The Visitor(s)

'The Visitor' was the feature at our Saturday night dinner and a movie blowout.  It's just about my favorite movie ever so I liked seeing it for the second time and Vince went along with it.  John and Kathy couldn't make it for Saturday so they came Sunday.  I told them how good the movie was and that we could watch it again when they were here but Vince didn't like it as much as me so we talked instead.

Speaking of visitors...
Twelve hours after I arrived in Spokane on a red-eye from Athens I was sitting at a hotel in downtown Spokane with Kathy and Gaynelle, both Mankato State college roommates.*  Helen was the only college roommate missing from our 1978 apartment down the hill from campus where even though we had two bedrooms, we all slept together in one (the other sat empty except for the turn table and 8-track player) because we couldn't decide how to divide us up.
Between the three of us we were able to dredge up the names of a lot of college friends that we knew we never forget but did.  We convinced each other that we all looked the same as we did in 1978 and maybe even better.
Nineteen hours later,  Janet**, an earlier college roommate and stepsister (long story) pulled in from Minnesota on a motorcycle with her husband.
You can't have too many close girlfriends.

Writing.
Thinking the meeting would give me the motivation to wrap-up (i.e. start) a little screenplay I been thinking about, I went to my first 'Metaline Falls writers group' last week but since all they talked about the whole time was how expensive things are nowadays, I may not go again.  There must be some reason I can't work on the writing project at home but I don't know what it is so I rode on my mountain bike on pavement with really new, really wide knobby tires and an unpadded, lopsided 20 pound pack that didn't conform to my back (miserable ride) to Nelson, British Columbia and stayed at the Dancing Bear youth hostel for few nights to see if that would inspire me.  It did, and now I have a screenplay about a girl that enters a cooking contest.  It should be better than it sounds and shouldn't be too complicated to do except for the scenes with all the animals.

The Dancing Bear inspired my 'girl enters a cooking contest' masterpiece.

There was no easy way for me to get into that top bunk.

A Big Week:
The movie theater re-opened on Friday with 'Super 8', the smell of new paint and popcorn and a near record crowd, many of whom had to park somewhere other than the main street because all the parking spots were taken.  Except for the sci-fi parts the movie was good. 

Next week.  Is anyone else tired of Harry Potter movies?

We won 2 local kayak races on Saturday.  One race had 4 boats, the other had 2 and the blue ribbon we came home with was the first of the summer.

We got some new red chairs.  This is just one of them but the other one looks just like it.

After a fifty-five year delay, last week during a paddle, I got up the nerve to execute my first rope swing launch.  Describing is as a 'launch' is pretty misleading but I can't think of a better word. 


*I told you about Greece and I told you about Kathy my best friend from college and now Sleepy Eye, Minnesota home of Buttered Corn Days in my last post.  Both Kathy and I majored in Parks and Recreation/Natural Resource management.  She was a Rec major because she was passionate about it.  I was a Rec major because it was easy.  I was one of her bridesmaids.

**I was one of her bridesmaids too.

***Trying to come up with a good way to make sure that the three-quarter can of refried black beans I couldn't eat wouldn't go to waste, I walked over to Justin, the Liverpool, England-ite that had been traveling for 4 years and working on a website about how to travel for a long time with no money.
Beans in hand, I asked "Do you wan......" and before I could finished my sentence, he'd grabbed the can and was writing his name on it with the group sharpie while holding the refrigerator door open.

Meet Our Movie

Brian (lead male) is bringing his new girlfriend Kathy to meet his family for Christmas dinner in rural Minnesota. Brian's family (age range from 5 to 75) expects him to bring the old familiar girlfriend they love and consider part of the family. When Brian enters with someone new, they don't know how to react. The story resolves when Kathy saves the life of one of the Uncles in a quirky, comedic scene and is welcomed into the family.

Loosely based on a true story, "You're Not Cindy" is an autobiographical comedy/drama of a Christmas when my college boyfriend surprised his family with me and I received a used, non-working clock radio in a shoe box as an impromptu gift from his confused parents weakly faking that they had expected me.

Without boring you with specifics, certain things need to be done before our movie hit the big screen.
1. Write a screenplay.
2. Find professional actors that would act for free
3. Find a location that looked like a Minnesota farmhouse, seated 16 for a Christmas dinner, wouldn't mind 35 strangers making themselves at home and was easily accessible for actors and crew from Canada and the US.*
4. Prepare a couple turkey dinners for 16 including pickled herring and several Jellos with Cool-whip.
5. Choose and wrap Christmas gifts for a big bunch of people in February.
6. Find and inspect hotel rooms for cast and crew.
7. Coordinate catering.
8. Find Christmas outfits for everyone.
9. Find a dog the day before the shoot since that is when we found out that our Canadian dog didn't have a rabies shot.
yada yada yada
Real movies have a lot of other people do this stuff but as usual it was just the two of us.

