Grand Central Market in Los Angeles, California

With a variety of cuisine, coffee, produce, and general novelty on offer, the Grand Central Market in downtown Los Angeles, California is a bustling hub of activity. It's a great place to be a culinary tourist and sample foods from around the world under one roof. Grab breakfast here, as I did, and then head out to explore downtown L.A. landmarks such as the Bradbury Building just across the street. Your taste buds will thank you. Grand Central Market doesn't disappoint. 

I unknowingly photographed the exact spot a scene takes place in La La Land.

Humblfax's Facts (2000)

This may in fact go down in history as one of the best and worst short films that I have ever or will ever make. It was so intentionally ridiculous that you'd think we were spoofing something. It was a made for YouTube video before YouTube was even a thing. Without social networks and before blogging became widespread, the project that became Humblfax's Facts was little more than an excuse to entertain ourselves - and probably no one more than me.

I can't think of another project I've ever created that was based more on inside jokes for such a small audience. The truth is that at 16 years old, this small summer film was as much about playing with the new Sony D8 that I'd bought myself as it was about entertaining my friends. Funny how in retrospect it's random things like this that seem to stick.  

The making of the project only lasted a couple of weeks between our jobs and varying schedules, and in the end, it was never really finished. I'd amassed just under an hour of footage of various scenes, sketches, and outtakes, and then left it. As was often the case back then, I was after more experiences than results. I remember we finished shooting a day before I left for vacation with my family to Ontario and then I had a new project to occupy me. 

It was later that fall that the project came to light again. It still wasn't edited, but I remember everyone being interested to see how some of the footage turned out. I still remember that evening because of how hard we laughed. The raw footage and bizarre situations just seemed to emphasize some of the quirks in our small group, and after that it was clear that the project would never be better than it was as a collection of random scenes. The movie wasn't just a hilarious recap of a few weeks of our summer, it ended up being some of the only home video footage that I bothered to shoot of us together in high school.  

All of these memories are awesome to rediscover, but the project was a bit of a gem in itself. The premise was like a Forrest Gump style version of Medicine Hat history starring a character named Erma Humblfax, played by my friend Kim. The movie followed Erma's life as she haphazardly influenced some of the local culture and landmarks, often without much regard for any of the actual history, but so was born Humblfax's Facts.

Here's how the story went:

The movie opened with Erma being born in a ditch, her mother dying shortly afterwards, followed by a sixteen year flash forward to her running through the open prairie (Monty Python and the Holy Grail style) in search of water. She finds a creek, drinks the water, gets sick, and ends up at a farmer's place where she seduces him. Erma then mistakes the farmer's mother for his lover and robs him.

With some money she ends up in Medicine Hat and starts stripping downtown (as you do). There she meets a rival stripper who after a dance battle gives her a tacky clay bowl because "it's savagely ugly and it reminded me of you". On her way home, Erma slips along the river, and with a pile of singles and the clay bowl she pieces together the advantages of getting into the local clay industry. She gets that going with the help of a local businessman, and after striking it rich she moves to England and befriends a socialite.

Then WW2 starts and they're both injured in a London bombing so they both go back to Medicine Hat where Erma starts working in a factory for the war effort. After the war ends she helps foil a plot to murder the mayor at the Courthouse, but it turns out he was just being pursued because he had lost some important papers. 

Erma is then kicked in the head by a child on a swing and falls into a decades long coma. When she wakes up in the 1990s she's made so much money off of her investments that she's instrumental in constructing the Saamis Teepee. Oh, and while all of this is going on, Erma is periodically visited by the ghost of her dead mother who offers her advice in rhyming rap songs.    
In short, local history just had its mind blown.

Choice one-liners from the short included:

• "Water! Water! Life giving wetness!"
• "Put me back in the wheelbarrow you bloody fool".
• "If you've got it, flaunt it".
• "It's savagely ugly and it reminded me of you".
• "Damn you, Hitler! Damn you!"
• "You bastard, I hate you, I'm taking all your silver!"
• "He kicked me in the head!"
• "In my town? I don't think so!" 

Deliberate setups aside, it's easy to see now that the best part of the project has become the stories that it triggers for me. There's not much sense in sharing all of the footage, because like I said, it's funnier for what it became and the memories that we made around it. I figured a montage of random clips couldn't hurt though. I'm guessing some of my friends might be embarrassed, but come on, you had to know this was my secret plan from the start - over a decade in the making.



Thank you to Kim Hopkins (McKenzie), Jennifer Heninger, Sarah Irwin (Sterie), Mike Niebergall, Kim Frey (Unrau), Mathew McKenzie, and Carla Hopkins (Heiland) for your help that summer. This project was nothing if not a reason to laugh. Thanks for that!

Silent City (2003)

For nearly a decade this project sat in a box full of my old film school reels, and to be honest, no one was missing much.  It was perhaps the very first thing my friend Dave and I ever shot on film, outside of a few tests maybe.  At the very least it was the first assignment in the film program that required us to shoot and edit on 16mm.

