Canadian Unity

What a topic for Friday the 13th, eh?

I stumbled across one of Yahoo's Questions that they pose to the online world, and this one basically asks is Canada unified? As one poster pointed out, the only thing unified about us is that we are not unified. We all agree to disagree. Well, there are a couple of posters who think we are unified, so not even that works.

I think what bothers me most is the few anti-multicultural posts. I guess I can sorta understand the resentment to some extent - it's hard enough to define the whole "English Canada" culture, and then we get new Canadians with a very distinct culture that they bring from their own countries. Sometimes it might feel like this is being pushed on us, but really, I've never had a new immigrant come up to me and say, "Hey, I'm celebrating such and such tonight, you better be there or else!" Yet the response to immigration always seems to turn into slogans like "give Canada back to its own people." I wonder if they really mean the First Nations, or if they mean specifically the white Europeans who ended up here and now make up the majority. And it's not even just those Europeans who founded Canada - how about the waves of immigrants in the last 100 years who at one point were the "new immigrants" and were oppressed by the "real Canadians". Now, they're the ones we want to give Canada back to, and keep it away from those other "new immigrants." It's a vicious cycle.

I guess this is a little different in Quebec, at least from remembering some of the people we met and the stories they shared. Quebec culture is more defined, and they want to keep it strong. I can understand that, there is something special in Quebec. However, Montreal is more of an international city, such as Toronto and Vancouver, and as such has more mixing, more cultures to compete with the Quebecois culture. And most new immigrants head for the cities - more work, more opportunities, etc. And I remember someone telling us that these immigrants are choosing English over French as their Canadian second language, so I can understand that being a serious issue. We can get all annoyed that people in Quebec won't speak English to us, and how rude they are and other such nonsense. When Quebecers come to the rest of Canada, do the English speak French to them? Are we rude for not speaking French to them? I don't care if there are more English-speaking people than French in this country, most of us took French in school. And isn't this country bilingual? Shouldn't we expect everyone then to be a little bilingual, not just the French speakers? Yeah, this is coming from someone who needs to get all my French interviews translated cause I can't understand a word of it. But I want to learn French. I took a year of it in university. I am continuing to work at it. Slowly.

Anyway, I guess my main point in this whole thing is that while we are a long way from being united, I don't think that needs to be the goal. We're not going to find unity, and really, we've never even defined what we want to be united about. Do we hope to be united about politics - good luck! - or culture - have we even defined what culture is? - or some other enormous concept? I don't think we should be looking for unity, we should be looking for understanding. If we can understand where the rest of the country is coming from, understand at least the issues facing other provinces and territories, then we can understand the country as a whole a bit better. So I'll get back to work on that with the documentary, and you guys can go check out the Yahoo discussion if you want to. At least people are talking about this stuff. That makes me believe there's hope :)

Yahoo's Canada question and the answers:
http://ca.answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=Ah_YiYpTmcSgJgsDQDso.RbOPhV.?qid=20070713105214AA5wrIc&cp=2&tp=2&tnu=59#all-answers

The map is up

Ok, finally got the map up. I'm off for a few days now, gonna get back to work on getting the film done. Will update again in a week or so when I've got something more to show for myself.

Happy Canada Day!

Ok, the map is almost done, I've got the route all laid out finally. However, it's still in black and white, so it's hard to see what's what, so I'm gonna add some color before posting it.

But I have got something to show! There are some pictures uploaded now!!

I figured this one is appropriate for Canada Day. My friend Claire was out from England just as I was starting to really get serious about this whole project, and we ended up taking a road trip

I don't know, but the way this plaque is written, it sounds like they really wanted to add "for better or for worse" at the very end.




Photo: Claire Benson

Happy Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day!

We should all go out and drink some blue beer!

Malliardville (one of the founding French communities in greater Vancouver) was having a celebration in the park that I was going to go to, and then got too caught up in work. But I'll dig up some blue food coloring tonight and have a drink, does that make up for it?

Blogger.com has a draft thing running, so people can post videos on their blogs. Which is awesome! I've got a trailer to post, but there are a few bugs as of yet. So first, I'm going to overhaul this blog and get some pictures up and make it look nicer, and finally get a map of the route across Canada up. And soon, you'll be able to see some of the stuff we shot.

Happy National Aboriginal Day!

I don't know, something about National Aboriginal Day sounds a little too politically correct or something. Couldn't we at least drop "National" and just assume it's national? I don't know. Maybe it's just me.

Also, happy solstice!

We've come to the end of transcribing. It took a lot longer than I thought it would, but this whole project is a learning experience, eh? A lot of people have asked me why I would bother transcribing all the interviews. With so much footage, I need to be able to keep track of it, figure out where interviews overlap on similar subjects, see what I can juxtapose next to each other - basically, now I go back to my original idea and outline, and structure the interviews so they fit, or restructure my outline so it fits the interviews. Because the basic structure is a road trip, it should all go together without too much forcing. But the practical end of it means I need to rewrite the script to match the dialogue. Yes, it does sound backwards.

BLOG ON HIATUS - Too Much Transcribing and Logging

Ok, there’s not much happening, and not much to comment on at the moment. I’m still ploughing through interviews, which, while they are extremely interesting, are also very long and make my fingers sore. Though my typing speed has increased phenomenally.

When I get tired of transcribing, I log footage. We shot a bunch of B-roll stuff, the landscapes out the bus windows, shots around the towns and cities, stuff we did in different places (like the Hairy Leg contest, snow carving and careening down Mont Tremblant on a toboggan), and stuff like the crab fishing, and stuff that I can’t even remember right now. Let’s just say that there’s a lot of footage that needs to be gone through, and each separate shot or thing that might be used needs to be described and have its timecode written down, and that’s what I do for fun when I’m not transcribing. This is where an assistant editor would come in handy . . .

But this blog is only occasionally being updated as it is right now, so it’s going to go on hiatus for a while so I can get this stuff done. I’ll see you in the next phase!

Night Shift

I’m starting to get used to this wacky schedule. Sort of. It changes a little bit each night.

We don’t work Friday night, so the footage that they shot on Friday is what we transfer Sunday night. So it’s ready and waiting when we get there. So we show up early, and leave early. Sunday is the best night. Then Monday morning, the production starts shooting early, so we can usually come in early Monday night, and there will be some film ready, if not all of it. However, as the week goes on, the production starts later and later in the morning, usually because they have long working days (12 - 16 hours sometimes) and unions require them to have a certain turnaround period before they can shoot again. So we get the film later and later as the week goes on, and stay later and later in the morning. So Monday morning, I might get to sleep at 4 am, whereas on Friday morning, I might not get off work until noon. (It doesn’t happen very often that we go that late, but it really sucks when it does.)

Beyond all that, I’m still working on The Distance Within whenever I get the chance. I’m in the transcribing phase. This is the part where I play back every interview and write down everything that’s said. It takes forever, but at the end, I will have a better idea of what people were talking about, and how well it fits with what everyone else was talking about. Cause it’s all kind of a blur to me at the moment.

Once I have the interviews transcribed, I can start putting together bits of interviews that talk about the same subject, area, issue, whatever. And I can look at different ways to tell the stories of the trip and the people we met. For now, I have a lot of work to do just to get past this part.