Hello TO!!

Last week I flew to Toronto to meet with the Canadian MS Society's Personnel Grants committee. It's mind blowing that it takes the same amount of time (just over 4 hrs.) to fly 3/4's of the way across Canada as it does for me to drive through the mountains to my in-laws' in the interior.

Along the way, I got to see two of the Great Lakes-Lake Superior (left) and Lake Huron (right). When we were landing in Toronto, I was stunned to discover there was no snow on the ground!! Here I'd purchased brand new snow boots just for this trip and there was nothing! It's a good thing I'd packed a pair of shoes. Crazy!

I took the Rocket bus from the airport to Kipling Station to catch the subway (left) into downtown. It reminded me alot of the subway in NYC. So different from our skytrain here-it's a much older system and runs almost entirely underground. I was also surprised that they have actual people sitting in the subway to collect fares, rather than having automated ticket machines like we do in BC.

It was about an hour from the airport to the hotel I stayed in, which was a Hilton right downtown, just a block away from St. Patrick's station. The photo on the right was my view from my hotel room.

Monday night, the Canadian MS Society took our team out for dinner at The Queen & Beaver. We had a lovely dinner and then everyone headed back to the hotel to rest up for the big meeting the next day. I won't go into detail about the all-day meeting on Tuesday-that's another post, but let's just say it was intense, hugely interesting and I came away with a full heart and a deep sense of satisfaction for the work our team did together.

Wednesday, I had the entire day to sight see before catching an evening flight home. My friend Jenna, whom I write with on NMO Diaries lives in TO, so we finally had a chance to meet. We had dinner together Tuesday night and then she picked me up on Wednesday morning and drove me all over the city. I really appreciated her taking time out of her busy life to be my tour guide. She did a fantastic job.

We started our day having coffee (tea!) at Casa Coffee in this cool little neighbourhood. Jenna said that in the summer, they close the street here to traffic and it becomes a funky street market. I love the indie of this coffee shop-it had a whole old school candy counter at one end and the ceiling was decorated with a ton of globes. The photo doesn't really do it justice. The conversations of the locals were highly entertaining-it's such a small space that you can't help but overhear what other people are saying. I kept catching snippets of things like "She was only wearing a g-sting and a fur coat..." and "Here comes the Russian Mafia!" and "I am totally dressed for fashion week man!". I had to keep my back to the locals because I couldn't stop laughing.

Here's Jenna and I in the coffee shop. I think I need a selfie stick!

 Afterwards, we made our way to the alley ways where Rick Mercer does his rants for his show. Of everything you could see in Toronto, this was the one thing I was most wanting to see. 

The lane ways seem to go on forever. There's so much amazing graffiti and I only managed to see a small fraction of it. Part of that had to do with how cold it was: -13C. It was too cold to be standing around for too long and taking off your mittens to take iphone photos. I might have fared better with my DSLR camera, (I can operate it with gloves on) but I opted not to bring it this trip. I did however record my own rant which I will be posting to Rick Mercer as soon as I get a chance to upload it. Silly but fun!

We did a drive by of the Hockey Hall of Fame, or as die hard Canadian hockey fans would call it, church. (Hockey is a religion in Canada.) Really cool building-Toronto has some gorgeous architecture. 

And then there was of course, the obligatory viewing on the CN Tower. Jenna very kindly offered to take me up, but as we were sitting there on the street, the observation deck was being swallowed up by clouds. No point in going all the way up to see absolutely nothing! I was fine with it-I've done the Space Needle in Seattle, so it wasn't really a big deal to not go up.

I loved the little trolley buses. This shot shows the old ones. The new ones look very much like Japanese bullet trains. I had hoped to find time to ride one, even briefly, but just didn't get to it. 

For lunch, we went to Trattoria Nervosa in Yorkville. It was a really cool Italian eatery. We ordered a traditional Italian pizza and a Caesar salad to share. The selfie (right) was taken in the entryway. I loved the medallion on the floor. The bike was just around the corner in front of one of the many trendy little shops. I had a great time visiting with Jenna and getting to know her. We'll see one another again in early March when we both fly to LA for NMO Patient Day.

