This piece works on a number of levels:

1.  It explains in very simple terms how Ultimate Frisbee is played.  There are several pieces where the narration and the action in the scene have been synchronized, especially on the word/action for the ‘pancake’ catch.

2.  It describes the kinds of people who get involved in Ultimate Frisbee, from beginners to competitive players like Adam Ward, showing that Ultimate Frisbee has a lot to offer people from all skill levels.

Areas for Improvement:

1.  It would have been nice for the website of the Calgary Outdoor Club to show up or be mentioned somewhere in the piece.  Maybe a ‘for more information, check out Calgary Outdoor Club dot com!”  Sadly, it totally slipped my mind to ask for this.

Next time, baby.  Next time…

On a whim, I decided to look for other news items on Ultimate Frisbee and came across this glitzy piece:

It’s interesting to see some of the techniques used to make this piece more visually appealing:

1. Whip Pans and zooms to follow the action, stop motion, speeding up jumping and slowing down the action to coincide with the music.  Computer graphics inserted in post production.

2.  Music is continuous throughout the piece, including the interviews..

3.  Cool uniforms, team songs (I believe I can fly) and monogrammed frisbees.

4.  There were good examples of unorthodox throws, such as the chicken wing.

This particular piece has innuendo written all over it, but it is a neat way to promote their event:

]]> http://markmacgillivray.ca/?feed=rss2&p=361 0 http://markmacgillivray.ca/?p=331 http://markmacgillivray.ca/?p=331#comments Wed, 25 Aug 2010 05:51:46 +0000 admin http://markmacgillivray.ca/?p=331 Last week I took a pilgrimage to the Edmonton Fringe Festival and watched 13 plays over 4 days.   Overhead, the haze from the forest fires in British Columbia cast a pall on the weather — that and the rain.

Fortunately, we had decided against taking our bikes in favor of taking the Edmonton Trolley from Jasper Avenue to the Fringe Grounds.   The trolley with the most character was the Melbourne Trolley.  It is also where we met Gregor the beetle. (more about that later)  Also, The Fringe Festival had made a deal with Edmonton Transit to offer free rides from the grounds every day after 6 pm.

The Edmonton Fringe Festival is the largest Fringe festival in North America and offers hundreds of plays from all over the world.  These plays are  usually composed of one or two actors with a minimal set and last between an hour and an hour and a half.

But now to the plays:

1.  My Pal Izzie – A play about the early life of Irving Berlin, told through the eyes of his girlfriend.  Singing was top notch and provided an interesting insight into life in the 1920′s, where social mores were very different and automobiles were considered ‘hi-tech’ and those that drove them were disreputable and not to be trusted.

2.  Japanglish – An interesting look into a woman’s experience growing up in an immigrant Japanese family.  Yumi Ogawa’s performance was energetic and heartfelt, especially her Janet Jackson dancing.

I have heard a lot of expressions for this amongst Asian Canadians, but the most intriguing is ‘banana’.  Yellow on the outside, but white in the middle.  By the same token, there are many of my Caucasian friends who have taken on Chinese and Japanese cultural trappings.  Does this make them eggs? (white on the outside but with a yellow heart)

Nonetheless, this play brought a fresh perspective on Western and Oriental cultural clash and the fresh perspective of a woman perched precariously in both worlds.

3. Spiral Dive, Part III – The third installment of Ken Brown’s trilogy about a young Canadian prairie boy and his experiences in World War II.  Intense, gripping with a very well thought out use of construction scaffolding that I’ve every seen in a play.  Wow!

The fact that the scene changes were absolutely seamless was in part due to the fact that Ken Brown both wrote and directed this play.  If a scene change was too awkward to portray, it could be rewritten or moved to maintain or increase the momentum of the play.

I have had the good fortune of working with Dan Gibbins of Scorpio Theater as the Director for his play, The Spy Who Left Me.  We worked hand-and-glove to modify and modernize his play while retaining its essential flavor.  The result: 9 Calgary Acts Nominations, including Best Director and a tripling of play attendance over their previous year.

