Weekend in Review
Friday night: watched hockey
Saturday: watched hockey
Sunday: watched hockey
What can I say... it's playoff season!
Seriously, though, I did actually get out of the house a bit this weekend.
Friday evening, we celebrated my [insert vague term here referring to the common-law husband of my mother-in-law]'s sixtieth birthday with a trip to Le Paradis, a terrific French restaurant in downtown Toronto. (To any and all Toronto peeps reading this: you have to check this place out! Great food, low prices, how can you lose! Just make sure to make reservations.)
A man with a large window-pane just entered my building. Huh.
Saturday, I spent the day volunteering at Sprockets, a children's film festival organized by the people who do the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). I do tech when I volunteer at Sprockets, which means setting up the AV system for introductions and readers (the readers are for subtitled movies, since six-year-old children can't quite keep up with those). The bonus of doing tech is that I actually get to watch the movies. So I saw one Icelandic movie, No Network (check out the link: the Icelandic name is much cooler!), and a UK production of The Snow Queen. Both movies were pretty decent, although nothing to write home (or blog) about.
The funny part was the Q&A after The Snow Queen. Tiffany Knight, who played the title role (a role with no spoken lines, which was kind of neat), took questions from the audience after the movie. Bear in mind that "the audience" here was a bunch of children (six-year-olds, give or take) with their parents.
I really respect the fact that the actress answered the questions honestly, and she did a great job of answering them in a way that the children would understand (ideas, words at the right level, without pandering or condescending to them). Nevertheless, by the very nature of the questions, she pretty much killed all of the magic behind the silver screen.
Some examples were: "How was it working with the grizzly bears?" (There are polar bears guarding the Snow Queen's Fortress of Solitude ice crystal palace at the north pole; when the child was asked "do you mean polar bears?", he replied - with the certainty only a child can muster - "no, they were grizzly bears. I know their faces.") Her response was that they were drawn in by the computer, and that she didn't actually film anything in the presence of grizzly bears. She described how they filmed in front of a blue screen, and how everything else was just filled in afterwards with drawings on the computer. Only the people and the reindeer were actually there.
When asked about whether it was scary to do the big battle scene in the Fortress of Solitude ice crystal palace at the north pole, she said that it wasn't so much scary as it was uncomfortable. They were filming in July, so she was sweating under her costume. And there wasn't air conditioning either, because of the noise. So there was a wind machine blowing hot air at her, to make her cape billow. And so forth.
Another child asked about why the prince was grumpy, and who played him. She said that she didn't know who played him, because they didn't film on any of the same days, so she never met him.
Since she had brought up the reindeer, someone asked something about working with the beast (the child was quiet and at the front of the theatre, and the question was not repeated for our benefit). She described, in response, how - it being July, and given that reindeers shed their fur in the summer - it was a very mangy, unfortunate-looking beast that she was working with (this was CG'd over in the movie), but that it was a very well-behaved reindeer.
And so forth. Just about any bit of magic was explained. Thankfully, most of the kids were probably too young to realize just how much disillusionment was to be had...
Saturday evening, I did watch hockey.
Sunday, I went with my friend d- to Comicon in Toronto, out of curiosity more than anything. (We had got free passes from the Silver Snail, and Martha refused to go, for some reason.) It was more or less what I was expecting, but a bit less in every dimension. I'm not a huge comic collector, so I had nothing to buy while I was there. The entire convention was in one room, two levels down at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. Being such a small event inside such a large convention centre added to the feeling of less that I got from the whole thing. There was some cosplay, but it was marginal at best. The booths weren't exciting, the independent comics were pretty bad, and so forth. The less said, the better. ;)
After that, Martha joined us, and we went to high tea (I think that this was high tea... I'm sure I'll be corrected if it wasn't) at the Fairmont Royal York Hotel in downtown Toronto to celebrate a friend's birthday. Much fun, with great food. My tea was not quite what I had expected, but it wasn't bad. Martha's tasted pink, surprisingly enough. Tea eventually turned into drinks at a nearby pub (not to be named because they watered down the drinks, although they're usually a pretty good place), and then we went home... and watched more hockey.
It is, after all, playoffs.
All in all, it was a fun weekend. I completely failed to pull my weight in the keeping-the-apartment-clean department, but I had fun, which kind of balances things out, I think.