What makes Silent City worth sharing is more than just the few seconds of grainy footage that we managed to capture.  It isn't that there was some profound message behind our shots or that we had any intent of creating something epic to document how brilliant we were (although I wouldn't doubt that such things were said in jest at the time).  The film was simply a start.  It was a beginning to our film school careers, and in an unexpected and far more symbolic sense, it played a role as one of the ways that I said goodbye to Dave when he passed away last year.  

The project was shot on an afternoon in Regina that consisted of us driving around downtown, Wascana park, and the university campus and randomly pointing the Bolex camera at things.  As technical as I'm sure that sounds, I don't remember either of us being too concerned with what we shot, just as long as something actually developed when we got our film back.

The one scene that we actually put some thought into took place in Wascana park.  It consisted of me shooting Dave as he walked across to the left side of the frame and then overexposing the shot as he walked back again.  The idea, and how it ended up in the finished reel, is that we would cut the two shots together to contrast the exposures and motion between the takes.  The result was like a ghostly apparition of Dave crossing paths with himself.   

I really hadn't given the project much thought until Dave's passing in September 2011. Dave's girlfriend, Wendy asked me if I'd like to place anything in his casket and I suddenly felt there was a reason to dig out the reel again.  I still had the envelope of raw 16mm clips that we'd spliced from this project when we had edited it on the giant Steenbeck late one night.  After careful consideration I thought that nothing would be more fitting than to leave him with one of the first creative ventures we had shared in film school together.  He'd have a piece of it, and I'd have the finished reel to remember what we made.

Up until February 2012, when I purchased myself a vintage 16mm projector, I still hadn't seen this project since we shot it back in 2003.  I honestly didn't know what to expect, but the reality behind what had happened in just the last few months made each frame a bit more memorable, and even a bit haunting.  It wasn't like watching a home video, the cold shots of the city and of Dave walking just seemed to echo a lot of the sadness behind losing a friend whom I'd shared so many memories like this with.

The reel of Silent City is simplistic, direct, and little more than a 16mm film test.  And yet, it's become a project that I'll never forget or view the same way ever again.  

Cutout - Animation Test #3

One of the final animation tests we did in Film 203 was with jointed construction paper cutouts that we each made.  This form of animation has been most notably popularized by the South Park series, and although my test isn't much to go on, it was a lot of fun to make.  I animated a cowboy who shoots his gun and the bullet bounces around the frame until it hits him.

With each test we learned a little bit about the patience and subtly required to create movement in inanimate objects.  What resulted from all of these was one final project that we could create in any medium we wanted.  I opted for a claymation/stop motion project titled, Over at Grandpa's.  More on that soon.

Sand - Animation Test #2

The second animation test we did in Film 203 consisted of using sand on a light box. Once again the Bolex camera was used to capture the experiment one frame at a time. My clip was really just me playing around to get a feel for the medium, but most of our exercises were inspired by the classic NFB animations we previewed.  The Erlking by Ben Zelkowicz is the impressive sand animation short I remember.

Flipbook - Animation Test #1

In a continuation of the old film school projects I've been rediscovering since purchasing my Revere projector, this is the first of three animation tests I created in 2004 in Film 203.  What we did was create small hand drawn flipbooks, and then captured the books one page at a time with a Bolex camera to share them with the class.

This film strip was a bit rough and unfortunately the flicker on from the projector was particularly heavy on this test.  Still, it was an interesting experiment.  I drew a washing machine exploding in suds.  Each of these shorts were stand alone exercises, but the tricks we learned along the way did play a large role in the final projects each of us had to make for the class.

Line Art - Drawing on Film (2004)

Of all of the experiments we did in our film school animation class in 2004, drawing on film was by far the most tedious to me.  If you keep in mind that 24 frames equal one second of screen time, it meant having to replicate an image over and over again to create the project - or at least it should have.  

I chose instead to go the completely experimental (and in many ways easier) route, and opted to create a colourful film strip inspired by frequency lines.  I divided my film strip evenly between frames of green, red, and blue.  This was done with a clear strip of 16mm film and pack of sharpie markers. On top of that I drew various lines that would fluxuate in contrast to one another.  The result was as busy as you might expect, but it created a cool effect.  See what resulted below.

Original Animation Storyboards

It was completely by surprise that I stumbled onto all six pages of the original storyboards I drew up for my Film 203 animation class that I took in 2004.  I honestly thought I'd lost them when moving and hadn't actually seen them in over five years.

I've previously shared the drawn backgrounds and actual film strip from this final project titled, Over at Grandpa's.  What's also exciting is that I recently purchased a vintage 16mm projector (still on route) to try and capture some of my remaining film school shorts that I haven't been able to play.  It's yet to be determined whether the film from this animation will hold up in the projector, but hopefully I'll be able to share some excerpts at the very least.  For now, it's just cool to be able to look back at all the work that went into this claymation that I never even got a chance to screen.