home movies

During my summer in Iqaluit, a friend and I started talking about putting together a claymation movie. I wanted to document my fruitless fishing forays in a comical way and we began coming up with ideas for a plot... and music. I was staying in an apartment not far from the airport and my neighbour had an old electric organ that she let me borrow. I lugged the thing across the hall and into the apartment, sliding it up against the wall. I plugged it, super excited about coming up with a soundtrack for our little movie. I spent hours goofing around on that thing and, unfortunately, due to my almost-luddite-level ignorance when it comes to technology, what I have below is pretty much all that I was able to record. Since I didn't know how to record the noise I was making, I just used the GarageBand feature on my macbook to record the audio through my laptop's internal microphone. To play it back, I found it was best done using the iMovie feature, but I could only listen to it if I put actual movies alongside to accompany it, as the music would stop once the movie footage ran out. So I uploaded every last movie clip I had on my camera - the camera that can't record audio - and then I was able to listen to my 4:44-minute slice of schizoid heaven.

The claymation movie, like so many of the things I get excited about, never moved passed the imagination phase.

Tonight though, I found the original, for-recording-purposes-only video, and I honestly scratched my head/giggled hysterically while it played. There appear to be little snippets from Yellowknife, Grace Lake, Rossland, Iqaluit, Egypt, Chicago, London, Vancouver, Calgary, a couple some stops along the road... and a whole lot of me walking drunk with my trusty, beat-up, pocket-sized Panasonic.

Note: A couple of the movie files were corrupted, so I had to take a long piece from Egypt and sub in a shot of fireworks at a White Sox game and a ferry ride across the Mackenzie on January 2 in -40C.

Here it is: