... Stone Fox on the interweb....

So, back in college, when I still entertained the thought that I would one day be a great filmmaker, I used to make stuff....

My friend Zayna and I ran the campus tv station, TVMcGill, which by the way, is awesome to this day (due to my legacy, i'm sure)

Anyway, we use to misappropriate the resources to create our own projects... and this one time, we made a music video for a friends band, by editing it for three straight days during the run up to finals in our last year of school. Holed up in the student union for 72 hours we thought we were creating genius. we were actually creating this:




Now, about five years later, I found it on an afternoon of youtube googling phrases from my personal histopry to see what comes up.... I have absolutely no idea how it got there... as the master miniDV and Beta tapes are somewhere in a box in my apartment collecting dust with my books by Kant and Derrida. But I am happy it did.

Maybe not so my viral internet fame can begin, but definitely because watching it brought back the memories of making it, and those were some of the best days in all the ones I have spent toiling away in the movie industry.

And so I thought I might provide a little how to guide on how to make a horrible music video and guarantee a locked in love for filmmaking and future internet embarassment

DO: Create a dummy production company and change your cell phone answering machine to reflect it, thus giving you a home base to secure corporate sponsorship, thus ensuring you do not run up your parents credit card to make your masterpiece

DO NOT: Answer your cell after you have started drinking at night, or before you aare fully awake the next morning, inspiring your sponsor contact to ask "are you really a professional producer? are you a student?" and causing you to have to do a lot of grovelling and finance most of the video with the credit card your parents don't know about (yet)

DO: Figure out your concept and storyboards early, stick to it and follow through.

DO NOT: come up with a narrative that no one is EVER going to understand like... say... I don't know... a guy who wakes up on the roof in a kiddy pool and can't remember where he was or what he was doing the previous evening, causing him to recall it in flashbacks as he walk the streets of Montreal, only to realize that he had stolen the band's mojo and all the flashbacks were actually the aforementioned band chasing him through the streets, and when he finally puts it altogether he just happens to have mentioned the bands practice space, where they are currently practicing in pajamas, causing yet another chase down the block..... Trust me, you will get it, it won't be clear to anyone else.


DO: Prepare as much of the wardrobe, makeup, props, locations, extras, etc in advance

DO NOT: back down from any last minute challenges or changes. Some that we dealt with here were:
-you aren't actually allowed to shoot in the montreal metro, which we did... so it was my job to distract any and all approaching subway cops while the band shot with the DP. I played stupid lost anglophone about 15 times, french subway cops are mean
-The purple footie pajamas for one of the band members were too bright through the camera, we threw them in a mud puddle, then into a drier at the local laundromat, and they were good to go
-we had NO shots of the dickies clothes or logo when they finally came through with the funds on our last day of shooting... we just went back and reshot some dickie's beauty shots... corporate selling out was ingrained in us early
-we couldn't actually get our hands on a smoke machine to create a "smoke rising from an open bag" to signify the bands mojo... instead we had friends take turns hauling down smokes and breathing out the plumes through a hose we inserted througha hole in the bottom of a knapsack.... we killed a lot of brain cells for our art

DO: Always keep food and snacks on hand to keep everyone happy during the day

DO NOT: Let your main talent get loaded and show up 15 minutes before his call time... The coffee and breakfast burritos you have on hand will sober him up and entice him enough to shoot, but you will end up having to make him look that haggard and hungover for the rest of the shoot

DO: do this... its a once in a lifetime opportunity to be this self-indulgent and have this much fun with almost no consequences....

DO NOT: take yourself to seriously.... in the end, the only thing that will happen is a few hundred people seeing it on youtube a half-decade later, just have fun with it.

.... best way i have found to support a charity today!...

If you buy this duvet cover, screen-printed to resemble cardboard boxes, the proceeds go to support a dutch homeless shelter....

Now thats thinking outside the box....

I realize most of the people who read this are located a little west of the atlantic and probably are worried about the homeless problem at home.... Well, for all you Noprth American Stylistas/Philanthropists.... go here to get the duvet, help out some dutch people, then go here to make a donation to the United Way...


oh, yeah, I am scouring the interweb for new duvet covers to go with my kickass new apartment... description coming soon, as are the horror stories from my search!

... and i thought Dougal's work was complicated....

Commercials like this may take longer....



....but this one took 600m takes of one shot.... i would cry




... Doog's are pretty cool though. check this making of... only commercial i know that has one....





i guess that car one is a lot like this one....



i am going to end this post before it become's an ode to Dougal....

.... this is just funny...

... how did i miss four-eyed monsters for three whole years?....

This is the best thing....

From now on it will be the only way I date on the internet... These people decided that, rather than send back and forth lame messages, or meet (she was too shy) they would communicate artistically.