Far too many times have I seen the catastrophe happen where the written word was considered ‘gospel’, forcing the hapless director to try to block a scene to minimize the ‘trucks’ that occur during the changes.

4. The Super Villain Monologues – A series of vignettes about the life of Super Villains who, it seems, combine the greatest in intelligence with serious character flaws.  No matter how powerful you become, one day you will get your ass kicked by some schmuck wearing his underwear over his pants.  Deal with it…

5.  March – This was an interesting play to watch.  All the characters interacted, but there was no real central theme.  Well acted and enjoyable nonetheless.  It was interesting in the sense that it dealt with deciding on a purpose for one’s life and how, if one does not choose it for oneself, another will choose it for you.

6.  Songs for Caligari – Ever since I saw Nosferatu put to music during a Halloween costume party, I’ve enjoyed the creepy nature of 1920′s horror films.  In this performance, the silent film The Cabinet of Dr Caligari is accompanied by 3 singers, a theremin and an electronic orchestra that accentuates a very creepy film.  After the performance, Dave Clarke gave me the opportunity to play.

A theremin is played by moving your hands by its two sensors: one controls volume (left hand) and the other controls pitch (right hand).  by varying the distance between your two hands, you get a sound that is the virtual hallmark of 1950′s sci-fi.

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7. Lucky 9 – This one man play was about how he learns about personality enneagrams and uses them to better understand himself and his family.  It was interesting enough for me to sign up on his mailing list for Integral Philosophy.

It sounds a lot like what I did back in the 90′s – Practical Philosophy pub nights.  Quaff your favorite beverage and discuss the things in life worth talking about.

8. Sandkeeper Canto – This was a fascinating play about a man who is trying to find his girlfriend but, in doing so, offends Time.  The God Time sends his bodyguard Aeon to steal the memories of his girlfriend so that he will not remember her even if he does find her.  David MacInnis’ performance is amazing and ranks up there with previous performances I’ve seen of his.

9. 39 – This was the most intellectually challenging play of the bunch.  In it, we are introduced to a world that has been made perfect by an invented A.I.  With ideas such as trans-humans and post scarcity, we are confronted with a man from who returns from a failed colonization expedition to encounter a world in which he is ill-equipped to live in.  39 carries  the guilt of feeling responsible for the deaths of his fellow colonists and wants to be tried for his crimes, but the society to which he has returned has lost all notions of rules and law.  Neat.

What made this interesting was that the play jumped around over different time periods, all due to the fact that this human does not have the mental capacity to project his thoughts via the trans-human interface and we get a ‘stream of consciousness’ sense of what is going on.  While at times difficult to follow, it places the audience square in the role of the trans-humans trying to understand a world that no longer exists.

The director made interesting use of projecting live video images of the actor for some of the scenes to add tension to the orbital reentry sequence and others.  A simple idea effectively executed.

39 is a play that is the result of a workshop process by the Yokohama Theater Group.  As time goes on, this group will continue to explore themes of trans-humanism and post-scarcity in plays to come.  I can hardly wait!

10. Die Roten Punkte – This was a very silly piece.  Taking the same faux rock band idea as Boy Groove did in 2003, Die Roten Punkte pokes fun at the German punk bands as a brother/sister duo provide arty pieces and a rock opera.  It was entertaining, but as a formula, it’s been done better.

That being said, the fact that they have their own website, lyrics, videos and merchandise (including a banana case!), this may be the future for plays looking to make a buck in the Fringe world.

11. The Metamorphasis – This piece was extremely difficult to sit through.  The performance was an opera of Franz Kafka’s story of the same name. Gregor is metamorphosed into a giant beetle, to the horror of himself and his family.   They are upset, not by the fact that Gregor has been turned into a bug, but that he is the only person in the family with a job and able to pay off their debts.

As Mike Ross of the Edmonton Sun succinctly put it in his review of the play,

“The day starts out bad. It gets worse. The end. Spoiler alert: It doesn’t go well for poor Gregor.”

The ensemble was that of four singers and a cello, oboe, clarinet flute, guitar and kettle drum.   It was very well performed and captured the Kafkaesque feeling of claustrophobia, horror and hopelessness.

