He’s an Irish Wheaten Terrier bred by Wayne & Susan Kemp of Marayne Wheatens in Drumbo. Their dogs are gorgeous and their approach to rearing and raising them is exactly in step with ours. Just a few weeks old, he’s still feisty and full of beans. Like his namesake, he has a ton of character.

Jack MacGowran

Ignatius Feeney is the character that Jack MacGowran plays in John Ford’s The Quiet Man, Squire Danahar’s right-hand man.
The name is an homage to the concept of the faithful companion—which we have no doubt that this Feeney will become for our family. (Let’s forget for the moment that he bets against his master at the end of the film; that’s another story…)

So now we wait with anticipation until he’s old enough to make the journey to our house, and leave his mom Remy—an absolutely amazing example of a terrier. I could’ve taken Remy home, she was so welcoming and affectionate. It’s going to be nice to have a sidekick again.

Don was the consummate DOP. He lived and breathed the film set, and although he was no spring chicken, his enthusiasm for film-making imbued a vigour in him that was contagious. He started every day in Port Credit by brewing the strongest coffee I’d ever tasted and chomping at the bit to get to set. He’d race to the massive Caddy that he had driven out from Vancouver, and then—big band music blaring—drive it at a snail’s pace into the city. It’s not that he wasn’t in a hurry, he just didn’t drive fast. It was as if he was savouring the anticipation of shooting. And maybe even timing his arrival so that he was metering first light, setting up his shots with the sun.

He was quirky and talented and brash; he was funny and fun, and not afraid of a fight. He would let you know what he thought, good or bad. And he was supremely talented. He had a long lineage in documentary and drama—he had shot everywhere and in all conditions and loved to share it. I could fill a book with stories he regaled us with and add a few more from our experiences together on set, but this post is about his past—and how I came to know it better.

I was reminded today of one of Don’s tales, one that he would mete out in pieces now and then when something on our set reminded him.
It had to do with a wild shoot that he had been on in the Yukon territories, working on a National Film Board documentary. I couldn’t remember the name, but he would often talk about how they had done fly-overs deep into the bush, dropping food caches and 12V batteries to run the cameras. He had all kinds of stories about how tough the shoot was, how beautiful the country was and how interesting the subject.

So when I learned that the NFB was releasing its docs to the web, I visited the site and did a search on Don’s name. I was rewarded with the beautiful film Nahanni. He shot it on 35mm, in an area of the Yukon that few ever see. His doc probably part of the inspiration for Pierre Elliot Trudeau to visit and subsequently protect the Nahanni river by declaring it a national park. It is a fitting legacy of rugged beauty, not unlike Don himself.

Life’s pictures on Google. Wow.

Posted by email from moxy’s posterous

Posted by email from moxy’s posterous

Posted by email from moxy’s posterous

Posted by email from moxy’s posterous

It hung over me like a damp blanket. I couldn’t get my mind off the brutality of the world in which we live, off of why nations wage war against nations, or at how terrorism and counter-terrorism supposedly define the “new normal”.

And then—just as unsuspectingly—I tripped over this. A project called Where the Hell is Matt?. I can’t describe it, other than to say for the duration of this video, I smiled, and cried, and ultimately felt an overwhelming sense of joy and hope.

Wow.

To watch the video in High Quality—and I strongly suggest it—go to the YouTube page and be sure to select Watch Video in High Quality just below the video.

“Where the Hell is Matt” YouTube Page

The drama inherent in trying to save a ship that has nearly capsized in the North Pacific is gripping, mostly because of the exotic cast of characters that populate it. From Captain Rich Habib to a bevy of wild salvage divers and naval architects, these guys are the stuff of a Hollywood movie.

The story itself is a screenplay. A deep-sea car transport, its 14 decks packed with 4,703 new Mazdas at an estimated cargo value of $103 million lays on its side after a malfunction while changing ballast water. The only way to right it is to create a digital model and calculate an intricate pumping system. The only way to accomplish it isn’t pretty.

The job is daunting: Board the Cougar Ace with the team and build an on-the-fly digital replica of the ship. The car carrier has 33 tanks containing fuel, freshwater, and ballast. The amount of fluid in each tank affects the way the ship moves at sea, as does the weight and placement of the cargo. It’s a complex system when the ship is upright and undamaged. When the cargo holds take on seawater or the ship rolls off-center — both of which have occurred — the vessel becomes an intricate, floating puzzle.

Davis handles the telling of this fantastical tale brilliantly. As he introduces each character as they are summoned to the project—from Jackson Hole, Wyoming to Port of Spain, Trinidad—he back-stories just enough to help us understand the dangers and rewards. And in Captain Rich Habib, he has a protagonist that is sort of a seafaring Red Adair, square-jawed and steely-eyed through risk and tragedy.

The story has everything that I love: drama, technology, character and story. Someone needs to make a film of this. It’s the best thing I’ve read in a long, long time. Follow the link to the story after the excerpt.

Deep within the ship, the men dangle on ropes inside an angled staircase and peer through a doorway into the number-nine cargo deck. Their lights partially illuminate hundreds of cars tilted on their side, sloping down into the darkness. Each is cinched to the deck by four white nylon straps. Periodically a large swell rolls the ship, straining the straps. A chorus of creaks echoes through the hold. Then, as the ship rolls back, the hold falls silent. It’s a cold, claustrophobic nightmare slicked with trickling engine oil and transmission fluid. Trepte lowers a rope and eases into the darkness.

High Tech Cowboys of the Deep Seas: The Race to Save the Cougar Ace by Joshua Davis in Wired Magazine.

A carpenter at the TVA’s new Douglas dam on the French Broad River, Tennessee.

This photograph is gorgeous. He’s wearing the type of skull bucket that I want to create as the iconographic style for Moxy Webworks.

This dam will be 161 feet high and 1,682 feet long, with a 31,600-acre reservoir area extending 43 miles upstream. With a useful storage capacity of approximately 1,330,000 acre-feet.