Super fun, right?

I have never gone in for the whole online dating thing... Not that I don't think it works. I just don't think it works for me. I used to make fun of it outright... no go... I did an internship after my first year of university at a PR Firm that was working on the rebranding campaign of webpersonals to lavalife.com. Webpersonals was the Worldwide Interweb extension to the company that runs those party chat line dating things.... you know, the ones with the really lame commercials... yeah, they own lavalife... or they did then. So everyone in the office had to sign up... This was back in 2000. Y2K was still fresh in everyone's mind, People still knew what compuserve was, and dating/meeting people through the internet was just not done.

Suffice it to say, I met some real losers.... but it was for work, so it didn't really count.

Since then I have just said i don't like internet dating... and yes, I make fun of it... So much so that my sister called me on it, told me I couldn't really have a say unless I tried it... so I did.

And it wasn't that bad... It wasn't that great either. Look, its not that internet dating is inherently a bad thing. But you are definitely going to find people looking for relationships... thats the point. But here's the thing. I am not looking for a relationship. The relationship should be the by-product of the person I meet, not the other way around... and that's completely a personal preference. Online daters are looking for the person best suited to the relationship they want to be in....

So you end up dating people's profiles. They have slotted themselves into categories... nice, neat, clean, friendly categories... and there is no context. You know what they like, who they are, before you are ever attracted to them... and that seems backwards to me.

Arin & Susan managed to get themselves out of those boxes... have a little context before they met up... they managed to get a sense of eachother through the quirks and preferences without actually saying flat out "these are my quirks and preferences"

I like it....

... so funny, I was just thinking about no name...

... when i was a kid, more often than not my after school snack consisted of no name chicken bologna... i would wrap pickles in it, or cheese soldiers (which, for those of you not awesome like me, is cheese cut into sticks, when lined all up in a row look like soldiers)...

... it was awesome! sounds gross i know, and to be completely honest, it was a little gross. chicken bologna is basically the ground up pieces of the chicken that no one would possibly purchase in their original condition, reconstituted and sliced and sold 15 to a package... And it was constantly in my fridge, i have this vivid memory of my dady, coming home from the office, still in his coat, smelling like winter, standing by the open fridge door and eating it straight from the package.... 

and it looks like it could be again. They discontinued the no name line of products in the early 90s. It was all the rage in the early 80s. introduced in 1978, after a big economic crisis it offered people  simple food, cheap. It died and was replaced by President's Choice in the Reagan happy, label loving late 80's. We were supposed to be happy about it, because a great friend of the family (coincidentally one of my still all-time favourite people on earth) was integral in the development of the new line. But truth is, I missed that thickly sliced chicken bologna in the bright yellow packaging that was a constant in my childhood snacktime. 

And now it looks like it may become a part of my cheap living, squatter diet, because THEY ARE BRINGIING BACK NO NAME!!!! I was just thinking they should, the other day... no odea how it came to mind, but i was thinking that with the economy being what it is, and the brand landscape littered with superfluous luxury, a good, reliable economy brand that is not associated with negative connotations, and as a strong tie to a powerbrand would do so well.

And tonight, on my TV, there is Galen Weston, hocking the no name brand.

The question is, whats the skinny on the chicken bologna?

...what am i, chopped liver?...

there are, at this point, and according to my blog counter, 1538 unique visitors to my blog... I can only conclude that they have all landed here by mistake and immediately left for greener inter-pastures, as I have had two comments in my entire blogging career.... two... only two...

and you know what they say about two?

it can be as bad as one, its the loneliest number since the number one.....

so if you are reading this, even by accident because you were really googling "big breasted cheerleaders bounce in the shower" and got here by accident, leave me a comment, I just need that kind of approval from strangers... a love poem would be even better

...Into the Mystic....

... So I have been missing in action the last week and a bit... I have been in Mexico with the fam, spending the week in Playa del Carmen at the beautiful casa passalacqua... Its been amazing, good times, great sun, fun with the fam, too much tequila...

but one thing has been bothering me... (well a few things actually, travelling with the Amazings is pretty tough on an average girl....) but the thing about Playa is that it is pretty Disneyfied... but today we took a little Mexican bus Adventure out to Paa Mul... a little RV Park and Dive Spot off the highway just south of Playa.... and its the kind of vacation spot i dream about... not built up, just a resto, a rv parking lot, a bunch of thatch cabins on the beach and a lot of coastline.... best day in a while, totally worth the crazy sunburn we all returned with....

I do not want to go home, not even a little bit... its a million degrees below zero in Toronto, and i just want to stay here... more blogging about mexico when i get back to the T-dot.... anything to relive the glory while huddled in the freezing white North....