a peek inside the fishbowl

I can’t believe it’s August 2 already.  There’s so much we still need to do this summer.

The girls are back from a week at summer camp. Mark and I spent the long weekend driving up to the camp, overnighting, and driving back again with a full car (full of girls – our girls – duffle bags, lifejackets, paddles, and lots of sand).

Mark and I had a long and uneventful drive up there. Camp Wabikon is in the Temagami area, about a six hour drive from our home here in Ottawa. It was sunny and clear for the entire trip but when we finally arrived at the landing to await our ride over (Wabikon is on an island) some crazy clouds started to roll in.

… which made the boat ride over a tiny bit scary and hurried. Although the dark clouds didn’t amount to anything to speak of, the drama in the sky we witnessed that afternoon served as a prelude to what we’d see later on. Here’s a pic that Mark took of a lightning storm that was far off in the distance. Incredibly, it went on for several hours.

Being so far from the city meant that when the night was clear we had a great view of the stars above.

Here’s an evening shot. And just so you know what we’re looking at, here’s the same shot in the daytime. (Both shots taken by Mark.)

The sky – so big and so grand and so everchanging – is one of my favourite things about that particular neck of the woods.

Here’s where we stayed while we were there. So cute.

… and this was the view near our little porch.

See what I mean about that sky? It’s the kind of place you can sit and stare at the landscape forever.

And what about the girls, you ask? How did they fare a week from home?

It was fine. They were too busy to miss us very much at all. Just like I expected.

There’s Sarah, launching herself off a diving tower.

Now I have a mountain of laundry to sort and wash. And there’s more summer fun to come, so I guess I’d better get a move on.

I was going to let this video speak for itself but I cannot help writing a preamble.

I love visual media, I really do. When I was studying journalism at Carleton my focus was on multimedia storytelling, although at the time it meant something a little different. It was radio and television. I loved my radio classes; recording interviews and editing them together with sticky tape and a razor blade in a tiny little room. It was hands on and incredibly satisfying and the fact that sound could tell a story fascinated me. I loved my TV classes too, and in my fourth year I took a documentary film class in which my classmates and I created a couple of really neat projects. One of the documentaries I produced went against the wishes of my instructor. I insisted on doing a piece about Tom Green but my instructor thought the idea was ridiculous because according to him, Tom was just a kid who wan’t going anywhere. (Ha ha on him, right?) Another piece I worked on was about Beechwood Cemetery. It was essentially part of a “the business of death” series I was working on that extended into my magazine and print classes as well. (It was all I could talk about for awhile. I must have been a great person to hang around with!)

I graduated, and life intervened. Instead of going one direction I went another, and didn’t get to fulfill my dream of becoming a documentary film producer. I’ve had good fortune to work on some cool projects in recent years: a script for a promotional video about an explosives testing facility, for a children’s summer camp, and one for a secondary-school level educational video about the Canadian government. This has only whet my appetite. I hope to do more, more of my own.

Storytelling with pictures and sound is thrilling to me. Words are great, hey, I love words, but sound and images take your story to another level altogether. And lucky for us, we live in a time when regular people can pursue their passions on their own time, without the need of tiny rooms, razor blades, and heavy cameras.

That’s why I’m very happy that the blog is taking a bit of a new turn and entering the age of vlogging (a.k.a video blogging). It’s going to be the occasional video post, not a whole new format, BUT STILL. I thought it deserved a preamble. :)

I want to explore more of Ottawa in this format and share these stories with you, but I need to state for the record that Mark plays a giant role in this, as it would be impossible to go down this road without him. The video below is rightfully his and he deserves full credit. I look forward to many creative collaborations with him in the future.

Anyway, that’s the preamble! I’ll try not to be so wordy next time. Without further ado, here’s (a peek inside) the Ottawa River Pathway. It’s a three-minute summary of his commute along the Ottawa River and what he sees along the way. We would love your feedback.

Ahem.

Three members of our family had the opportunity to appear in a weather promo for CTV Ottawa recently.

It was quite the experience, and the shoot created quite a bit of buzz in our corner of Ottawa. Imagine, a guy with a big strapping camera, several people running around, and me, with a garden hose in my hand… trying to make it look like rain on a day that was so hot and sunny it felt like we were standing in a furnace. (That’s the TV biz for you eh?) Cars slowed down, people paused to watch, neighbours stopped us in the street to chat about it afterwards… it was both fun AND awkward in equal measure. :)

It was a really great experience for the girls. The crew was here for quite some time, filming every imaginable angle and scenario, but when everything was said and done our appearance amounted to a second (or two, max) in the whole promo. We know how TV is made (we’ve done our share of little family video projects too) but it was cool to see a real life example.

This promo is running on CTV Ottawa now. Can you see who in our family made the final cut? :)