About to travel again and as such have to get a lot of stuff done. Trying to get things done for Shakespeare’s Angels (did a fight practice and filming today). Was surprised by another mouse in one of the traps (since we haven’t had them for a while now) and had to return Dad’s computer to his house now that I got it working again. Nothing eventful, but no time, no time.
Add comment February 22nd, 2007
Fantastic! The FDC website finally got an overhaul (now that I don’t own it) — all based on wiki and looks pretty good.
Add comment February 9th, 2007
Joined the second production meeting for the short film “Shakespeare’s Angels” which is supposed to be a cross between a mash of Shakespeare’s works and Charlie’s Angels. I got invited along because there was to be fighting and honestly, how could I resist? Turns out I get to play a bit part as well, which should be fun as well. Overall, looks to be a higher production comedy short which will have quite an enjoyable cast with whom to work.
Add comment January 21st, 2007
Because I love having nice weapons, I bought 8 new broadswords (from Baltimore Knife and Sword) from the workshop and searched all over town to get enough packing material to be able to check them. After a marathon bubblewrap session I finally got all my stuff together and went off to the Calgary airport. Met up with Jacques whom was flying to Toronto as well as I, so I upgraded both of us to first class so we could sit and talk together in comfort. I think Jacques enjoyed the flight. :) I for myself was very, very happy to be home at last to see my lovely wife and get a bit (however short) of downtime.
Add comment January 7th, 2007
Decided to have a bit of downtime rather than have a last day of classes and went skiing with Laura, Siobhan, Spencer, Bryce, Marie-Helen and Ian. We went up onto Sunshine and it was one of the worst skiing experiences I have ever had in my life. Sunshine has no trees at the top, I was expecting it to be a bit more like Whistler… but it was very cold (like -30) and very windy and nothing to break the blizzard as we skied. The crew went off and Marie-Helen and I skied together just trying to get down from the top of the mountain. Wasn’t so easy for Marie-Helen because after all there aren’t low visibility, icy, Rocky Mountain conditions found commonly in South Africa. But we made it down to the half mountain point and met the others. They hadn’t done much either because it was so cold. We were happy to leave in the early afternoon and head back to the arts centre. The workshop ended off as I always love with a show. Some of the folks did performances from the workshop choreography that they had rehearsed or their actual shows they do professionally. It was an excellent time and very entertaining.
Add comment January 6th, 2007
I got to be part of Kyle, Casey and Ian’s broadsword vs. quarterstaff fight sequence. I was lucky I got to play the boardsword guy and fight the other two off… It was a pretty fun sequence and we got rocking through to the end of the class. We got asked if we could perform it on Saturday for the group because we were the tightest group, but sadly Laura (one of the quarterstaffers) had to fly home on Saturday so we had to pass on the honour. That was cool… I remember the first time I went to Banff in 1998 I was a little disappointed when I didn’t get picked to be on stage (but then again, I was just a beginner at the time). Moved on a chain workshop with Kyle (from Sydney Stage Combat) and Tony (doing Bartitsu) — that was fun and interesting but the woman I was fighting didn’t speak English very well and kept wanting me to rush through it which made it difficult for us to work together. Kyle and Tony made it look slick and seamless however.
Add comment January 5th, 2007
I had better time doing a bit of assisting Bryce in his gravity class where he threw me around a bit. He’s such a fantastic guy and I wish I got to work with him more often. Also did a cutlass class with Casey and Pops which was very very different and I muddled through it with my partner Eve. The cutlass techniques that Pops developed are all tangential hits at very close quarters on a circular path, definitely not for beginners but looks fantastic.
Add comment January 4th, 2007
So, I got to help Daniel today with Rapier & Dagger and for some reason that made me very nervous…. I don’t know why it should have, but I certainly didn’t feel confident with even the stuff I know I know when I was helping Daniel… guess I just didn’t want to screw it up for him. Anyway, it was a lot of fun, but if that’s the way I react, then I’m way further off being an accredited instructor than I thought. Very nice opportunity though to assist Daniel with his class.
