My best wordpress site to date would be for Captain Euchre of my web series Tights and Fights. I wanted the site to be a little crazy, and had only limited photography to work with. I took this photo of Captain Euchre we took on one of the filming days. The photo had a shadow crossing the Captain which made the photos from that day troublesome, but I was able to use it here.
The site uses wordpress page templates to display different category orderings (eg. “Most Recent” “From the Beginning” “Featured Episodes”). You can flow through these posts as you watch them or hop to a particular episode with the far left sidebar. The white spots in the picture are additional YouTube players.
The site has a video focus, articles, a strong theme, useful information and above all free entertainment. Check out the site www.captaineuchre.com
I just had to play around with this photo of my friends dog Winston. 
I did this by simply copying the photo onto a new photoshop layer, then adding the photocopier effect. That effect made the picture black and white with the contours of everything emphasized in black. I then brought the transparency down to let the original colours show through. Here is the original photo.
One thing that I want to do more of in the future is camping. I guess you might call it extreme camping, but there is nothing nicer than a night under the stars. I’m crazy for the simplicity of it. I always wanted to take Afie out to the country and sleep outdoors, give him a chance to see the world the way it should be. But he was never strong enough. My next dog will be younger and we’ll go into the woods for a few days.
This photo is actually a photoshop exercise. The background is from a trip to Kilarney Ontario Provincial Park. The park was one of the places the Group of Seven painted. The photo was taken on the first night I believe. The foreground picture of me was taken in my bathroom on my phone. 
The challenge was to make two photos blend. The sun on my forehead would never quite right, but I think I match the perspective and graininess of the foreground in the background.
So I did this silly little stop animation thing years ago when I wanted to learn more about it. Its chock full of mistakes, but the tinfoil figure does have some life to him.
I didn’t really have a plan so I just through in anything that was sitting around my apartment. The background is basically a brown piece of paper and the white wall of my apartment. The river is a ribbon and the wood thing was made by my father. All the weather effects were done in AfterEffects. The whole project took no more than 15 hours which isn’t bad considering I didn’t know what I was doing.
I’d like to do more stop-animation
So its one of my greatest shames. I’m the only male in my family who can’t juggle. I’ve tried and tried, but I can’t go more that 4 throws before they all come crashing down. I’m not sure why it is so difficult for me or even why there are so many people in my family that have no problems doing it. Sure I can ride the unicycle and once tried to eat fire like my father. And I can read hands like my magician uncle. But I’ve just never been able to juggle. So I did a little stop animation a few years ago to prove that I do actually know how the mechanics of juggling works.
Sorry about the background, I guess I got lazy. Enjoy.
In May 2006 I went down to the Humane Society here in Toronto. I had been thinking of getting a dog for a while. I was really impressed by the rescue of Chester, by my friend Adrienne. Its a sad situation down at the River Street Humane Society. The cages are packed with pitbulls. I remember distinctly looking over the top of one cage, because a blanket draped the door. The dog totally lost it, barked and growled fiercely. It wasn’t until just before bed that night, that I realised that was the dog I had brought home.
Afie has severe post traumatic stress and anxiety around sleeping. I think this is do to chronic pain in his rear legs, progressive blindness, and a history of violence. He lacked communication skills and had learned that biting someone ensured that they never touched you again. He had a complete lack of interest in toys or balls, and to this day he has never chewed an object that wasn’t food. He stumbled and was unable to run when I got him.
They told me that he was everyone’s favorite, but that he had bitten almost everyone that had worked with him. Foolishly I claimed to know all about dogs that bite, but my childhood dog had issues that don’t compare to Afie.
I changed his name for Afy to Afie, because Afy just looks stupid on paper. He gained 15 pounds in the first two months and was able to run for a short period, although he wasn’t able to move his legs in tandem for another year.
They claim on his rap sheet that he has a “fear of stranger”, but that was a misdiagnosis. He actually has a fear of hands and an aversion to being pet. Eskies are generally suspicious of people outside their immediate family, and get far to much petting as puppies. And since Afie has chronic pain, he will like you much better (stranger or not) if you don’t try to pet him.
I actually developed a way of asking if it was ok to pet him, which he really responded to. Now he seeks out affection and I can offer it when I want to touch him. In the streets the deal is simple. I ask people not to touch him, and he doesn’t bite them. It works out great.
His health is now declining which is really hard to watch becuase there is still a lot of bad times to recover from for him. There is never enough time in life.
This video series was a marketing experiment in 2007. A lot of what we are doing with Team Leader was hashed out on Canine Insurgency. As it turns out Dog products garner high online advertising rates.
Meet Afie, my grumpy old dog.
This was my demo reel a few years back. It was mostly created with AfterEffects, and the clips are from various live action and animation projects.
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I wrote this in my final year at university. After the difficulties of the large ensemble compositions I had done the previous year, I wanted to do a big work with a small number of people. This made a rehearsal a snap, they should tell you this stuff in composition school but I had to find out the hard way.
I also wanted to explore rhythm and percussion in conjunction with electronics…and more specifically digital audio. I didn’t have a lot of experience with recording at the time and didn’t really know where to start so I made a single recording of the word “finished”. I then used the school’s studio to make hundreds of sounds for the peace. Lourie Radford really guided me on this one helping avoid the mistakes of an earlier composition.
The work is all about the interaction between the very simple one performer percussion set up of 4 toms and a pitched timpani. I had the performer, Nicholas Jacques, play all parts of the timpani while I manned the audio system for this recording. Its a large work of over 10 minutes and the electro acoustic material is swelling and filled the hall. One of my more successful compositions, it was programmed last and immediately brought forward commissions I never accepted.
During a difficult time just after graduating 2000-2002, a good friend of mine Brian Pare and I were working convention audio in Ottawa. We shared a place and eventually moved to Toronto together. During this time I was continuing my exploration of computer media started in university under Laurie Radford. These are some of the found audio compositions I did.
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There is lots of good use of the theremin, original drum samples, valuevillage records.
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This one prominently features an old national geographic record we found at valuevillage.
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This is a remix of an old partially destroyed big band record.
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To make these pieced Brian and I went around and recorded sounds, and friends and digitizing old records. We used sound forge and Acid mainly, as well as keyboards, guitars, Brian also had a theremin and an effects box. Lots of good times, and bad neighbors.
The site uses wordpress page templates to display different category orderings (eg. “Most Recent” “From the Beginning” “Featured Episodes”). You can flow through these posts as you watch them or hop to a particular episode with the far left sidebar. The white spots in the picture are additional YouTube players.
