Posts tagged with "projects"

the white widow makes it real easy to jerk off and take a nap

There’s been a strange inter­lude of dis­com­fort amidst the seren­i­ty.

I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that I have so many ideas, but they all require a human sub­ject. I tried doing some land­scapes, but all I got was some shots of dirty snow and a run­ny nose. It’s the habits, details, nuances, rit­u­als, flaws, moments of peo­ple that I love to cap­ture.

rolling a joint

aLeda 100% cel­lu­lose.

I’m booked for two more wed­dings this year, and I live for those moments of chaos, when peo­ple are too wor­ried about drink­ing and eat­ing and danc­ing to think about being record­ed, a sort of ani­mat­ed jumpol­o­gy. But even though it takes me a few weeks to put the final togeth­er, wed­dings are nev­er enough. I just want to keep film­ing and edit­ing and film­ing and edit­ing.

Arrows with no target

I don’t view my projects the same way any­more. I used to work towards a goal, an idea of what I want­ed to achieve. But more recent­ly I stopped car­ing about the end result, prob­a­bly due to this new per­spec­tive on…every­thing.

It’s a strange jux­ta­po­si­tion of know­ing that what you’re doing is ulti­mate­ly insignif­i­cant, and find­ing enjoy­ment in doing it any­way. Like a child stack­ing a pile of blocks, only to knock them down.

The wikipedia arti­cle on wu wei explains feel­ing this bet­ter than I can:

The goal for wu wei is to get out of your own way, so to speak. This is like when you are play­ing an instru­ment and if you start think­ing about play­ing the instru­ment, then you will get in your own way and inter­fere with your own play­ing. It is aim­less action, because if there was a goal that you need to aim at and hit, then you will devel­op anx­i­ety about this goal.

Zhuangzi made a point of this, where he writes about an archer who at first did­n’t have any­thing to aim at. When there was noth­ing to aim at, the archer was hap­py and con­tent with his being. He was prac­tic­ing wu wei. But, then he set up a tar­get and “got in his own way.” He was going against the Tao and the nat­ur­al course of things by hav­ing to hit that goal.

(This also reminds me of a verse from Leonard Cohen’s True Love Leaves No Traces: “Through win­dows in the dark/The chil­dren come, the chil­dren go/Like arrows with no tar­gets/Like shack­les made of snow.)

Nowadays, I do what I feel like doing and don’t stress out about not fin­ish­ing a project, cause I know I’ll feel like work­ing on it anoth­er day. It leaves me more loose ends, but I don’t mind. Luckily, I love cre­at­ing things. Trying dif­fer­ent medi­ums. New ways of express­ing myself.

The Dawning: Rachel CD Release Concert

When Rachel Beausoleil start­ed work­ing on her lat­est album, she approached me about design­ing the art­work. We sat down and threw around some ideas before she even start­ed record­ing, but did­n’t come up with any­thing sol­id because I did­n’t have a sound to go on. All I knew was that it was a med­ley of songs, not like her last album where the songs fol­lowed a theme.

One day I came home to find a record­ing of the album in my mail­box, yet to be mas­tered. She named the album after the epony­mous track, The Dawning, which is a jazz arrange­ment of the famous song Aquarius, a per­son­al anthem of hers.

The Dawning artwork front

She gave me her notes soon after, so I put on the album and gave it a good lis­ten, feel­ing a cer­tain clar­i­ty from her sound. It made me think about dawn, and space, and sun­ris­es, and hot colours, so I incor­po­rat­ed those ele­ments when lay­ing out the text, as well as some bokeh to give an off-focus glim­mer.

Continue read­ing “The Dawning: Rachel CD Release Concert”…

Natalie MacLean — Why Subscribe?

Natalie MacLean — award-win­ning wine writer, speak­er, judge, and author of the book “Red, White and Drunk All Over: A Wine-Soaked Journey from Grape to Glass” — com­mis­sioned me to make a video to sell sub­scrip­tions to her wine newslet­ter.

This was real­ly fun to do, as Natalie is very fun­ny, pleas­ant, and nat­ur­al, both in per­son and in front of the cam­era.

Shot with a Canon Vixia HF100, and edit­ed in Final Cut Pro. Soundtrack Pro was used for audio edit­ing, and Magic Bullet used for fil­ters.

Rachel Beausoleil at the NAC

A demo reel I made for Rachel Beausoleil, using footage I shot of her jazz vocal per­for­mance at the NAC Fourth Stage, as well as snip­pets of an inter­view I did with her. As a way of get­ting more expo­sure for future gigs, she asked for some video that she could shop around to dif­fer­ent venues. I agreed to make this demo reel for her in return for some tick­ets to the show for me and my friends.

It was a won­der­ful con­cert in an inti­mate set­ting. The reper­toire was quite var­ied — from waltz to Bossa nova to bal­lad — but all songs were per­formed as a jazz inter­pre­ta­tions. The setlist includ­ed Aquarius by The Fifth Dimension, Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen, and Evangeline by Isabelle Pierre.

Of spe­cial sig­nif­i­cance is that the per­for­mance was on Rachel’s 40th birth­day. She had planned the con­cert over a year ago as a come­back after hav­ing two kids and giv­ing up her time for them.

I can now embed videos in HD after acquir­ing a Vimeo Plus account; they look oh-so-sexy, and even bet­ter in full-screen.

One of the high­lights of the night was Tom Posner’s bass solo dur­ing Caravan (a clas­sic Duke Ellington big-band piece) clock­ing in at almost two min­utes. You can see how sur­prised Rachel is when Tom los­es him­self in the music and keeps going on this great flur­ry of notes. This solo is some kind of awe­some that I can’t even describe.