It was so horrible that a few people walked out.  One lady tripped on the stairs and fell on her face while the performance was going on.  Thinking this behavior to be rude, I immediately felt good about her falling.  Then I felt bad about feeling good about someone being hurt.  I then felt good about feeling bad about it and satisfied, continued to suffer through the performance.

God, sometimes I feel so … Catholic?

I’m not sure where composer Andrew Creaghan is planning to take this project, but I think that adding some acting — hell, even a puppet show would be nice to look at while listening to the music.

12. Pulse: Every Village Has a Drum – This was, hands down, the loudest performance of them all.  More like a Japanese version of  ‘Stomp’, Pulse combines Taiko Drums, an electric cello that looked like it was fashioned out of some animal’s ribcage, electric keyboard and the musical stylings of Twilla MacLeod to create a tribal chest-thumping experience that was hugely energizing.  It was all I could do to not jump up and groove.

They had a tree where people could write down their secret wishes and attach them to the tree, though it was never really made clear what role this played.  My secret wish was that my elbows would heal so I could get back to playing a decent game of tennis.

Other people probably asked for world peace.  Selfish bastard.

13. The Excursionists – This was a fun romp as two Englishmen from 1886 create time travel, ostensibly to go back one day in time to do those things that one failed to do before.  Time travel in the name of punctuality — how typical of the sluggardly  Victorian English!

However, the benefactor of the professor wants to use the time machine to invite King Henry VII to tea and, in doing so, changes the time stream with unexpected, yet Napoleonic, results .  Very funny.

]]> http://markmacgillivray.ca/?feed=rss2&p=331 0 http://markmacgillivray.ca/?p=326 http://markmacgillivray.ca/?p=326#comments Tue, 27 Jul 2010 14:46:47 +0000 admin http://markmacgillivray.ca/?p=326 Rick Mercer has to be one of the ballsiest Canadians I have ever met.

Between his ankle biting work on ‘Talking to Americans’ to the antics he gets up to with Canadian politicians, it is difficult to know if there’s anything in this world the Rick is afraid of.

Yesterday I had the opportunity to work with X-Weighted, a reality program that challenges individuals, couples and families  to lose weight by changing their diet and fitness activities.

In this show, a family was challenged to bike 4.5 km into Little Elbow and then climb 3.5 km to the top of Nahahi Ridge in Kananaskis country located on the eastern slopes of the Canadian Rocky Mountains.  The challenge for the camera crew was to keep ahead of this very energetic group.

As Production Assistant, it was my job to carry the lead camera, batteries and other gear.  All in all, it was about 80 pounds of kit to carry up a 1300 meter elevation gain while hustling ahead of a family working to beat a fitness challenge.  To say that there was a fitness challenge for the crew as well would not be an exaggeration.

It had rained a great deal the day before and we were concerned that, if the rain continued, the shoot would have to be cancelled.  Fortunately, the only challenge we had was the occasional muddy trail and muggy atmosphere.  The views of the Elbow Valley were spectacular with Glasgow Mountain, Cornwall Mountain and  Banded Peak dominating the horizon.  The clouds and wind (especially near the ridge line) were a blessed respite from the hot sun.

It was fascinating to see how television gets made.  The team of producers, directors, sound and cameras work cohesively together to capture the trials and tribulations of the family as they made their way on bike and on foot.  I was impressed by the positive attitude and cooperative approach to solving problems as they occurred.  I was especially impressed with how Al Leader selected interesting camera angles with his crew — you really got a sense of a compelling story being told by the visuals created.

He worked cooperatively with the other DPs: Glenn Crawford and Lisa Fryklund  who would bring their unique perspectives into the mix.

The sound guys also performed under challenging conditions as the 50 – 60 km winds buffeted everyone on the ridges.

Supporting this crew were the Producers who were responsible for equipping, provisioning and feeding us.  Kristin Hursh packed us a sensational lunch, especially the tortilla wraps and prepared special meals for those with dietary preferences.

