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Robert

The 20 Minute Walk

August 7, 2022 by Robert Leave a Comment

This podcast discusses suicide in a graphic manner and may be disturbing to some listeners.

This is a first person narrative documentary created by Help Text founder Emma Payne. It was originally produced in 2017.

In 2002, colleague and friend Emma Payne’s husband Barry died by suicide. As she struggled to make sense of things, I gave Emma a mini-disc recorder and suggested that, like keeping a journal, just talking into the recorder might be helpful.

15 years later, Emma listened to the recordings for the first time and we started to work together on what would become a single episode podcast called The 20 Minute Walk.

Originally released in 2017, the podcast has been remastered and re-released in 2022 to mark the 20th anniversary of Barry’s death.

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Robert Ouimet

producer
https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/media.blubrry.com/ouimetpresents/content.blubrry.com/ouimetpresents/emma-20-minute-walk_V14.mp3

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Resources:

Canadian Association for Suicide Prevention

Mental Health Commission of Canada

Talk Suicide Canada

Centre for Suicide Prevention

Government of Canada Suicide Warning Signs

Filed Under: Emma Payne, Ouimet Presents

My Friend Ted: The Lines Behind Me

August 20, 2020 by Robert 8 Comments

We talked about lines in the sand. But I was so busy looking forward to see the lines, I didn’t realize they were under my feet all along. So that’s when I had the resolve to end my life.

Ted on his front porch, April 5, 2020

My Friend Ted, Episode #5

On April 6th Ted died peacefully at home. He was 57.
This episode is titled The Lines Behind Me

https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/media.blubrry.com/ouimetpresents/content.blubrry.com/ouimetpresents/ted-podcasat-ep-5-v2.mp3

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ISBN: 978-1-926758-30-5

The Trivia Event in New Westminster
The Trivia Event at the Anvil Centre in New Westminster was streamed live. You can watch the replay on YouTube.

Links:
End of Life Doula Association of Canada
ALS Society of BC
What is ALS (Wikipedia)

All episode in this series:

  • August 20, 2020 My Friend Ted: The Lines Behind Me
  • December 18, 2019 My Friend Ted: The Need to Live
  • September 26, 2019 My Friend Ted: Hope
  • July 1, 2019 My Friend Ted: Front Loaded
  • June 17, 2019 My Friend Ted: Do What You Can

Filed Under: My Friend Ted, Ouimet Presents, Podcast

Pocket Girl Podcast: CPTSD

May 12, 2020 by Robert 1 Comment

The more I think about it, the more I understand that Pocket Girl started long before I began dating terrible men, flailing in my artistic career, or smacked hard into the wall of sexism. I was raised to not have a self. Gas-lit into believing the problem was me, and not the horrendous, dysfunctional, misogynist, abusive bullshit, I was marinated in.

Photo of Alexandra Carson
Alexandra Carson

Ouimet Presents
Podcast Ep. 19

It’s been a while since we’ve heard from the Pocket Girl and this episode explains why. Also, she’s now officially Alexandra Carson. For now, she still lives in Portland.

https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/media.blubrry.com/ouimetpresents/content.blubrry.com/ouimetpresents/Alexandra-Carson-ep6-OUIMET-PRES.mp3

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ISBN: 978-1-926758-13-8

Resources:

Pete Walker is not only a survivor of CPTSD, but also a therapist. His book Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving is a must read and offers so much hope.

Beauty After Bruises is one of the very few sites dedicated to CPTSD awareness and can help connect you to therapists and resources.

Shahida Arabi: Her book Power: Surviving and Thriving After Narcissistic Abuse was instrumental in helping me with some breakthroughs last year.

The Body Keeps Score by Bessel van der Kolk. Not CPTSD specific, but tons of relevant and helpful information.

All Episodes in this series:

  • May 12, 2020 Pocket Girl Podcast: CPTSD
  • September 3, 2019 Pocket Girl Podcast: Crazy Lonely
  • June 23, 2019 Pocket Girl Podcast: #SYA
  • June 11, 2019 Pocket Girl Podcast: Match.con
  • May 23, 2019 Pocket Girl Podcast: Burning the Barn

Filed Under: Ouimet Presents, Pocket Girl Podcast, Podcast Tagged With: CPTSD, Portland

AI Transcription and COVID-19

April 5, 2020 by Robert Leave a Comment

photo of 2 signs, one says "proceed with quation" the other says "stop"

We’ve been adding transcriptions of our Yellow Jack podcast episodes as a service to people who need or want a transcription. We use a company called Trint for our transcriptions. They use artificial intelligence to create a transcription from an audio file.

It isn’t perfect.

