Film

I have two film projects I’m trying to write currently, hopefully to be produced next year. The first is a continuation of the Things You Can’t Forget series, entitled Intimacy. It’s the story of a couple on vacation and explores, through their friendships with people outside of their relationship, where true intimacy lies. The second film, entitled Houndstooth / Nom d’un chien!, is a short comedy based on an urban legend I took for the truth recently. It’s a fun story that I’m currently trying to see if I can work some other ideas into without diluting it’s simplicity.

I’m also going to be wading into the footage me and my crew, the Five Wise Kids, shot this summer in Jamaica, trying to shape a short doc out of it, hopefully. This has been on the back burner for a while, clearly, since I’ve been back since the beginning of July, but I’m feeling guilty and that’s a great motivator. I think there’s some great footage in there and I have a concept for the story, so we’ll see what I can get out of the footage.

Web

Speaking of Things You Can’t Forget, I’m going to be vamping up that website quite a bit sometime soon to make it a proper showcase for the films in the series and hopefully a fun destination for news on productions, screenings and anything else that comes up. Aside from that, I’m working on rebranding my father’s company website, Hydropower Performance Engineering Inc. (HPPE), with a greener focus and a simple, engaging design. A new logo is in the works and I’ll be heading out in the field with my dad in a few weeks to take some photos of him at work, the hydroelectric generating station and his equipment. There are a few other sites I think I’ll be tackling soon as well, mainly from a design capacity, nothing confirmed yet, though.

The other major project, which is the establishing project of (hopefully) a series of fun and useful web applications, is the tiffr project. tiffr is a small web application that will simplify and streamline the normally arduous process of selecting and scheduling films for the Toronto International Film Festival. It will allow users to easily make a shortlist of films screening in the festival and to create a schedule based on their own criteria. I started working on this with Ryan Ming earlier this year, but when we weren’t ready for TIFF08, we decided to step back and retool our idea. Our new architecture will be more flexible and easier to use and develop than our previous model. I hope to begin the development phase very soon and potentially have a beta version online by the end of February for testing. Stay tuned for news on this.

Photo

Aside from the shoot I’m planning at the hydroelectric dam, I don’t have any real photo projects on the go right now, other than the monumental task of sorting and ranking my entire existing catalog of images. To that end, I’m hoping to soon make an attempt at posting an image daily to my flickr account, but we’ll see how that works. Maybe just a couple a week. I’m already making excuses.

So, yeah, there’s a lot on the go. Keep checking back for updates on these and other projects, and hopefully, together, we’ll see some progress.

I’ve been thinking about eating healthy recently, which led me to memories of my visit to Clermont-Ferrand this summer, where I stayed with my wonderful friends Laure and Aude. Their father has a garden in their backyard and we would regularly eat from it’s bounty. Squash, tomatoes, apples, zucchini, herbs and other goodness would spring forth, delighting my GMO-saturated palette.

These cherry tomatoes weren’t actually from their garden, but they were fresh and delicious and addictive. I was picking at them all afternoon and evening until only the bowl remained.

I actually didn’t know much about Oshima prior to reading about him in the fall schedule but he sounds like a fascinating director, considered among some to be the greatest living Japanese filmmaker, and integral to the beginning of the Japanese New Wave. I saw one of his early movies, Cruel Story of Youth, on Friday night and it was quite impactful, with the same kinetic energy and rebellion of the films of the French New Wave, a comparison Oshima apparently doesn’t take kindly to. Apparently he strives to never make two movies in the same style, so I’m really looking forward to seeing how that plays out in some of the other films in the retrospective. The Cinematheque schedule offers top ten Oshima lists from a bunch of film scholars, including Martin Scorsese, in an attempt to help you choose which films to see, since there are quite a few in the series. I just read the write-up for each film and, based on my availability, chose a few that I knew I could make it to.

They’re also doing a series on the first 40 years of the Director’s Fortnight at Cannes. Although this selection features a lot of Canadian cinema, it’s the French films (and Mean Streets) that caught my attention right away, particularly, the screenings of Le Diable probablement and Céline et Julie vont en bateau. Any chance to see films by Robert Bresson or Jacques Rivette is not worth passing up, and I think these two films won’t disappoint. Also, if you’ve never seen Mean Streets before, the chance to see it on the big screen isn’t worth passing up. Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel give some of their rawest work, and that’s saying a lot.

I’ve broken with my tradition of buying two tickets to every screening I’m going to and inviting people along this time since there is such a wide range of films and I plan to go to many of them. Instead, I’ll offer the list of films I’m seeing here and if you read this and are interested in seeing any of them, let me know and I can try to get you a ticket. Some of these films will sell out early so the sooner the better.

• Death by Hanging / November 9, 2008 / 5:30pm
• The Man Who Left His Will On Film / November 10, 2008 / 7:00pm
• In the Realm of the Senses / November 15, 2008 / 9:00pm
• The Ceremony / November 17, 2008 / 7:00pm
• L’Enfant sauvage / November 28, 2008 / 7:00pm
• Diary of a Shinjuku Thief / November 29, 2008 / 7:00pm
• Le Diable probablement / December 3, 2008 / 8:45pm
• Gohatto / December 6, 2008 / 7:00pm
• Bonjour tristesse / December 7, 2008 / 1:00pm
• Céline et Julie vont en bateau / December 7, 2008 / 3:00pm

Bonjour tristesse is already in limited availability and it’s also part of a double feature afternoon I’m doing so if you want to get involved, better act fast.