A series of lucky coincidences led us to the Lovitt Restaurant in Colville, Washington with an exterior that looked exactly like a Minnesota farmhouse if you didn't really know what a Minnesota farmhouse looked like. The Lovitt Restaurant, as you might guess by the name IS a restaurant, so inside it looked like a restaurant which would be fine if we had written a screenplay about a family that was having dinner at a restaurant but they weren't....they we at Aunt Marge and Uncle Joe's farmhouse for Christmas. Spokane cousins, that I only talk to when I need something (mostly kidding), earned a healthy spot in our credits with a collection of Christmas decorations that sang, snowed, kicked, swiveled and blinked. Then, between local secondhand, rent-to-own and furniture stores we managed to find a couch, loveseat and comfy recliner around town. Coffee and end tables, refrigerator, stove, a couple afghans and a TV that we could have on in the background throughout the day (is anyone else familiar with this family gathering phenomenon?)

Stuff I'd never really thought about...
If you want to shoot 'actor A' close-up from the front saying her lines and then 'actor B's' face reacting to 'actor A' when she's talking...it's at least two different set ups/takes....lights, mics, camera...everything. Then if you want to get a shot of 'actor C' overhearing and reacting to 'actor A and B', it's also and other set up/take. And, if actors A, B and C don't do their lines and reactions exactly the same every time, the takes can't be edited together smoothly which means that not all takes are good and you have to keep shooting until you get something good. You get the idea. When i realized that all of the gifts in a gift opening scene have to be wrapped up over and over exactly the same for each take, it was too late to make reservations for Costa Rica and spend the winter on the beach. A dinner table scene is similar. Let's use jello as an example. It gets passed around. Everyone takes some and puts it on their plates. Cut. Now let shoot it the other side. Easy for you to say. Now we need another untouched jello and clean plates.
And this is why we ran out of time.

Film Festival.
The venue (OK...so it was the school cafeteria) was sold out (if you can consider a free event 'sold-out') for our world premier. The standing room only crowd of movie buffs and surprised students looking for dinner, enjoyed the evening of 9 student films and 50 cent cookies that cost me 75.*
The audience laughed everywhere they were supposed to and then some. We held a question and answer session after the films and someone asked if our Christmas dinner scene was a real family dinner and if everyone knew each other. I guess that could be interpreted as a compliment? The event was followed by a party at our Nelson house until 2:30 and included international guests from as far away as Metaline Falls, Washington.


*For the event I bought some sweet breads and then went back and picked out 10 cookies at the Kootenay Coop Bakery.
"Would you like two more cookies?" the cashier asked.
"No thanks, I'm good", I responded.
"OK. That's 7-50".
I handed her a crisp purple 10 dollar bill.
"Thank you. If you would have gotten 2 more it would have been a dozen for 4-75." she said handing me my change.

If you think this post has a lot going on...you should have been at the Lovitt during the shoot.

The first photo is of the Lovitt before we did our magic.

Where Is The Camera? (part 1)

The buzz was "Pizza and Nelson Brewing Company organic beer in cans at Kathy and Vince's Wednesday night". The whole class came. A film-maker party. Like Hollywood. At 1 am we said good-bye to everyone except Rob who never left. Whether the full house was because it was OUR party or because we had free pizza and beer...I'll never know.

The public screening is Friday. Paul, Clay and Rob did the posters. I don't feel all that represented by our poster with the naked woman (covered in lycra only after protest) draped in film, toting a camera made to look like a machine-gun and announcing the event with a heavy metal/horror film font, but what the heck.

Figuring it would be easy to hang a few posters around town on the way home from school, I grabbed a handful. Not easy. Everywhere a poster could be hung, a poster was already hung....all current. While standing in front of a coffeehouse bulletin board a foot thick, I was approached by a musician who told me the best thing to do was to come back at 1:30 am...that way I could take some of the posters down from the night before and hang mine....a suggestion I chose to ignore.

The last time I mentioned the film we were preparing to shoot the car scene.

Take 1.
We were about to be the first car scene shot in Ione, Washington. The car was secured on the flat bed which was about to be pulled by Leon, the fella that put in our septic system, and his huge diesel truck. Vin wore a harness that was secured to the bed of the truck so well that if he would have fallen off he would have been dragged for miles. The tripod and camera weren't going anywhere. Our actors had driven down from Canada. ACTION. Ever notice how much a huge diesel engine vibrates at 20 miles an hour??? You'd notice if you were trying to film two people having a conversation in the car it was pulling while standing on it's flatbed. Well. That didn't work. We did, however, manage to get the boom shots and luckily Vince forgot he'd ever mentioned the shots from the airplane.

