Refragmenting Fragments

Last Saturday, Troy, our friend Joe and I went to a meet and greet event with Canadian director Bruce McDonald at the Princess Cinema cafe prior to seeing his latest offering called The Tracey Fragments. I wouldn’t call myself a fan of Bruce McDonald, having only seen one of his movies thus far, but Troy was really excited about the event. I was only in it for the hot chocolate and the movie. I didn’t even bring any camera with me to the event. So Bruce arrived about an hour late because he missed his train and so on and so forth and half an hour into his lateness I already started talking the guys into leaving since we each already got the free comic book they promised to the first 40 people to show up. But Troy said that since we’d already waited this long, we might as well wait until he showed up. And show up, he did. Praise the flying spaghetti monster!

As I said earlier, I didn’t bring any camera with me, and boy did I ever regret it. You see, after dealing with his older (as in age) fans who were busy singing him praises, Bruce sat in the table set up for him with a cup of coffee for a minute before he moved — taking his chair with him — straight to our table. So, sitting across the tiny round table right in front of me was the man who’s potentially made my degrees of separation to Kevin Bacon much lower, and he was chatting with Troy like they were old friends. While he was happily signing stuff for Troy and Joe, I was beating myself for not bringing my camera with me. It’s just that I wasn’t expecting to be able to see him up close and personal like that, which was one of the reasons I didn’t bother to bring a camera. I thought we would have to line up to chat with him (which I think is lame) instead of having him come to our table. Life lesson #5878: Always have a camera with you. That is a lesson I learned ages ago but somehow forgot.

The Tracey Fragments itself is a pretty cool movie. It’s… artsy, for lack of better term. Definitely not everyone’s cup of tea. Some might even find it a bit pretentious, but it was just the director doing his own thing. I’m okay with that. I do my own thing all the time with photography. If people like it, great. If not, well, at least I like it. 🙂 Anyway, if you’re any good at video editing, you should check out the movie website. If you click on the Re-Fragmented menu, it will bring you to a download area where all the movie footage, musical score and script are available for free under the Creative Commons license. If you live in Canada and you made a cool video out of it, you’re encouraged to submit it and if you’re lucky, you could win a prize and have your video featured on the DVD release. It kind of makes me wish I knew anything about video editing. Even if you’re lacking video editing skills, you should at least download the musical score by Broken Social Scene. Some of the tracks are pretty catchy, especially their cover of Patti Smith’s song, Horses.

I actually started writing this post two three days ago. I am such a procrastinating blogger.