Week 6: PMA

Talk about whirlwind. I haven’t even had a chance to think this week, never mind write about what I’ve been doing!

Last weekend we filmed for our film and video class, which means that this week we’ve been editing. Kenneth was extremely kind and lent me a really great camera to film with, in addition to the one we were provided with at school, which meant that we could get a whole lot more footage than we could have just with the one (as we were filming on the mountain on Sunday and it was time sensitive).

This week I have continued with archiving photographs and images for Plague, as well as finding more images for the Emily Carr show, which I sent to be digitized so that they can be included in the episode. There was a bit of a mix up with the rights and cost of the images. Emily Carr’s paintings are in the public domain, but the Vancouver Art Museum, which possesses the majority of her works, charges an obscene amount of money for high res. digital images. So apparently we’re just going to scan pictures ourselves and put them in the film. That said, the museum has the most incredible website which contains pretty much every extant image by Carr, which can be searched in various ways, and made all of my work a lot easier!

Archiving images from the BANQ was also facilitated by a shortcut I discovered. The image number (which I already had) could just be copied and pasted into the URL. After doing a hundred or so images manually, searching through the website, waiting for various pages to load, I discovered this. It definitely made a drawn-out task a little less tiresome!

I have had a couple of meetings with Kenneth this week. The first involved our talking about my trip to Israel and how I’m going to approach the film I want to make. He asked me to write up and outline of the film (which I will post here), emphasising how important it is that I make a film about myself, as that’s something that I can do that no one else could, and it will therefore be more fresh and exciting. That said, this is a first film, so I need to do something within my reach. I’m so excited!

The meeting we had yesterday was highly informative. We discussed different options for funding in the documentary film industry and he told me about the various ways in which the projects at PMA are being funded. But I’ll get into that more in my paper on the industry…

Next week will be my last. I really can’t believe it. This has been an incredible experience so far. I will be very sad to leave!