Lisa Mathews was the person who contacted me through the Calgary Outdoor Club to be Production Assistant, along with Ian and Ewan as well as to act as unofficial guide up the mountain.

All this for a minimum donation to the Canadian Diabetes Association of ten dollars.

Implements used to smash computers ranged from the relatively workaday tools such as sledge hammers, pitchforks and crowbars to the more sporty selections of hockey sticks and golf clubs.  Hapless computers and other pieces of faithless equipment were speared, tossed, flattened, dismembered and disemboweled with gusto while Don Cherry impersonator Clark Robinson provided color commentary.

Also in attendance was Darth Vader and members of the 501st Badlands Garrison Storm Troopers.  Vader was especially aggressive as he was to encouraged to “USE THE FORCE!” He was overheard muttering to a 4- in-1 HP Inkjet printer, “You have failed me for the last time”  and elected to use a golf club instead of either a force choke or blue electricity to destroy his robotic foe.

The centerpiece of the event was the Heavy Destruction Zone  where, for a minimum $100 donation to the Canadian Diabetes Association, you can use a 20 foot backhoe to smash your computer to kingdom come.  This piece of equipment was the Equalizer and was very popular with those who had trouble with lifting the sledgehammer.

Now, one may think that smashing computers would be an environmentally damaging activity.  However, it is not.

Computers are provided by the Electronics Recycling Association that it collects from its donation locations and brought on site for the smashing.  They are stripped of any the potentially damaging parts ( batteries, toner cartridges, etc.,) removed for proper disposal and the computer itself, and indeed any computer more than 5 years old, is recycled at a rate of $82.50 per ton regardless of its condition.

The computer is then smashed, swept up and placed in bins to be shipped directly to the recycler with minimal waste and no dangerous contamination of the environment.

The event raised approximately $1,000 for the Canadian Diabetes Association and attracted over 800 attendees.  Smash for a Cure received positive and detailed coverage on Breakfast Television, and Global News.  The Canadian Diabetes Association is excited to have us hold this event again and perhaps take it national within 3 – 5 years.

All in all, a smashing success!

Due to the work that I and others did to promote PHEN,  the Ministry of Health and Wellness has agreed to provide PHEN with funding to continue operations for the 2010-11 fiscal year.

The Provincial Health Ethic Network (PHEN) is a group of trained ethicists who provide advice on ethical issues to health professionals, government and the general public.  Given that science is giving us increasing powers over the health, quality of life and the longevity of an individual, while at the same time challenging us with an aging population, the question of ethics has never been more important.

In late February 2010, I was approached by a PHEN member who was determined not to let this organization, of which he was one of the founders, go down without a fight.  We met and mapped out a strategy to get PHEN membership engaged in saving their beloved organization.

There were two thrusts to this strategy: a communication strategy pointing out to Alberta Health decision makers the value of PHEN to Alberta’s health professionals, and an emotional appeal to PHEN members, all of whom have contributed, to a greater or lesser degree, to PHEN’s reputation as an internationally recognized ethical resource.

The reason this book was chosen is because many of my clients and contemporaries depend upon, to a greater or lesser extent, the production, sale, refining and marketing of oil and gas.  And even while some of them may not be directly involved in the oil and gas industry, many of them have oil and gas companies as clients.

Here we go!

Author Dr Stephen Gorelick wrote this book as a means of trying to resolve contradictory messages we receive from the oil companies:

1. We have reached, or will reach peak oil (the point where production can no longer keep up with demand) within the next 10 -20 years.
2. Oil is a finite resource, but because it is so large, a peak will not occur for many decades to come.

The difference between these points of view lead to two separate courses of action which, from a business perspective, are antithetical to one another.

If Case 1 is true, then a sensible approach would be to continuously build business capacity to deal with ever-increasing demand.  As the value of the commodity increases, so does the revenue per unit.

However, if this course of action is pursued and Case 2 were correct, then large increases in capacity in firms across an industry would lead to gluts in supply — and a crash in the price of oil.  The ROI for larger capacities, both in terms of human resources and machines, would telescope outward, making a company’s attempt to recoup its investment virtually impossible.

