Vancouver

[Drunk Monk]

I went on business. I was trapped at the River Rock Casino, about 5 mins from the airport. It was amusing - great to see some old friends and make some new ones - but now I'm sick with a cold.

[Drunk Monk]

I am now buried in a ton of research that Gigi and I gathered at this event. Working with Gigi is always challenging because she still has no sense of story, no sense whatsoever, so she often gets really excited when an interviewee tells her something useless for print. Just this morning, she was really excited because one of the masters sent us this huge cache of photos. Of course, she didn't look to see that they were all of horribly low resolution and completely useless (one pic is of a cigarette, just a cigarette. Seriously.) Anyway, that's just me bitching about work. She did foot the bill on all of our eats during the trip, and we ate really well. Salmon and coffee at Sea-Tac. The gourmet restaurant at the Casino.

I shot a vid of Helen to promote a T-shirt design we did without her permission (fortunately she liked it). I really wanted to connect her to the shirt as she's one of our most popular DVD sellers and has mad kung fu skillz to boot.
[youtube]I4nmh6y65ro[/youtube]
She was one of the main organizers, so she was frantically running about trying to get things organized, but agreed to give me a few minutes to shoot this. She had her hair done, so I had to cut the shirt and pin it around her to not muss it. We shot at the corner of the stage where people were practicing and the lighted backdrop was being tested, which is why the lights are so weird. When I dove into filming, some one was practiced short whip and fan, which was an unusual combo. Whips and fans were cracking while I was trying to direct Helen and contain Gigi from making random commands which had nothing to do with what we were doing. However, once unbeknownest to me, the practitioner had changed to this crazy older woman who was wielding these crazy double whips of leather and chain that were like 15' long. The cracking increased. I thought I felt a breeze over my head a few times, but was too deep in the lens trying to get a useable shot. I finally had to give up because everyone was stressing and then turned around to see how close I had come to getting flayed.

[Dr. Ivor Yeti]

Your job is way cooler than my job. And more dangerous.