fear

I Art Directed another 4th year York University film recently; written and directed by the fabulous Shannon Fewster (cutester!). It shot from November 19-23, 2009 on many locations with many characters! I only have snaps from a couple of the days though; the classroom and the car scenes. The actual classroom was very bare bones, so we needed to make it fun and math-y looking. The car scene was pretty light for my department, but I got to wrangle some raindrops and how often can you say you've done that~

This still kills me. I know it's so she can see the monitor better, but it still looks like a lunch bag to me.

Check my raindrop skills.

The film won't be completed until the end of the school year, same with Boycatt, so unfortunately I won't know how either of them turned out until I get to see them at the end of year screenings.

Fortunately, I was recently contacted by my director for It's Raining and he's sending me the completed copy of the film. Can't wait to see it! I may be working with him again on his next project, so perhaps you'll be seeing more updates from me on that front.

And now, back to my many remaining final projects for the semester...

chantilly lace

Recently, I was given (very short) notice that I would be participating in a group exhibition in the Gales gallery at York University. It was to feature works by five talented young female artists (Jess Thalmann, Jiallin Ji, Jo Fallack, Lili Huston-Herterich, and myself). Unfortunately, due to time contraints (ie. practically no notice and it being the busiest part of the semester), there was no way to really plan a show that would have a lot of cohesion between all the different work. So, we figured we would all just put in whatever work we could and that would be that.

Another unfortunate piece of business was that the artists who utilized the gallery space right before us were given the wrong shade of white paint to restore with and our walls ended up having very noticeable darker blocks of paint across them. Already being frustrated with the show and everyone being so busy, there wasn't any time to go out and buy the right paint and fix it. We decided to just roll with it and we installed our work over top and named the exhibition Chantilly Lace after the shade of paint that wasn't meant to be there.

These are the drawings that I installed in the show:

Outspoken (Laura Crowell 2009) 22"x30" conte on paper

Untitled (Laura Crowell 2009) 22"x30" conte on paper

La Scapigliata (Laura Crowell 2009) 22"x30" conte on paper

The show will be running until November 13, 2009.

Interesting experience, to say the least. I am a little sad that we were given such crappy notice about it though. I've wanted to show work in that gallery since I found out undergrads were allowed to apply, so it's unfortunate there wasn't enough time for me to produce new work for it.

Outspoken is my most recent piece. I'm hoping to continue with a series of drawings in a similar style. The hands drawing has already been shown at Whippersnapper gallery earlier in March of this year in the Play/Pause show. La Scapigliata is sort of just a drawing for the sake of drawing something. There's not a terribly big meaning behind it, so I felt a little silly including it.

Ah well, there was space on the wall, so why not!

headshots

So I got to try my hand at some more headshots on Sunday. My friend Laurie is in theatre production and needed some headshots for the show she is stage managing so she asked me to do them, which was awesome because I need more practice! She was great and brought along another lovely girl, Emily, who is also in production. The more the merrier~

These ladies were a lot of fun to work with and were super fabulous because they set up the lights for me! We used the theatre lighting studio, so unfortunately I have no idea how to handle the type of lights that were available to us. They weren't the most ideal lights for headshot purposes, but I think they turned out quite nice all the same.

Thank you Laurie and Emily!

boycatt

I worked on another film over this past weekend. It was directed by my ol' roommate Tess Marie Garneau. It shot from October 22-26 for a 4th year York University student film production in quite a variety of locations. Unfortunately I was too busy to take stills in a few of the places, but for the park day I had some spare time to run around with a camera.

The majority of these photos will be from the outdoor pet show scene. We shot in Trinity Bellwoods dog park and it was a gorgeous fall day!

Our AD taking a break under a tree at lunch.

Is this not the dog from the Sand Lot?

This is 'Lole', he's a little down on his luck.

Our Production Manager doing a little dance.

I had to make a giant cheque for our pet show winner.

Cinematographer.

The pet show set.

The make up team.

The evil encyclopedia salesmen mafia.

Our lovely director... being lovely.

 The main cast, sans Milo the cat.

It was an interesting five days. I learned a lot, had some fun, and worked with some pretty rad people (for the most part).

My roommate will be editing it, so when he gets around to sorting out the footage I'll see if he can provide me with some stills from the film to show ye alls. The colours in this movie are going to be beautiful, I can't wait to see the final product.

elephant love medley

So, been sick for the past couple days so I've just been watching movies here and there to help with the healing process. Today, it was Moulin Rouge. I always forget how much I absolutely love this film, sometimes it's just overwhelming how much it amazes me. I'm a huuuge sucker for incredibly beautiful visuals and this film is chalk full of them.

This is one of my favourite sequences. It's not as powerful as the El Tango de Roxanne sequence, but this one always gives me the warm fuzzy goosebumps.



AGH. So good. Especially love the part with the exploding heart effect. This whole film is just a really great marriage of over the top embellishments, great acting, incredible art direction, really good editing, etc. Definitely one of my all time favourites.

Anywho, gushing over. I need to upload my new photos, there's quite a few, but I'm always hesitant since I often want to have them part of a 'series' or small group, but then never get around to finishing said 'series' or group. Ah well. I'll get to them eventually. Need to redo my flickr account too. I've sort of reached my 200 photos already, but I'm not certain I like all of them. Might just have to get myself a pro account so I don't have to worry about the cap.

'Til next time~

decision daisy

I am aware that the flowers in question are actually blackeyed susans, but originally I tried this idea out with daisies and liked the title so I kept it. The daisies were much smaller, so writing on the petals was much more difficult than it was with the susans and would have required way more photoshopping than necessary. Fortunately, my mum had a nice crop of these flowers growing in the backyard during the summer and they didn't seem to mind the black marker as much, so WIN.

decision daisy, originally uploaded by avalilly.

all yellow, originally uploaded by avalilly.

handful, originally uploaded by avalilly.

I'm not sure if I want/need any more images to go with these. Might just leave it as a triptych, since it seems okay the way it is.

The leaves are already changing colours here. I love autumn, but I had so many summer-requiring ideas, I guess I'll just have to wait 'til next year to do them.

make-over

So, this year I decided I should actually get a desk for school instead of just using my laptop on my bed all the time. I happened upon the Salvation Army store in my town getting rid of everything for super cheap so they could move locations or something. I found this desk in there for $30. It's small, cute, and fits perfectly in my new room.

I decided the dark forest green wasn't really working for me though. I have this thing for red, white, and black, so ofcourse that needed to happen in the new paint job. Picked up some marine oil paint 'sample' cans from the paint place, sanded it down and painted away!

Before!

After!

Unfortunately, the stripes didn't come out perfectly straight. The tape I used sort of allowed for some paint to seap under it, but it's nothing terribly noticeable. I'll probably just fix it with a small brush if I'm in a tedious mood sometime. I have some small circular mirror accents I'm debating putting on the drawers too, but I think I like it the way it is.