Add comment January 3rd, 2007
Oh god, wearing the same underwear for 4 days is not good, and you can’t borrow underwear from your friends, it’s not cool. I blew out my boxers yesterday doing some deep lunges or something, so I’m more wearing a loin cloth now as opposed to underwear which is just fantastic. What’s worse though is socks… after you’ve worked out in socks for 4 days they are NASTY, even if you try to clean them. Fortunately after my Systema class with Spencer (Slash) and a quarterstaff class with Paul, I arrived in my room to finally find my luggage (woo hoo). I got changed for an afternoon of smallsword with Jacques, should be much better now.
Add comment January 2nd, 2007
As expected, no chance of getting clothes today — Ian loaned me some pants and I managed to purchase a shirt at the gift shop yesterday that should tide me over for a short while. Did some interesting knife work with Kristhoffer Jorgensen and some very real ground fighting and take downs with Allen Reid (my partner was Tony for that and even though he is half my body weight I’m sure the kiwi could easily kill me).
Add comment January 1st, 2007
Ok, so took a long bus ride and got in early this morning (like 3am) but at least I had a nice huge bed to sleep in. Got up early (missed warmup), no clothes yet from the airport so I dressed in my stinky jeans and headed to see what classes I could do today. Had a few options and ended up taking Casey Kaleba’s falling off furniture (just standard back rolls off tables and the like, nothing crazy); even more cool in the afternoon I had Tony (Wolf) who was reviewing his process for creating fantasy fights (similar to what he went through for Lord of the Rings). He chose the Ramen and the Cords as the base culture from the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant (one of my favourite books) which made it very familiar, educational and exciting. Still no clothes at the end of the day… that worries me as tomorrow is New Year’s day so I don’t think I’ll see anything delivered then either. Everyone got dressed up (excluding me) and went to the facility bar to ring in the new year with the rest of the fighters.
Add comment December 31st, 2006
Landed in Calgary and my luggage is missing… not missing exactly, they just didn’t put it on the plane. Why? Apparently there were weight issues with the flight. However, I’m an elite status guy and I was upgraded to business classs so you’d think that my luggage would be the first luggage down the ramp, but I guess flying almost 100,000 miles doesn’t mean much to Air Canada. My luggage is slated to arrive first thing tomorrow in Banff (which is good because my shoes and workout clothes are in my bags which I need). Now I have to wait 3.5 more hours to catch the bus to Banff Centre for the Arts. I (along with a few others) missed registration tonight, so hopefully that doesn’t mean I’ll miss anything cool tomorrow.
Add comment December 30th, 2006
I figured a while ago that I would do a free workshop with FASS and KWLT to do some “intro to stage combat”. I was thinking that I would try to make it more actor focused… I didn’t do a great job at that, it’s hard to focus on character representation and exploration in the area of stage fighting. I’m not quite sure how I got reasonably good at it, but I must have done something useful in all those courses I took. Anyway, I had a ton of weapons and had people interact with each other as the characters they would be given the weapon styles they were wielding. Then we got to the bits that everyone loves, the swish-swish ting-ting, the actual attacking and parrying bit. Overall, it was a fun three hours and I am out of practice. I *must* spend more time apprenticing with someone to learn more of their approach. The adventure really began when the class was over and I lugged 200+ lbs of swords to the car. Turns out it had been towed by the UW police because, well, I had parked not really on a spot and not really even on a road. It was a walking path in the middle of campus. I wasn’t overly surprised. Karen came and rescued me from my fate and we loaded up the hatchback and then headed to the police office to get my car back. $70 later, we were heading home. It was a long day that really started yesterday morning at 4am and I’m very tired.
1 comment November 29th, 2006
Tonight’s dinner conference was themed “pirates of the carribbean”. At 5pm, a bunch of pirates do show up — however, they are all riding Segways which was wacky and they weren’t talking with accents. So, it ended up being less the swashbuckling adventure that people had hoped for, and instead, just people dressed as pirates zooming around the lobby and telling you to go to dinner. Having done dinner theatre kinds of things, I know what should be done to entertain the crowd at events like these. There was no sword fighting, no bucaneering, no wenches flirting, no ship in the pools, no segway-to-segway grappling and boarding and they they all left after about 45 minutes. Guess there job was to get us to dinner and that was really it - hope we didn’t pay them a whole lot.
Add comment November 15th, 2006
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