Saturday: watched hockey
Sunday: watched hockey
What can I say... it's playoff season!
Seriously, though, I did actually get out of the house a bit this weekend.
Friday evening, we celebrated my [insert vague term here referring to the common-law husband of my mother-in-law]'s sixtieth birthday with a trip to Le Paradis, a terrific French restaurant in downtown Toronto. (To any and all Toronto peeps reading this: you have to check this place out! Great food, low prices, how can you lose! Just make sure to make reservations.)
A man with a large window-pane just entered my building. Huh.
Saturday, I spent the day volunteering at Sprockets, a children's film festival organized by the people who do the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). I do tech when I volunteer at Sprockets, which means setting up the AV system for introductions and readers (the readers are for subtitled movies, since six-year-old children can't quite keep up with those). The bonus of doing tech is that I actually get to watch the movies. So I saw one Icelandic movie, No Network (check out the link: the Icelandic name is much cooler!), and a UK production of The Snow Queen. Both movies were pretty decent, although nothing to write home (or blog) about.
The funny part was the Q&A after The Snow Queen. Tiffany Knight, who played the title role (a role with no spoken lines, which was kind of neat), took questions from the audience after the movie. Bear in mind that "the audience" here was a bunch of children (six-year-olds, give or take) with their parents.
I really respect the fact that the actress answered the questions honestly, and she did a great job of answering them in a way that the children would understand (ideas, words at the right level, without pandering or condescending to them). Nevertheless, by the very nature of the questions, she pretty much killed all of the magic behind the silver screen.
Some examples were: "How was it working with the grizzly bears?" (There are polar bears guarding the Snow Queen's Fortress of Solitude ice crystal palace at the north pole; when the child was asked "do you mean polar bears?", he replied - with the certainty only a child can muster - "no, they were grizzly bears. I know their faces.") Her response was that they were drawn in by the computer, and that she didn't actually film anything in the presence of grizzly bears. She described how they filmed in front of a blue screen, and how everything else was just filled in afterwards with drawings on the computer. Only the people and the reindeer were actually there.
When asked about whether it was scary to do the big battle scene in the Fortress of Solitude ice crystal palace at the north pole, she said that it wasn't so much scary as it was uncomfortable. They were filming in July, so she was sweating under her costume. And there wasn't air conditioning either, because of the noise. So there was a wind machine blowing hot air at her, to make her cape billow. And so forth.
Another child asked about why the prince was grumpy, and who played him. She said that she didn't know who played him, because they didn't film on any of the same days, so she never met him.
Since she had brought up the reindeer, someone asked something about working with the beast (the child was quiet and at the front of the theatre, and the question was not repeated for our benefit). She described, in response, how - it being July, and given that reindeers shed their fur in the summer - it was a very mangy, unfortunate-looking beast that she was working with (this was CG'd over in the movie), but that it was a very well-behaved reindeer.
And so forth. Just about any bit of magic was explained. Thankfully, most of the kids were probably too young to realize just how much disillusionment was to be had...
Saturday evening, I did watch hockey.
Sunday, I went with my friend d- to Comicon in Toronto, out of curiosity more than anything. (We had got free passes from the Silver Snail, and Martha refused to go, for some reason.) It was more or less what I was expecting, but a bit less in every dimension. I'm not a huge comic collector, so I had nothing to buy while I was there. The entire convention was in one room, two levels down at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. Being such a small event inside such a large convention centre added to the feeling of less that I got from the whole thing. There was some cosplay, but it was marginal at best. The booths weren't exciting, the independent comics were pretty bad, and so forth. The less said, the better. ;)
After that, Martha joined us, and we went to high tea (I think that this was high tea... I'm sure I'll be corrected if it wasn't) at the Fairmont Royal York Hotel in downtown Toronto to celebrate a friend's birthday. Much fun, with great food. My tea was not quite what I had expected, but it wasn't bad. Martha's tasted pink, surprisingly enough. Tea eventually turned into drinks at a nearby pub (not to be named because they watered down the drinks, although they're usually a pretty good place), and then we went home... and watched more hockey.
It is, after all, playoffs.
All in all, it was a fun weekend. I completely failed to pull my weight in the keeping-the-apartment-clean department, but I had fun, which kind of balances things out, I think.