But it is surprisingly good considering the AI has to try to understand different speakers, different quality of audio, and myriad other nuances in the recordings. So the transcripts do contains errors – they are far from word perfect. We do edit the transcriptions to fix obvious issues, but some of the errors do still sneak past us.

One of the words that comes up a lot, obviously, is COVID-19. And for whatever reason, the Trint AI just doesn’t get it. In fact, it never gets it.

I say COVID-19, You Say….

Trint always misunderstands the words COVID-19. It doesn’t seem to matter who is speaking, whether it’s studio quality audio or a a phone line, man or woman, it makes no difference.

It’s not like Trint transcribes COVID-19 as some other word. It actually transcribes it as various other words. For example, if the voice over includes COVID-19 a few times, it will replace it with a few different words.

It’s getting to be quite hilarious. Here’s what it came up with when COVID-19 was mentioned in the first 7 episodes:

cold it 19
Colvert 19
colvard
COVERED
combat. 19
cozied
coded 19
Cobbett 19
Corvin 19
Cornfed 19
called mid-nineteenth
Corbett, 19
Cauvin 19

So, if you’re tired of hearing the phrase COVID-19, please feel free to replace it with any of these, just to add some variety in these trying times.

Filed Under: Transcript Tagged With: AI, transcription, Trint

Yellow Jack: The Whole World Stops

April 5, 2020 by Robert Leave a Comment

In spite of all the suffering, this a fantastic time…to really think inwards and try to realize that there are so many things that we change. This is the first time since the industrial revolution that the whole world stops.

Rogério Soares
Yellow quarantine flag on a blue sky background with text Yellow Jack Podcast episode 7, Rogerio Soares

Yellow Jack Podcast, Episode #7

(Ouimet Presents, Episode #18)
Rogério Soares is a documentary film maker who is based in Montreal. His most recent film, River Silence, tells the story of the social and cultural impact of one of the biggest hydro electric dam projects in the world, the Belo Monte dam in Brazil.

He was Brazil shooting another film when the COVID-19 pandemic broke out.

https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/media.blubrry.com/ouimetpresents/content.blubrry.com/ouimetpresents/yellow-jack-rogerio-soares.mp3

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Heed and shoulders photo of Rogerio in a white T shirt against a beige wall
Rogério Soares

ISBN: 978-1-926758-29-9

Show Notes:
Sifting Through the Misinformation
Exit Brazil
Alone with a Phone
Creative Reflection
An Opportunity to Make Changes

Transcripts:
Read the full transcript
Download the full transcript (PDF)

Links:
Rogério Soares on Facebook
Rogério Soares on LinkedIn
River Silence film trailer at NFB
Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino

COVID-19 Resources:
COVID-19 Prevention and Risk (Government of Canada)
Outbreak Updates (Government of Canada)
Government of Canada COVID-19 information portal
BC Government COVID-19 Symptom Self-Assessment Tool
John Hopkins University COVID-19 Interactive Map

Et cetera
Yellow Quarantine Flag (Wikipedia)
Be a guest on the Yellow Jack podcast

All episode in this series:

  • April 5, 2020 Yellow Jack: The Whole World Stops
  • April 1, 2020 Yellow Jack: Pause Everything
  • March 29, 2020 Yellow Jack: Imagine Everyone at Home
  • March 26, 2020 Yellow Jack: There’s a Lot To Do So We Better Go Slow
  • March 25, 2020 Yellow Jack: What Choice Have I Got?
  • March 22, 2020 Yellow Jack: Pioneers
  • March 20, 2020 Yellow Jack: Business as Unusual

Share Your Story

Would you like to be a guest on the Yellow Jack Podcast?

Use the contact form below to get in touch with our producers, so we can share your story with the world.

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Filed Under: Ouimet Presents, Podcast, Yellow Jack Tagged With: Brazil, Documentary, film, Montreal

Transcript: Yellow Jack Ep. 7

April 5, 2020 by Robert Leave a Comment

This is a transcript of the podcast Yellow Jack Ep. 7

Host: Robert Ouimet
Guest: Rogério Soares

[Voice over, Robert:] Hi, I’m Robert Ouimet, and this is the Yellow Jack podcast.

[00:00:10] On this podcast, I’m speaking with people who are in self-isolation because of the COVID-19 pandemic. In Canada, self-isolation is 14 days. Along with social distancing in the larger population, is meant to slow down the spread of the virus. So anyone who’s coming in from outside the country, in some cases traveling between provinces or who may have been in contact with someone who has COVID-19, is being asked to self isolate, to do their part to slow down the spread of the virus.

Rogério Soares is a filmmaker based in Montreal. He was out of the country when COVID-19 broke out.

