Day 87

we continued to shoot around camp today. some of my kid's counselors told me that their campers had been excitedly talking about starwood dv and what they've been doing and learning so far. good times.

after teaching and shooting around with them, i had some time off. i got the kayak and, accompanied by a friend, set off to see what was around the other point i had stopped at on a previous adventure. after paddling and visiting the purple starfish along the rocks beneath the rope swing, we made one turn and then, this time, one more right turn around the final outstretching point. finally. just to the right, around the small cove of smashing water and rocks, the water straightened out into a long path. i would say this looked like a huge river, but that would be ridiculous because no river can exist in a channel of ocean water.

i have a very hard time conceding that the straight between our shore and the nearby salt spring island can be entirely called 'the ocean.' isaac and i had a long talk about this. regardless, i can't approve that ocean water in a narrowed path between islands is entitled for the all-encompassing title of 'ocean'.

is it even possible?

Day 85

everyone's back. even the distant mainland mountains were visible, snow-peaked and serious, from across the waters of a pristine and sunny afternoon. i have re-noticed the freshness of the mountain air here after spending some time in the metropolis. still, vancouver's exhale didn't seem as coarse as chicago or the waterbody-barren rockford.

on our various adventures, we've come to an understanding. this verbalization, called the watershed theory, is the moment where, like a raindrop hitting the peak of a shed, the drop will go one way or another for whatever reason and then be required by the flow of those behind and the legalities of time and gravity to continue. plinko. God.

two months are already over here. as i turned my back to the water and ocean earlier today and realized that last summer's australia lasted two months and at the end of the trip, i was definitely feeling the grain of time, even after a massively productive and exciting adventure and ministry. today, it doesn't feel like two months. it doesn't feel like time at all. on of the other video guys turned twenty-two today and i'm relatively young to the majority of these people, but it's good. good things are happening and God has a hold of things and everything's exciting right now.

tomorrow, we start another week of starwood dv and working one-on-one with kids and video. should be good.

Day 76

that violent kid from yesterday got sent home. i found out and was kind of sad, but hopefully his participation in helping me with lights and media last night was a good thing for him. today was the last full day of camp and a couple of my boys came to chill in my office during their free time and to work on their projects a little more. since it was just a few of them, we were able to work on putting some special effects and features that aren't possible to teach in the time constraints of the regular sessions.

i'm working on all the kid's projects right now to have individual masters ready for morning. i decided to put a secret 'easter egg' button on the dvd menu that has a short video of me saying well done and thanks for doing starwood dv. i think it'll be funny.

every normal procedure turns into a full-blown adventure on burning night it seems. for example, russ was going to get the printer from his office so i could make dvd sleeve labels and such and managed to tear clothes on our office couch and then happened to take out the picture of his band with dc talk during the puling of this printer's cords. i don't know how glitches and accidents start showing up on these kind of days but some sort of ordeal never fails to appear.

so far since, it's been okay.

all the summer long staff, the ones that are here for at least three months, get three consecutive days off in the middle of the summer. i get my time at the end of next week and a few of us are going to the mainland to go to vancouver and stay at a friends there. everyone's looking forward to this.

Day 75

today was sunny with a high of seventy five. tonight was the concert. there's a really hyper eight grade kid here who's been acting up all week. his counselor wearily told me about the camper so before the concert i was trying talking to him. he wasn't really interested in being calm at all. a little later he came up to the booth right before the show and i showed him how to do 'rock show lights' and he started to calm down and go with the flow and lights and music. this was fun, but sadly in the end he started flipping wrong switches on purpose and wouldn't help follow the script so i had to kick him out of the booth.

before all this, i took advantage of some time off. moments for breaks come and go and when you see one, you gotta grabbit. i took a kayak and, with proper permissions, paddled all the way down to the right of the beach towards the distant point. everything, the mountains and waterfront and distant mainland mountains and shoreline, look familiar from the qwanoes vantage now and i'd been dying to see what new body of water or island or mountain was around this point. along the way i found the infamous rope swing that dangles from a tree that hangs over a coral reef drop off. dozens of purple starfish clung to the rocks of the shore and then, a few yards out, the ocean floor drops.