If you’ve never been to the Cinematheque and/or just don’t think you’re into movies enough to check it out, I highly recommend you visit the website and take a look around. Every season they play tons of amazing movies that were meant to be seen on the big screen and it’s not just art house and foreign films, they include a lot of accessible programming.

And on top of everything else, it’s the cheapest movie you’ll see in a theatre this side of Harbourfront Centre.

Blitz is a three day workshop that takes filmmaking neophytes and immerses them in all of the aspects of making a film in a very intensive setting, resulting in each group producing a short film of their own. Each Blitz camp has a theme and the participants are encouraged to incorporate the theme into their films by putting it through the filter of their personal experiences.

The young adults from the Can Stage Young Company were tasked with creating films around the theme of Leadership. On our first day we discussed what leadership means to them and how it manifests itself within others, and why we even need leaders in the first place. We then broke up into four groups and went about defining the stories behind our films and working out the pre-production logistics of making them happen next weekend.

The whole process was made super enjoyable by the fantastic mix of people involved, among both the participants and the facilitators. This project was spearheaded by Ravi Jain and Natasha Mytnowych, who are working with this group of young people at Can Stage, with crazy debt owed to Kate Fraser who put all the work into developing and supporting the Blitz program over at Schools Without Borders. Together they’ve recruited a great group of support people and film mentors (which includes me) to make the execution seamless and fun. Big thanks also has to be said to The Remix Project, which has graciously provided their space for the purpose of this Blitz camp.

Next weekend we’ll be shooting and editing these films into their final masterpieces and I’m sure I’ll be back after that, completely exhausted most likely, to write about how that all plays out.

Last spring I was working near the court house and one afternoon, as I was walking past this spot, I was inspired to make this photo. I was by myself at the time and I don’t think I had my camera but I made a mental note and moved on.

Flash forward to early September, and I was in the same area with Scott and JD, and my camera, and knew I had to make the most of the opportunity. I coaxed them into going along with my plan, and this was the result, after only two tries.

The original idea was a bit different, and tweaked by a Richard Avedon exhibit I saw in Paris this summer, that involved a girl, a dress and a wind machine (or just plain wind). Perhaps it’s still in the cards.

Gotta love the fact that he didn’t even put down his cigarette.

As opposed to the previous incarnations of this site, which, directionless, suffered from a dearth of updates for long stretches of time, the new fightingtheboss will be updated frequently with videos I’ve made, stories I’m writing, photos I’ve taken, links to sites of interest around the interweb and new and exciting information about film, photo, community and web projects on the go. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a bunch of movie reviews and recommendations for people who dare take my word on those matters, either.

The site is going to be evolving indefinitely, with new features and fixes being introduced periodically to enhance the experience and make it easier to find and, hopefully, enjoy the stuff that goes on here. The first changes you should see in the near future are the addition of the Projects and Photos sections of the site, which are in development now. The Projects section will be a portfolio of sorts, highlighting past, present and future projects in the fightingtheboss universe. The Photos section will be a gallery of selected photo works posted to this site and links to external fightingtheboss materials on the web.

The old content, which dates back to 1999, will take some time to appear, as it all needs to be scrubbed to conform to the new layout, broken links need to be repaired, etc. I may just cherry pick the worthy posts from the past to keep the content on the site focused and relevant, since a lot of that stuff from the past already feels like it’s from a previous life.

So take a look around, get comfortable, hit that bookmark button on your browser and come back often to see what’s going on in the fightingtheboss universe.

This is one of the shots from a photoshoot I did with Alison for her new interior design company Alison Milne Designs Inc. The shoot was super simple, relaxed and a lot of fun to do. Hopefully it’s going to pay off by getting Alison a gig on TV.

A few more of the images from the photoshoot can be found on fightingtheboss’ flickr.

There has been a bit of discussion recently about the continuation of Project Nine Mile sometime early next year. The tentative idea is to revisit Stepney and do a short photo/video workshop with interested students with a focus on literacy and numeracy, two big problems with youth at Stepney and across Jamaica. There are still a lot of logistics to be worked out before anything becomes concrete but there are a lot of good people with great intentions working on it, so we’ll see how things progress.

For the uninitiated, the initial phase of Project Nine Mile involved me going to Jamaica for six weeks this past summer to start a computer education program at Stepney Primary and Junior High School, near Nine Mile, Jamaica, the boyhood home of reggae legend Bob Marley. The experience was incredible and was documented as Internet became available over at the official Project Nine Mile website.

A timelapse video I created of the beach in Nice during my visit this past August. This was done by taking one picture every five seconds over an hour and then animating them. The music is 7/4 Shoreline by Broken Social Scene.

This was the third and final timelapse video I made during my trip to France. This video and the others can be seen in glorious HD on the fightingtheboss Vimeo page.