cold enough that your poop would freeze before it had a chance to settle down flat, so eventually you'd have tall pillar of shit in the outhouse pit, growing up towards your arse. My neighbour called it a Shitsicle - like, as in Popsicle. You had to take out a shovel and smash down the Shitsicle every few weeks.

The outhouse was a blessing because it forced me outside. I remember rushing outside on many nights in the blasting cold, doing my deed, rushing to get back in, but stopping in my tracks when I saw the Aurora Borealis blazing in the sky above. Standing there and just watching, awestruck. If you've seen those Northern Lights, you know that it's magic. I don't care what they say about the earths's magnetic field in the atmosphere blah blah blah. It's fucking magic.

The T'lingit people of the north say that the Northern Lights are the spirits of their ancestors walking across the sky.

I hope to find something that awesome and magical here, by the ocean, this winter. But I have a hard time believing anything could match them old spirits in the sky.

triplets

Now that the animation of my film is one, it's time to move on to other projects. Next stop - art show. I started on a few paintings today. I'm expanding my art enterprise into other rooms of the house. Now I have Animation Room, Watercolour Room, and Oil/Acrylic Room. I feel very privileged to have this much space to make art. That's one big advantage of living outside the city - way more space.

I'll post paintings as I finish them. I haven't even thought of where I'll show them yet. I tend to focus way more on the creation of work than the marketing of it - something I need to work on.

I've learned a lot about marketing short films, though, and have set aside a bunch of time this fall to make posters, DVD cases, and a website to showcase The Detonator. Or The Perfect Detonator. Haven't finalized the title yet.

Empire of the J25

It looks like a flock of Coots and a half-dozen Harlequin Ducks are going to be wintering on the shore near my place. That makes me very happy. They're two of my favorite waterfowl. Check em out:

It's pretty obvious why the Harlequin is a good duck. Purdy. Here's a Coot:

The Coot has a flashy bit of white, and colorful red legs, but they're not nearly as decorative as most male waterfowl. I like Coots because of their feet. Instead of webbing between each toe, their individual toes have flaps on either side. When the Coot pushes its feet down through the water, the flaps splay out, so the toes become really wide for a moment, like tiny red flippers.

I've been swimming in the ocean every day, but not staying in for long. It's bloody cold - colder than usual. Apparently this is will be an "El Nina" winter - an unusually cold winter because of cold ocean currents.

I've tried swimming in the wetsuit, but I don't like it. Today I swam in shorts, and it wasn't bad but my chest was burning and aching after a minute or two, and my chin (of all things) was also burn-aching, like that feeling you get when cold snow gets down your back, or into your boot. Except the cold snow is covering my whole body. A mountaineering friend of mine calls it the "screaming meanies". He gets it bad on his hands and feet because partial frostbite has reduced the circulation in his extremities.

This weekend I'm buying a thermometer so I have a better idea what the hell I'm doing out there.

sniniq

I got to thinking about the Cyclops. If you only had one eye, you'd have to evolve very differently to overcome the lack of depth perception. The traditional "giant man with one eye" doesn't work for me.

Whales have developed all kinds of ways to see without using their eyes. Humpbacks have lumps all over their heads, like big ingrown hair-pimples. Inside the pimple is a super sensitive cluster of hairs. Using the whole array of pimples, they can sense the motion of fish in the darkest ocean depths, and get 'em!

My cyclops has grown big chunks of hair that are slowly bonding together into sensitive lumps. I don't know how they help him see, because air doesn't reflect vibrations like water does. Whatever. Maybe they're like teats, and there's some milky fluid inside that jiggles to some mysterious frequency or whatever.

(The one on the left of the top image is a baby cyclops.)

Centuries later, they evolve into the Sniniq / Sasquatch / BigFoot / Yeti. One-eyed sumbitches with a bunch of teats on their chest! Gah! Moss grows on their wet hair so they're super-disguised in the bush. If you come too close, they crouch down and squint their one big eye and look like a stump. They're watching you.