Awesome Night Out

After a shaky start where my card failed to work and rather than tell anyone, I ran around half a dozen shops making sure. I returned and found Jason, who bought me a pint and then returned to my seat, to discover Luke had bought me one too.
I had an absolutely fantastic night catching up with Jason, Lisa, Brian, Kara, Syed, Luke and Allison. I definitely need a night like that more often.
Cheers for a wonderful birthday!

Indian New Year

So it turns out my birthday is on the Indian New Year! I heard from one of the women at the Naam that there would be a festival on Saturday, which it turns out is the same one that woke me up in 2008 held right outside my old house on 49th and Fraser. There was the same bright sunlight I remember, the same colour, friendliness and delicious free (!) food. I walked about in a muggy daze soaking in the smiles and the sun before cycling away to coffee up. I would have missed it if I had gone home from my night shift to sleep and it was well worth being a dribbling zombie for a day.
The whole day followed suit with the sun weighing me down like a fat yellow toad, and a busy convivial atmosphere filled the bustling streets. These images are from my brand new camera, a present from my kick-ass, ridiculously generous girlfriend. expect decent photos in all light and weather from now on viewers...

The Naam

The Naam is where I work from 3am to 11 two days a week, and before I worked there Adrienne had taken me there twice as a special treat. It is open twenty four hours and serves only vegetarian food with a vegan equivalent for everything on the menu. It is populated almost entirely by hippies and now, me.
It has the feel, now that I have had more in-depth contact with it, of the faded glory of the days in Vancouver when the road on which it sits was called Rainbow road and not 4th Ave. There is a large contingent of old guard servers still working from its opening forty years ago. These folk are fascinating, kind people with a spark in their eyes from a well spent youth. Everyone, young and old looks out for each other, covers each other's shifts and enjoys their work.
I work for the head cleaner Dale, who paddles (a cross between surfing and rowing) and is a photographer for fashion events. He is so consistently bursting with energy that he twitches and tends to blurt his sentences. At first his energy would make me incredibly nervous, feeling that I should be at least doing my tasks at a gently jog to keep pace with his spirits. He is fantastically cheery, even at three in the morning and is a wee bit of a letch.
I could write paragraphs on Al, who fascinates me. It turns out that after ditching school, dramatically hurling his 'bullshit' textbooks into the trash he became Al, the misfit. There was no need for a career in his day, at least not for everyone. In a time where you could serve tables for three months of the year and then disappear into the wilderness to live with a bunch of your friends hunting, swimming and taking acid, where was the need? He is a man of pet theories and distrusts all types of authority, the chief among which are Science and the Government.
My favourite part of the Naam is the part on which I can't say much, that is the mysterious Indian lady cooks who work in the tiny kitchens. All wonderful, they are always friendly to any tired cleaners at 3am who can remember their names. Yesterday I learned to my delight that my birthday falls on Indian New Year and so now every year I can find local Indian parades near my birthday, which happen to be as colourful and friendly as any I have seen.
Ewan of the Naam out.

Calgary and Giraf

In November my wonderful girlfriend drove me across a mountain range so I could attend my film's screening in Calgary, Alberta as part of the Giant Incandescent Resonating Animation Festival.
Here is the link to the awesome festival promo by Malcolm Sutherland. winner of the Best in Canada and co-winner of the audience award with his short The Astronomer's Dream. http://vimeo.com/6233213
The journey there was an insane twenty hour drive across the plains to the east of Vancouver, through the Rockies and out onto the wide open spaces of Alberta. The journey was almost too fast to take in the sites and sure enough we had a far better view on the return journey when there was light during the trip through the mountains.
There is an awful lot of Canada. My brain just shuts down rather than trying to fit it all into an internal map. Quite often during a drive through the Rockies your eyes try to do the same thing and you end up looking at things like your shoes say, or a dog, because you can fit them easily into your field of vision. The mountains make your eyes want to be bigger than they are.
But just as you can lift anything with a big enough lever, if you get far enough away from the Rockies you can see them all at once and this state of being is called 'Being in Calgary'. Hahaha amn't I drole?
We stayed with a friend of Lisa's called Lyndsey who had a spare room in her flat and is possibly the most likeable person on earth. Lyndsey is a wonderful, generous soul and treated us like long lost friends. During our stay with her she shared her whiskey and fed us Eggnog and without her the trip would not have been a millionth as pleasant.
The Night of my screening came and Lyndsey brought a couple of her friends from church and rock-climbing (they go together like jam and toast apparently). They were a wonderful bunch keen to see what was going on. I gather Lyndsey's seal of approval was the only reason they'd consider coming which made me nervous, but they were engaging and friendly and we had a fantastic night out when the screening was over.
So the screening was a theme-driven competition where the shorts were played back-to-back and the judges would decide the winner, the theme for my section was 'strings'. I later discovered this was an obscure reference to a Canadian film of the same name made by Oscar nominated female team from Calgary, but hey. My film was on last and just as Adrienne reached over to grab my hand and I thought my heart was going to explode it started, then stopped. The end credits rolled and the sound kept going. There were sporadic "Is that it?" claps and it was over.
I rushed out into the foyer and a girl called Joanna whom I had been talking to by email was all apologies. I was quite panicky.
"I'm really sorry! What can do for you though, is play it tomorrow as part of the next selection as well as tonight before the main feature. I'm so sorry it didn't work. Would that be okay?"
"Th-thankyou!"

I've never felt such a wierd combination of still fading horror combined with exultant triumph. I just sort of wobbled. I was consoled by all present and we all stayed to watch the feature, which we all got free tickets for and I fulfilled my biggest ambition of having my film screened before a feature. The film was an Israeli-Australian co-production and it is absolutely brilliant. The trailer can be found here -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44lh-RvV4NM

So for the rest of the trip we relaxed, watched more films, enjoyed Lyndsey's hospitality and visited a fossil museum an hour out of town. we visited Jasper and Banff and Lake Louise and chased a truck to Running Down a Dream by Tom Petty.

Thankyou so much Adrienne. X

A Human Face

So 'Colourful Devils' has been submitted for grant funding and it's fate is out of my hands. So for something to do I'm making a new film with the working title 'A Human Face' I'm currently putting some boards together and will post them as I go. The production blog is here - http://ahumanface.blogspot.com/

ME LIKE HOCKEY

Galiano

Here are some pictures taken during several trips to Adrienne's parents' cabin on the gulf island of Galiano!
Galiano contains a thriving Hippy community, but there are many holiday houses and the population explodes in the summer. There is one pub called the Hummingbird, which provides a free bus that travels around the island mopping up tired and thirsty pedestrians.
Today the island is extremely quiet having only a few permanent residents made up of artists (and one film college?) which make their money during tourist season. There is a wide variety of animals and most of the island is covered in forest, although it's main purpose at one point was as a source of wood. Now the trees have reclaimed the island from people, even if there is less variety and a few more vaguely familiar scrubby bushes with sweet smelling yellow flowers.

Yue Minjun!