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 54

marathon. it's two in the morning and we've barely started burning the dvd's. the other two are in the next office finishing the weekly dvd and i'm in my office working on burning and labeling my campers' compilation. i had started much earlier tonight and managed to get about 98% of my starwood work done. i finished designing, printing, labeling, burning, copying, and stuffing the dvds and pulled one out of the final stack to double check quality. good decision, bad outcome. that's the way it had to happen, i guess, and it sent me on a frustrating adventure that is still going strong. networks and disconnecting and reconnecting and converting and starting to make a new dvd menu from scratch and sending conversions back over to other computers are only a portion of the mayhem. i'm not even going to continue to relive the pain of the past several hours, but the end is in sight for me. after this, i'm gonna go and help finish burning and stuffing the hundreds of weekly dvds for the rest of the campers.

today was the last whole day of camp, though, for junior high one. all my video campers came back to finish their projects during their free time today. i'm really pleased and impressed at the amount of knowledge they were able to control and exercise for the mere five-plus hours we spent together. the quiet girl thanked me and said she learned a lot. the director girl and her friend said in their credits that they 'can't wait to do more video-making together when they get home.' the boys had a good time as well and both groups turned in solid projects. if it hadn't been for time constraints tonight, i was planning on showing one of the projects for the daily highlight during the last evening q-town.

speaking of q-town, i finally got a taste of the action on the other side of my light board and media booth. one song is kind of country-sounding, so after working it out with russ before hand and deciding which two harmonica keys i'd need to cope with a mid-song key change, i got to play harmonica on stage for the opening song. there had been no real practice and i had no on-stage monitor, but the people that could hear said it went well. it felt really good to play something again.

my hands have printer toner on them, but there's finally a stack of filled dvd cases sitting next to my left elbow. i'll finish stuffing the fronts tomorrow morning before the campers leave after lunch.

one week down, seven more to go.