Untweakable

Just rehearsed with the footage we shot on Wednesday. I now realize why we try to avoid such multimedia effects. The projection is fixed. I can't tell it to do anything else apart from being what it is, whereas with 'live' performers I can still say, "try this" or "try that..." It's the ability to continue tweaking scenes and characters that keeps the eventual quality on the upswing. Now I just have to work around what I have. Not that it's bad, or anything, it's just untweakable.

Now, why don't I just trash the footage idea and just bring everybody back onstage? Because Mags and her crew, who helped me shoot the video and are currently doing post-production on it, will kill me for wasting her time and effort, especially on a public holiday morning. She is apt to drown me in a flood of tears -- she was already about to go there when I suggested that a scene might have to be re-shot.

Next time I want to shoot, it'll be a short film format or something. No more mixing media.

It's a conspiracy!

Spent the morning shooting footage for Drama Night. It'll be the first time we'll be featuring video for our stage productions and I'm quite excited about that, though it also creates a heap of new staging problems I have yet to wrap my mind around. Balance and scale, mostly. Onstage, 'live' action and sound will pale in comparison to the video projection and soundtrack amplification. So how...?

Also, just returned from Jen's dad's wake. That's like six wakes now in four months. If I were a conspiracy theorist, I'd be very suspicious of the common thread linking our recently departed: all but one were in their 80s and all succumbed to lung cancer. None, as far as I know, were smokers, but they did live through a time when second-hand smoke was more common than first-hand air.

I'd like to request the-powers-that-be to put a temporary moratorium on more people I know dying. I'm particularly unsociable and wakes are terribly difficult places to have to show a social face in. And I'm exhausted. So, please, nobody else die for a while, 'k?

The "like/don't like" game

I played the "I like X, but I don't like Y" game in tutorial with x34. The idea is for the kids to take a turn each to guess the combination X and Y. By listening to the combinations randomly guessed at and my responses of "correct" and "wrong", the kids will eventually figure out the combination and get to torment those who have yet to cotton on.

But the guess of one smart Alec went, "I like to spoon, but I don't like to fork". So correct, but also sounds so wrong.

Bad idea #41

It is our job to train kids to think for themselves.
It is not our job to train kids to pass exams.
If they can think for themselves, they can pass their exams themselves.
If we train kids to pass exams, they won't learn to think for themselves.
Then we would have failed our jobs.

Wild games

One of the rare instances when Tasha looks like she's smiling. Otherwise she's mostly got a furrowed brow, perplexed at the world and all its myriad wonders... and her bi-polar owners who alternately drive her to a frenzy with wild games of 'fetch' and then ignore her 'cos they're passed out on the ground with fatigue.