Take 2.
One week later.
Vince built a camera platform. Called a 'hostess tray' in the industry, it mounts to either side of the car and shoots through the window. If you want to spend 1500 dollars you can buy one or if you're Vince, you can build one out of scraps for about 20. The actors were mic'd. Everyone had a walkie talkie so we're synced for 'ACTION'. I hung holiday-looking garlands throughout the town so the audience would know it's Christmas even though it wasn't and even though the garlands didn't show up in any of the shots. Vin mounted an inverter to the car engine so we could run lights (held by huge suction cups suctioned to the hood) off of the car battery. Joel, our lead male, drove and did his lines as if there were no bright lights shining in his face and he could see just fine. Cut. Good take.

Where Is The Camera? (part 2)

Are you tired of camera scene pictures yet?

House.
Life is so much easier with a place to hang our coats when we walk in. I think I mentioned that we needed a coat rack, that Max, Vince and I headed down the railroad tracks to find some spikes and that Max didn't find any but Vince and I came back with 17 between the two of us. Today at Ryan's machine shop, Vin sand-blasted and shortened the spikes at a 10 degree angle while Ryan welded them to the metal plate he'd just cut and drilled. My job was to hold off the guy with the broken cultivator emergency for 15 minutes until they were done.

With the front door open, the house is 966 square feet plus 58 acres.

Exciting News.
Energy Star credits for the washer/dryer and the refrigerator just showed up on our electric bill.

Just A Quick Pop In

Almost everyday I promise myself that I'm going to post and entry in my blog so you can see that I'm not very good at keeping promises when they're to myself.

School and Canada.
Six hours of "After Effects" (a complicated (for me) software program) yesterday and now when I make a movie where I'll need to have a car fly through a glass window on the 50th floor of a skyscraper, I'll know how to do it. It's the very same class in which I created a skeleton that danced the Macarena.

I got an 'A!' on my last editing test. You may think I'm punctuating the 'A' in order to emphasize it but I'm not. This is not an 'A' or an 'A-' but an A exclamation point. Just another cute little Canadian quirk.

Every week I look forward to going up to Nelson and look just as forward to coming back down to Metaline Falls. All year Vin and I been whispering in the car while sitting in the customs queue without even realizing it. I guess we both felt like somehow the customs people could hear us in the car if we spoke at a normal volume. Going through customs I'm always a teeny bit nervous. I'm sure I look guilty. I know I always feel guilty.

One easy swipe of my BC Health card and the receptionist sat looking at all of my Canadian medical records. Then, when no one was checking in, she swept the floor until an examination room was free and she could set it up for me. As students we get BC Health for about 100 dollars a month. I wish I was sick so I could use it. Thursday I had a physical. I was 3 minutes late. Two minutes later, the doctor came out to get me and apologized for making me wait.

House and home.
Interior doors. We decided on what we wanted so the hard part is done. You'll think it's weird, but we had some sheets of corrugated metal left from the siding that we're going to transform into doors. How will that look? Beats me but I'll know in about a week.

We now have a cute little Asko washer and dryer, showers, bookcases, dining chairs and wooden steps. The washer and dryer are energy star, the bookshelves and steps are local wood from Steve Kiss..neighbor, logger and talent from Vin's first film. The chairs are from Sundance Catalog (sorry).

Our Saturday movie night ('Benny and Joon'...filmed in Spokane in 1993) had a record 7 movie loving lasagna eaters in attendance. Both the lasagna and the movie were delicious. Must sees: 'Benny and Joon', 'Bart Got A Room' and 'Gilbert Grape', my recent new favorites.

The elk are back. Back from where? They didn't fly south because I know I would have noticed since they travel in groups of 15 to 50. Guess it's their little secret and I'd know if they wanted me to know.

Notice, in the last photo, how the wood from the outside looks like it continues to the inside (where we need some coat hooks*). Very Chic.

Warning. If you think that after 25 years of sleeping in a king sized bed, you can go back to a queen...you'd be wrong.

*Max, Vin and I found 17 railroad spikes, soon to be coat hooks, on a walk from our house yesterday.

House, School, Nelson etc.

House.

Without looking, I'm guessing it's about 80 degrees in the house right now. Guess I was wrong in thinking that burning softwood wouldn't work. Regardless of being covered in a mid-summer sweat, I'm sitting a foot from our new wood-stove (it's a Scan 60 if that means anything) at an angle from which I can fully admire our new metal sculpture of a stairway. The whole house is like one big art installation. I'm not sure I would try to build a house in an unfamiliar location ("What do you mean the nearest concrete contractor is 75 miles away?") while going to school in a different country ever again. A good thing is that the to-do list that pretty much filled a notebook this summer fits on a post it note these days. (wow. those are some blurry photos)

You know how to make a really big room seem like a really small room? Fill it with slip-covered Pottery Barn furniture. A room that was big enough to have thrown a frisbee with Max yesterday (if Max would ever catch a frisbee) is, today, a room for just sitting.


