THE MAN WHO RAN AWAY TO SEA (1996, video/Super-8/Avid, 8mins, colour)
The stresses involved in completing The Adventures of Stella Starr stifled my interest in filmmaking for a while – apart from the physical effort and the struggle to put together enough funds to finish it, I felt pretty guilty about what I’d put everyone on the crew through to get it done. The small honoraria I could afford to pay hardly seemed like fair compensation (it was a pleasure to write additional small cheques to everyone after the sale to Canal+). But a couple of years later, after embarking on my professional editing career, I was asked by one of the producer-members of Video Pool, Murray Toews, to contribute to a project he was involved with, putting together a series of programs of original video art under the umbrella title Blender, to air on the local Winnipeg cable station, Videon. As with the Exquisite Corpse experience, this project came together quickly – I wrote a short piece based on my own family history and combined old 8mm film with shots of a young actress, Alison Northcott, reciting the text in a darkened studio.
Television: Videon/Cable 11, Winnipeg
