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.