School.

I finally did finish transcribing the dialog for my 5 minute documentary. Forty-one single spaced pages of 12 pt type. 19,834 words and beating Vince, the distant second place finisher over 11,000 words. Piece of Cake, my finished film, probably won't be a Netflix choice anytime soon but I should be be an inspiration to anyone facing a problem they consider unsolvable. I've retained (at least to date) the skills to make a film (with credits that 'roll' at the end like a real movie) and I don't think I've ever been prouder of myself. But even with that, I'm not sure I'm proud enough of myself to go through the process again. It's a good thing that movie making isn't my passion because it certainly isn't my calling.

I hated taking the tests but found that as long as I take the test within 5 minutes of walking into the room, don't talk to anyone, don't let anyone talk to me and avoid all eye contact, that I can get the information sitting on top of my brain onto the paper before it leaks out onto the floor.

With the semester over, I can honestly say that out of the 10 classmates (ages 17-53) I had, not one of them drove my crazy. Seems like there would have been at least one that I wished would never show up for class but there wasn't. No one used Bounce, no one hogged all of the professor's attention, no one thrived on hearing themselves talk, and I was able to ignore the occasional gum smacking.


Nelson.

In mid-November I discovered a utility van parked between two parking meters on Nelson's main street that cut their own organic potatoes and fried them in their very own separate fryer with organic sunflower oil. It drove up everyday at around 11:00 a.m. and pulled away about 7 p.m. The name on the side of the van was 'Bite'. What a cool name. Bright gold, really hot and shimmering with grease (of course they were greasy...they are french fries), twice a day I waited "That will be 8 minutes," for my fries to show up at the van window. Then horrors, the other day when I went to get a picture for you and a large fries for me...they were gone.

Two days later I was moping around hungry when I discovered, tucked away in a teeny little alley, Au Soleil Levant, a teeny little French bakery that makes bread I can eat. Given the choice I'd probably rather have french fries but warm bread works too.


Canada.

It was 1 degree tonight in Canada and one second later we were crossing into the US where it was 34.

Eleven dollars for a tube of extra blue hard wax (SINCE WHEN??) but on the other hand we get Canadian health insurance for 50 dollars a month and Apex, the ski area 10 minutes up and outside of Nelson, has had 3 feet of snow and grooming since mid-November. Plus actually I just realized that even at 11 dollars a tube that I can still ski for around 35 cents a day.

Live and Learn

No one told me that one of the most important steps in shooting documentary was transcribing. Or if someone did, it was when I wasn't listening. It may not sound like a big deal to you but I have to listen to and write down EVERY word with the time...to the nearest one-hundreth of a second...that it was spoken I have about 5 hours of shooting for my 5 minute documentary and my fingers look the times of a garden cultivator. Ironically, accidently forgetting to turn the sound on during a one hour shooting session was a disaster that ended up making my day.

I never paid much attention to Skype until our cell phone bill finally found us up here in Nelson. We knew it wasn't going to be pretty but were still surprised to see that the last two months were 690 dollars. Our favorite call was the 24 dollar casual chat the Vin and I had to each other from one classroom to another (in the same building). Who knew? (don't you hate that saying?)

Canada.
Benjamin Moore paint chip colors are in French. Rainforest dew is vert stuart. Pale avocado is avocat pale.
Yesterday it was pretty cold....1 degree in the Peace.
Remember I told you about the Cocoa-nut lounge? We showed up to another standing-room-only crowd...this time on a Tuesday....groovin' to an electric guitar artist yelling a combination of opera and rock.

Wednesday was classmate Alan's birthday. He turned 25 so the whole class (except Naomi who's only 17 and has a grandmother my age) went out to a karaoke bar where Vin and I belted out 'I've got you Babe' to a crowd that didn't know that Cher had ever been married.

House.
We've had electricity, plumbing and 4-6" (R30-R45) of high density closed cell foam insulation for ages but since they didn't lend themselves to compelling photography or storytelling I've had a hard time working them into my news.

The insulation people? Perfect.
The electric people? Perfect. Two brothers dba Brother's Electric. One of the brothers, Darin, went to college somewhere in Ohio because it had the strongest Ninja 'team' in the country.
The plumber? Apologized after hollering F*** You and hanging up on Vin because he asked when the boiler was going to be installed.

Max loves hiking on larch needles, a silent, western version of New England's fall leaves.