Jenna dropped me off at one of the subway stations after lunch and I made my way back to the airport, just in time to get through an enormous backlog at the security checkpoint. Fortunately, I was able to go through an accessible line, which was a life saver. My flight home was rough-we had major turbulence the entire way and I didn't get out of my seat the whole time. Normally, I don't mind turbulence-that's how you know you're flying, but I was feeling a bit under the weather and so it wasn't as much fun as it normally would be. Fortunately, our flight arrived 1/2 hour early, so that kind of made up for it.

I really enjoyed my trip to Toronto. I'd never been before and that's now as far east in Canada as I've ever been. I plan to write about the actual work I was doing there for the Canadian MS Society, but it will be posted over on their site, when I do. 

So...I am home now and playing catch up with various things-laundry, emails, blogging, etc. (Oh the glamour of it all!) I have a few projects in motion that need my attention. I'll be making a list first thing tomorrow morning. No rest for the wicked!

Once Upon A City

So here's my second Montage video. This one uses only stills, but I really wanted to make a video about my love for graffiti, so there you have it! Some of the images are created from photographs I've taken and then finessed through the magic of post-processing and the rest are just as I found them. 

I'll have to make a page on my blog sidebar to house my Montage work. It's highly addictive and I see more movies in my future! In the meantime, I've put a link button for my Vimeo channel on the sidebar.

Montage: Week 1

So ages ago, I drove across the line to the US to purchase this little gizmo, a Flip video camera. I've used it a bit since then, mostly shooting tutorials, flip throughs of some of my ROD journals and clips of Indy swimming, which I've patched together using Windows Movie Maker, which I really knew very little about. Other than that, my Flip has mostly sat in a drawer in my studio. Well, no more!

This week, Vivienne's new class, Montage launched and I've been working hard (or if I'm being truthful here, obsessively) on putting together my first video. At the beginning, I was kind of freaking out, not sure what I was going to do. This is usually what happens when I step outside my comfort zone but I take it as a sign that whatever's about to happen is going to be GOOD! After much hemming and hawing on Monday, I suddenly knew what I was going to do when I woke up on Tuesday. Sometimes, you just have to trust in the process.

I've learned a few things this week about Movie Maker, not the least of which is that it's possible to save something in such a way that you simply cannot revisit it later for further edits. Ask me how I know this. Yes, I did the impossible, somehow. Lesson learned. Fortunately, I was 99.99% finished when this happened, so essentially, it wasn't the end of the world. There are a couple things I would have like to have changed (which 1000's will pass and never know) but what's done is done and I'm letting it go. 

What I've learned this week about the process of making a soulful video is that for me, the magic comes in syncing audio to the video and stills. I love finding the most effective way of illustrating the lyrics, arranging things so that the rise and fall of the music drives the story and selecting the right transitions to underscore the important moments. It's exciting stuff!

My classmates have started posting their videos and they are so unique and interesting and beautiful. It's inspiring to catch a glimpse of who they are and to experience their stories in this way. 

Here's a peek at what I was able to create:

Inspired!

April has flown by so quickly and we're now in the final week of Swan Dive. *Boggles* As always, my classmates have been hugely inspiring, so I wanted to share some of their amazing work. (You can click on the credits below to see the full size images.)

1. ledger, 2. Walk Away..., 3. still life with pears, 4. Spoon with texture, 5. close up, 6. Happy, 7. Pink, 8. Trees in mist, 9. SwanDiveTruck 4-1-12, 10. The knowing., 11. Gates with texture, 12. play, 13. color correction bluegrad, 14. SF Pier with Nasos3 texture, 15. Untitled, 16. Orchard as painting

Vivienne McMaster is offering a brand new class, Montage, which begins in June. It's about learning to create videos, by combining video footage, still images and words to tell your story. I like the idea of adding another layer to what I've already learned in the last year and a half about photography. It's another opportunity to step outside of my comfort zone and I'm excited about it. I'm signing up! Vivienne is offering an early bird special price to those who sign up before the end of April, so now's a good time to go check it out!

