Asthmatic Kitty, Sufjan Steven’s record label, approached me recently about being a “celebrity judge” for their music video contest. (You could lose the quotes for some of the other judges — Peaches, the bassist from Arcade Fire, the directors of Little Miss Sunshine.) It looks pretty fun. You take a mp3 from Rafter, an artist on the label with a forthcoming album called Music for Total Chickens, make a vid, and post it to YouTube. There’s two $500 prizes, one for highest amount of views (quantity) and one that us judges like best (quality). I checked today and there’s only 14 entries so far. The deadline’s Jan. 23, get all the details and the mp3s here.

Susan’s birthday is today, and last night she finished off the last academic assignment for her doctorate. That’s only one of the many things she’s pulled off this year — being her husband I might be biased, but I think her 33rd year was pretty amazing.

As a biochem grad student, Susan has pretty much a full-time job at a lab where she’s been publishing papers, training students and doing real science type stuff with gels and microscopes and a labcoat of her own. Last year she started a group on campus and a zine (LadyScientist) to talk about the issue of women in science. (Interesting fact that we just discovered this week: University of Toronto has the widest wage discrepancy between male and female professors in Canada.) This year she’s been dealing with the same issues, just in a fantastic variety of ways… Read the rest of this post »

We wrapped the shoot over a week ago and I’m still reeling with how much fun it was. I’ve been dipping my toe in with making little vids over the past five years, but this gave me the full immersive movie experience. I found it really interesting work that I’m pretty well suited to — it engages my social, logistical and creative nodes and was actually less stressful than I expected.

Mostly I was coordinating, but I was on set as an extra pair of hands on about 75% of the shoots. We shot it over six weeks (pretty great considering our seven directors’ busy schedules) and we should have it edited in the next few months. In the meanwhile, click through to see our production stills! Read the rest of this post »