west coast

Welcome to a happy, healthy, shiny new blog. Once again a nod to Judd for the hookup. Movable Type went the subscription route a while ago so we’re officially ditching them now that the old version is falling apart. Out with the old and in with the new: so far WordPress looks like a very worthy successor.

Speaking of new. I live in Vancouver now. Right here. If you switch to the satellite view you can see me on the roof waving my underwear. Not really.

The unpacking is more or less done. The living space is more or less livable. The view is… well, phenomenal.

I’ll get some more pics up soon so you can see the rest of our view. You know. The other half of the bay. For now you’ll just have to content yourself with this hello & how do you do.

The move went smoothly thanks to gurton & Cara & my dad, not to mention Maigen. Dad came down all the way from Qualicum- drove over two hours- just to help me move. It was completely unexpected and as it turned out I couldn’t have done it without him, so thank you very much, mon pere. Very much indeed. None of which is to take away from the effort put forth by Cara, who soldiered on in spite of lingering damage to her neck & shoulder; and gurton, who wrangled the life-saving dolly (which is still en residence); and Maigen herself, who traveled all the way back over from North Van to make sure her boy made it over with all his toys. Without you all I’d still be lugging over one back-pack load at a time and sleeping on Miguel’s floor.

It’s taken a while to settle in. Maigen was still working in North Van and could only be around on weekends, so while I spent the first couple days finding homes for some stuff and then getting caught up in training for the new job the place didn’t come along too quickly. Mostly I spent my free time just digging holes through stuff making what progress I could. Moving in is much more fun when there’s two of you. Once Maigen was able to spend more than a couple hours here we made real progress. There’s still a lot of little things that need work but I would say we’ve arrived.

I replaced the ludicrous shower head and fixed the new blinds, made the new dishwasher, stove and fridge comfortable in their new home, and Maigen replaced my precarious effort at a computer desk while making new friends with a couple downstairs who needed to unload their new-looking desk to make room for another one.

Now Maigen is putting together a nannying schedule much more to her liking that lets her live here and I’m getting on top of the landslide of information needed to handle the back-end of audio post-production for Canada’s top-rated and most popular fiction series. I love my job, even while it’s kicking my brain’s ass.

Mostly what I do is take everything handed to us from the picture crew and get it ready for audio editing & mixing. I load the picture for six different people in six different studios, along with audio guide tracks to make sure everyone’s working from the same page. And I load the actual production audio files for the dialogue editors. The process takes about three hours if I’m working in perfect universal synch AND the gear works right the first time around. This never happens. The job is expected to take anywhere from four to ten hours… or more if things go really left field. And because the production schedule is so tight this season we start work on a rough print of the episode one day and then continue with the final print the next day as soon as it’s ready. That means I have to go through the whole loading process twice and make sure no one gets screwed up in the process. Comedy = me coordinating anything more grand than a barbeque. But then I get a slower day where I update the sfx library and various other maintenance-type things and then I even get a day off… maybe. We haven’t quite fixed that yet. I may work five days straight and then, in theory, get a couple days off while the episode is in final mix. In reality the schedule is so tight that in some places on the calendar by the time one episode goes to mix the other is in cue for editing. I think I have some time off in November… but I’m not sure. Anyway, once the loading phase is done and I maybe get that day off I roll right into the consolidation phase, where I pull everyone’s work together on to three tiny magical tapes that are The Final Mix. These tapes are what gets taken to air. Imagine if I screw those up.

I’m also the guy who makes sure everyone’s work (and mine) is backed up everyday. Losing a day’s work snowballs very quickly up the chain and can cost thousands… not to mention pissing everybody off. And air dates aren’t exactly flexible.

So there’s some pressure, yeah. But I’m really looking forward to actually getting started. That was supposed to happen Wednesday but for some reason our start date has been pushed to Monday. I’m that horse lunging at the gate. As consolation we’re going to Meet & Greet this Friday. That’ll help pass the time.

The amount of learning I’ve had to do in two weeks is crazy. It’s so very cool to get some idea of what I’m capable of. I’m drinking it in, slotting stuff into place, connecting the dots. I’m most of the way through one of those Fat Little Notebooks. My head is getting a tan from all the little lightbulbs bursting over me whenever I make a new connection in there. So much fun. I’ve got to post some pics of the facility. It’s like the intro to the Propellorheads‘ song Bang On. Wherever I go in this industry I’ll have a very good idea of the back-end, and that means a lot to me.

Something else that means a lot to me: this living with The Girlfriend thing. It helps that we’re best friends. Well, it more than helps. It’s the Reason. We’re having the best time doing everything together. And it doesn’t have that fever blush of the honeymoon period so much as a sincere pleasure in each other’s company. We don’t get to spend every waking moment together and our schedules are erratic by nature and so far that’s all working to our advantage. We’re pretty much broke while waiting for paycheques to start kicking in so we’re doing all the things this town lets you do for free. Most of which, I grant you, involves walking. Man, we walk a lot. I walk about 10k a day. Maigen does the same. We’re both in the market for some serious walking shoes. But I have some gorgeous pictures. The gallery should be getting some new life breathed into it soon.

But yes, living with Maigen is fantastic. I am the luckiest boy ever.

Incidentally, to leave comments at the moment you need to click on the post title. I may leave it like that. I may switch to something more conventional. We’ll see. It’s a work in progress, like all the best works are.