Fur Babies

As promised, here are the two of the cutest puppies in the world, Indy, my dog and Dexter, my best friend Lisa's dog!

Just ignore the "music" in the background-it was the TV. *sigh*

Aqua Dog!

As promised, here's a brief clip of Indy at the lake yesterday. I used our digi camera so the audio is all garbled. (It's just random people talking on the beach, so you're not missing anything.) Next time I will take my Flip which does much better with sound. (Live and learn!)

Anyway, feel free to adore my sweet dog. I just love seeing him so happy and he's happiest when he's in the water, doing what Labs do best-swimming and retrieving.

Thinking About Creativity

Goodness! Is it February already?! Hard to believe we're already into the second month of the year. It's a busy time here in my studio. February, has traditionally been a popular month for workshops for me and I am teaching three in the next two weeks.

I've been making art, but a good chunk of it has been for publication so I can't share it just now. I've also been busy writing, which I love to do. Speaking of writing, it's come to my attention that before too long, I will reach my 1000th post! Can you believe it? When I started this blog, blogging wasn't as mainstream as it is now. Incredibly, that was just 4 years ago! How quickly things change. I'll have to think up something special for my 1000th post when the time comes.

A few weeks ago, a friend pointed me towards an online video of a talk given by Rice Freeman Zachary on Google Authors. It's here and you might want to check it out. Essentially she talks about her experiences with interviewing other artists about creativity for her book, Living the Creative Life . I was interested in what she had to say so I ran the video while I was working in my studio and listened.

One thing she talked about was how one artist said he felt that everyone was creative and that he feels creativity gets expressed through whatever each person's gift happens to be. I started thinking about it, turning that idea over and over in my mind like a small pebble and the more I thought about it, the more I agreed. I thought about it like this:

One of my favourite movies of all time is Apollo 13. The reason I love the movie so much is that when the space ship gets in trouble, the NASA engineers have to use their deductive reasoning and problem solving skills to figure out how to get the astronauts back safely. Every time I watch that movie, I am awed that men who have never been in space can figure out exactly what to do. It's fancy mathematics that I couldn't even begin to understand-I'm an artist after all, not a rocket scientist, but those guys worked the problem and somehow managed to solve it. It boggles my mind.

When I think about that movie, I see the creativity of science and I have to agree that this is creativity being expressed in the way that these men were gifted. We always think of science as such a left brain thing. Science and math are not traditionally what we would think of as creative-they don't involve paint or prose, music or stage lights, but it's creativity just the same.

I love architecture and I have often wondered why that is. Now I realize that it's because it's the genius of both the mathematical and artistic world coming together to create something of both beauty and integrity. One of my own personal heroes is Leonardo Da Vinci and there is no more perfect example of both the left and right brain thinking. That man was creative with every fibre of his being. He was fuel by an insatiable curiosity about the world and he never stopped wondering "What if...".

I haven't read Rice's book yet-I have to track down a copy, but I thought I would mention her video because you might enjoy it as much as I did. Happy viewing!

Granville Island

I just finished making another little video that I shot a week ago in Vancouver. I thought it might be fun for folks to see one of the places I like to visit whenever I have time. I'm still learning the ins and outs of shooting and editing, but each time I do it, I discover something new! The point is, it's fun and that's all that matters.

If you want to be notified as soon as I upload a new video, just go here and hit "subscribe".

So, without further ado, here it is!

Enjoy!

Bringing Art To Life

My very first Flip Video movie, edited with Window Movie Maker. (I wanted more editing options than the Flip Video's built in software allows.) I made a minor mistake I couldn't fix-the text for the web addy for the company where you can get the charms is supposed to be at the end, not at the beginning, but hey, it's my first try. Next time I will get it right!

My husband just came by and heard talking so he came into the studio. I explained that I was watching the video I just made and he says "But who's talking?" *boggles* apparently after almost 18 years of marriage, he doesn't know the sound of my voice when he hears it! *laughs*

Anyway, it was fun to make, so expect to see more! Enjoy!

EDIT: My apologies-in the video, I said the kit was $3 when in fact it is $6. Still a great deal!