Hence the need for an understanding of oil prices and whether or not peak oil is around the corner.

The first part of the book, Dr Gorelick examines the global oil landscape, taking oil production and slicing and dicing it by estimated reserves, commodity, usage, countries producing and countries consuming over time.

The second part of the book examines the current theory of peak oil and and several arguments that support it.

The third part of the book offers counter-arguments to the theory of peak oil and attempts to clear up misconceptions regarding oil supply and demand.

Nutshell Quote: “The amount of exploitable global oil, estimated as reserves or endowment, is at an all-time high and has risen consistently since values were first reported.  This is so even though the discovery of new giant oil fields has fallen since the 1970′s,” — Oil Panic and the Global Crisis p. 220.

Price Changes and Production do Not Reflect Scarcity

Dr Gorelick reviews how oil prices have changed in the recent past and how impacts external to supply (OPEC, war, technological advances) have affected the price of oil.  Even when estimated reserves are recalculated, this also impacts price.  Effectively, he shows that price and even production levels have nothing to do with the scarcity of oil.

Indeed, he correlates quite closely how the increase in oil prices matches the increase in oil worker wages and how the decrease US domestic oil production in the 1970′s has more to do with with the creation and use of  supertankers (>200,000 tons) to economically transport Middle East oil.

Once Dr Gorelick disabuses us of the notion that price and production have anything to do with the actual supply of oil, he then attempts to draw conclusions from historical behaviors of other commodities.  If we can evaluate the behavior of other resources, we may be able to predict with greater accuracy the behavior of oil in the future.

He compares oil production and demand with other resources to see if we can draw conclusions about resource usage historical patterns.  Some of the examples, I found, were relevant while others  left me shaking my head and none gave me any confidence in predicting the behavior of oil pricing and supply in the future.

One particular example is his view of tobacco production.  He shows how tobacco production from 1860 – 1990 follows the same bell curve as the peak oil curve and does so, not because of resource scarcity, but due to consumers pursuing a more healthy lifestyle. The argument seems to be that the existence of a peak oil – style curve can be created via a number of different situtations — not just resource scarcity.

I found this particular argument to be somewhat disingenuous.  It is like comparing apples and oranges.  In fact, it may be better to compare crude oil production to rock music than to tobacco.

The greatest contribution of this book is the way Dr Gorelick addresses contemporary issues that affect oil and gas supply: the industrialization of China and India.  He refutes the idea that demand from these nations will greatly outstrip world production and lead to oil shortages, price spikes and rapid resource depletion.

I’m not totally convinced by his argument, but it did force me to reexamine this issue in a new light.  Given that many books and movies look to the next global war being fought over access to resources, I hope that he’s right.  However, even if the danger of peak oil is many years away, what oil we do have is not evenly distributed.  This means that military actions by large oil consuming nations will continue for the foreseeable future.

Perhaps my biggest takeaway from the book is how energy efficiency leads to cheaper energy prices and how cheap energy prices increase consumption.   It illustrates that, if oil scarcity is a myth (as Dr Gorelick contends), then any energy efficient measure is its own worst enemy.  It is only through artificially fixing the price of oil at a point that makes the adoption of energy efficient technology will we truly move toward reducing our dependency on oil.

All in all, I found Oil Panic and the Global Crisis a very good read.  Because it is filled with the latest in resource statistics, it may serve as a good reference when evaluating the impact of new technologies and resource agreements.

On the down side, he only briefly considers the ecological and health costs associated with continued oil usage, making him one amongst many economists to consider environmental damage an externality.

According to this book, the cycle of boom-bust-glut of the oil energy market will continue.  Those of us who work in the industry or have oil companies as clients will continue to be subjected to this volatility.

From a business planning perspective, it may be helpful for a company to develop separate operating plans: one for boom times and one for the bust/glut times.

Needs of a Business During Boom Times

1. Rapid expansion of production capacity to deal with demand, along with the administrative infrastructure required to run the business efficiently.
2. Extensive lines of credit to make the necessary investments to get the maximum amount of oil to market at a particular price point.

