The 2012 Sabbatical Videos
From January 1 to June 30, 2012, I was granted a sabbatical from my teaching position in the Department of Film at the University of Regina. While not part of the initial plan, I decided to challenge myself by creating a new video every day of the six months. Every Sunday, I created a new chapter of "Mr. Saul", following up on the super-8 films I made a few years ago "Mr. Saul's Utopia", these works would be all created using video and computer until the banner "Mr. Saul's Digital Utopia". Those 26 videos are not included in this list. Every Thursday I shot a formalistic study of the city of Regina. They are also not included on this page. Since I am a family man, I could not be expected to work on my art every single day ("sabbatical" is supposed to mean "rest") so I took every Saturday off to do something with my son William. I don't know how to build a go-cart, so we made a film each week. I have put some of those on this list, when suitable. Many of them were comprised of me helping him shoot a skit with his friends. Those can be found on his Youtube account.I consider most of these to be sketches or exercises rather than completed works, but many of them do have promise and have been publicly screened. For example, from January 27 to February 10, Rob Bos screened the first three weeks worth of them at a group show in the "Art Projects Gallery" (Regina). Some of them explore an aesthetic idea or concern I'd not dealt with before. Others test a technical process. In some cases, I attempted creating work under the parameters of first or second year film students, to see what I would do with the limitations they sometimes face. I also sometimes presented re-contextualized work I'd made years before but never presented such as the additional soundtracks from the Dread Line. I shot many of them using a Canon 5D Mark II, but some utilized point and shoot digital cameras, SD digital video, analog video, downloaded video, super-8 and 16mm film, and pixelvision video. Many are available on Vimeo although some will not be publicly available until after their potential film festival run has ended. They are listed here in the order they were created.
Chronological
Alphabetical