with the dock barely visible, i rounded the final corner of the point to find another point. sad. i wasn't too far from paddling to nearby saltspring island at this point, but am saving that adventure for an entire day off. laying down in the kayak and looking upsidedown behind at the flipped water and mountain horizon is really trippy. mountains and clouds become part of the deep and the sloshing ocean surface transforms into a ceiling, evolving and reflecting an untouched atmosphere.

tomorrow is the last full day of this week. all my starwood dv kids are coming back to rap up their projects and i'll be up all night compiling and mastering and burning them. this has been another good week.

Day 71

the second camp for junior highers started today. this fourth overall consecutive week of camps makes adjusting to the routine of media presentation and all that a little more comfortable and simple. still, this is all brand new for each week of kids.

i was going to go bungee jumping this morning in the time we had before the afternoon, but last night was filled with shallow sleep and frequent discomfort caused by the re-opening of some roadrash from longboarding the other day. i wish i had the bail on tape, but all there is is a battle scar along the backside of my right forearm, hip, and knee.

a new week of starwood dv starts tomorrow. the cameras are ready, the batteries are charged, the computers are good to go, and the tapes are labeled.

Day 50

i woke up with q-town's camp songs in my head today. the catchy tunes fit the sing-songy camp genre perfectly, but why at 8:26 am? editing endless videos with these songs has cemented them in my mind. i still might fall asleep to jack johnson or the across the universe soundtrack, but its obviously not enough to be able to wake up to something else or nothing at all.

the unusual cool weather and overcast skies of the past few weeks disappeared today. completely. summer seemed to show up like it had been a suitcase on the back of the bus with the kids. in morning staff meeting, more stories were shared about how some of these kids had saved their paper route money for the past three years to come to camp for this one week of summer. imagine that.

i think it's time to introduce our three-man video team as well. we've been working full days together now since the beginning and we've come to achieve a pretty good balance in workflows and positions and personalities. nick and ryan are the head and assistant video producers, respectively. they both just finished studying together at vancouver film school. if you're interested in where that got them, you can check this video out on youtube. they did a good job.

my office is connected with theirs and the three of us juggle shooting and editing daily highlights for various qwanoes mini-camps like family camp, family work weekend, open house day, and now summer camps. i've done highlights for at least once day during each of those activities. we also had a bunch of intro videos to work on as well as any other cool ideas we wanted to incorporate with an appropriate qwanoes theme. nick has more of a director's personality and is good at shooting and editing and making sure things are getting done. ryan does a great job as a shooter and editor but has the greatest influence as a behind-the-scenes soundboard magician and adobe after effects guru. he's used sound and special effects in some really powerful ways for some of our projects. sometimes he plays too much u2 for my liking, but hey, its qwanoes.

i stand somewhere in the middle of this. also the most laid back of the three, i use my college training in editing and shooting to do daily highlights, camp activity videos, and working on the music video. my mind isn't so technically and 'film school' oriented and i'm glad because so far the inspiration and unformatted manner of my thinking has melded well with the formulas of formal education. what i mean is that i can see and understand the collaboration of their 'film' perspective with my 'documentary' kind of inspiration.

i also run the starwood dv activity. actually that's my main 'position' and its been a beautiful balance. a handful of campers have signed up to learn how to operate, shoot, and edit video. today was the first day of this. there's two daily sessions of groups of four.

i'll close with something interesting that happened today. of all the three hundred plus campers this week, two of the eight that are in my video club are two boys that were here during family camp over a month ago. during that time, i was really busy shooting and rushing to edit the highlights in time for their showing that i didn't meet too many, actually only a handful, of the kids that had come with their families. they happened to be at the table i sat at during that meal and i remembered their names when i saw them again today.

i don't think that was chance. we'll see how this goes.