Needs of a Business During Bust Time

1. Rapid restructuring to cope with a sudden decrease in commodity pricing.   Large accounts receivable become a liability as other companies impacted all along the supply chain.
2. HR support required to transition laid off workers.
3. Cash flow required to take advantage of opportunities to acquire poorly-positioned competitors in market.

Needs of a Business During Recessionary Times

1. Investment in secondary line of business not directly related to the oil and gas business.  At CCR Energy Services, for example, we serviced pressure safety valves for apartment buildings in addition to servicing the oil and gas industry.
2. Ideal time to look into business restructuring to best take advantage of the inevitable upsurge in the price of oil.

While the cycle of boom/bust/recession is not unique to the Alberta economy, it is without a doubt one of the most pronounced cycles of any economy in North America.

Question:  How does your company deal with the boom/bust/recession cycle?

In addition to having a multi-use location, each of his lines of business also mutually support one another: a small businessman brings his computer in for upgrade, decides to revamp his website and upgrade his office network.

The market for computer repair is growing: computers are becoming obsolete as new and more powerful programs (primarily games) are being demanded by customers and the spread of more complex computer viruses and malware will continue unabated for the forseeable future.

We are currently working together to develop ideas to make his business successful:

Effective Signage

It is absolutely criticial for any business that relies upon walk in traffic to let everyone know where they are.  My client has created his logo, store signage and brochures.  Over the next months, focusing on erecting signs that help prospective customers find him will be top priority.

Referral Marketing

In the first few weeks, my client has serviced about 40 customers.  Every client knows 2-3 other people contending with old technology or suffering from the effects of a virus.

The need is there and a satisfied customer is essential to the success of this business.

Postcard Campaign to Local Market

His shop is also very close to two communities.  While I typically dismiss direct mail as an effective marketing medium, it is a good way to get yourself introduced to those communities, especially when winter weather precludes the possibility of more effective methods.

Door to Door Campaign

Located next to an industrial park, my client will be visiting businesses by going door-to-door.  We have printed out a detailed map from Google Maps and broke it down into areas that can be visited in one hour per day.  As the shop is not open until 10 am, doorknocking will occur between 8 am – 9:30 am.

Given that he was uncomfortable taking headache medication or other drugs to deal with the pain, his chiropractor prescribed a Posture Pump exerciser which, when used regularly, would help relax his neck, return curvature to his spine and relieve what he believed to be a pinched nerve that was causing my friend trouble.

The problem that he was having with the Posture pump was that the recommended exercise involved inflating and releasing the air bladder every 10 seconds over a 5 minute period (the warm up) followed by a sustained inflation over the next 5 minutes (the sustain) and then a second 5 minute interval of inflating and releasing the air bladder every 10 seconds (the cool down).

It was very difficult for him to keep track of 10 second intervals over the 5 minute period and he  had a habit of dozing off during the 5 minute sustain period.

My solution to this problem was not only innovative, it enabled him to make the Posture Pump a regular part of his workout activities.   It made using the Posture Pump so easy to use that even his Chiropractor now uses it in his regular practice.

Using open source software, I recorded the exercises over the appropriate intervals, put the recording to music and outputted as an mp3 recording.  By following the instructions on the recording, I was able to focus my attention on relaxing my neck and shoulders to get the most out of the exercise.

This recording proved to be so effective in encouraging users of the Posture Pump to get the most out of their exercise that my chiropractor is using it regularly and examining ways that he can prescribe the recording to his patients.

If you are interested in trying my recording in conjunction with the Posture Pump, just drop me a line here.

While nothing can eliminate the stress of the countdown to Election Day, the proper organization of a political campaign can avoid some unnecessary challenges.

Politics and elections have entered other aspects of our lives, from corporate governance to promoting issues at our local school boards

I have run as a candidate in 2 Canadian Federal Elections and 3 provincial elctions which has given me an intimate understanding of how to put together a strong campaign team and plan for success.

As a civic, provincial and federal organizer for one of Canada’s newest political parties, I have a strong grasp of election guidelines for candidates and experience in planning and executing regional political campaigns.

Need some advice?  Ask me here!