[ Rogério ] Two weeks ago and was in Brazil. And I was shooting a film there in the Amazon, basically, and I was pretty isolated from what was going on around the world because it was pretty much like immersed in fishing communities and indigenous people. You know, in very small places. I knew what was going on. But I have the real dimension of what was happening, you know, in Canada and even in Brazil at that moment. I was meant to stay there until the end of April for what was really a long trip like two and a half months. And I started receiving messages from my Canadian friends saying, you have a very narrow window to come back to Canada and Canada’s stopping flights from Brazil.

[00:01:35] The prime minister is asking people to return. You better rethink your projects. because you might end up getting stuck in there. I thought people might just be panicking and didn’t give much attention to it. But I started kind of, you know, being more connected with what was going on, basically. And then I realized like, wow, this is this is really big and this is really an emergency situation.

[00:02:04] So I basically I had to finish what it was doing, postpone, you know, my production. I had to cancel it, basically.

[00:02:13] And it was a big kind of ordeal to get the tickets back to Canada like in three days time. Yeah.

[00:02:22] So airplanes were full. You know, airfares were like very expensive. There was there were like fear that planes would not fly. You know, quitting on flying, there were like rumors that Canada was going to go into a completely shutdown. And for the first time, I was like, well, I started to get into a panic and I bought two tickets.

[00:02:49 Robert] You did?

[Rogério] Yes. One was a Delta Airlines stop in New York. And I was like, I just hope that I won’t have to do it because by then I knew of how New York was going through, you know. And I basically got a second ticket, which was like the literally the last flight from Brazil to Canada. And I was lucky enough to be able to get into that place and come back home, basically.

[00:03:18 Robert] Well, I was going to say you you’re a filmmaker. You’ve you make documentaries and you’ve been in some pretty hairy situations in your work. So I’m imagining if you were panicking, it was probably pretty crazy.

[00:03:29 Rogério] Yes. Because then suddenly I realized what was going on in Brazil was that I was well, I was born in Brazil. So, you know, I have dual citizenship. And it’s like this is part of my culture as well. And I saw all the denial from, Bolsonaro, the Trump of the Tropics. Our president, you know, kind of basically denying, you know, the dangers and denying, you know, the possibility that Brazil, because of its lack of infrastructure and poverty and vulnerability, could actually get into a disaster zone unseen.

Like when I see the pandemic in the north, you know, in China, in Europe and in North America. These are places we’ve a lot more infrastructure than the South. So when you think of the Brazilian population, for instance, I can tell you I was kind of working with families in one of them. They had six children. They always slept in the same room because they only had a tiny little house. You have like grandparents living with their grandchildren. You have extended families. Sometimes they have fifteen people living in the same house. The place where I was, which was a city with a hundred thousand inhabitants, they only had six was what’s call ICU unit. So sick, you know, emergency kind of facilities for hundred thousand people. And then I was like, well, this is this this is really bad because people have no access to doctors. They have no access to basic sanitation. You know, so the level of misinformation as well. Enough afraid that there is a lot of illiteracy really kind of made me feel very worried about what was going on in the country, in the region. And that obviously had an impact on me as well.

[00:05:28 Robert] Now, do you must still have family in Brazil.

[00:05:31 Rogério] I do. My father, my mother, I’m in Canada alone. I came to Canada 12 years ago.

[00:05:36] But my my my parents are Portuguese immigrants into Brazil and they’re there. My dad is 84 and he lived by himself. . But we’ve like self-isolation. He doesn’t believe in that. He’s kind of you know, we realizing right now the dangers of it. But there is a kind of a misinformation culture in Brazil perpetuated by the government, which is really telling people to go out, telling the business to open its border, saying that the economy is more important because people will not survive if the economy doesn’t thrive. And this is like a demy when it’s a completely Bolsonara’s interpretation and lack of empathy, you know, for people. And my father kind of in between, you know, getting worried, but also not much wanting to lose his independency. And, you know, it’s been really hard for us to call and explain and to try to deal with this situation a daily basis. What I can do with the presence everyday over the phone..

[00:06:48 Robert] That’s all you can do. So, you know, when you got back to. How long have you been in isolation? Just a few days. Right.

[Rogério] Day seven.

[Robert] Okay. You’re halfway through your two weeks. You weren’t planning to come back to Montreal at this point when you got back to Montreal. What kind of setting are you in there where you were staying?

[00:07:09 Rogério] Okay. Right. I do have an apartment, but in my apartment I share that with a Canadian friends and she lives in New York and in Montreal. She lives in both cities, basically. And right now, she’s at home with her boyfriend. And it was really difficult for me to think about going there, being like self isolatorion in a small apartment with two other people who were already escaping New York. And it was like this is probably not a good combination because of the, you know, lack of space that we had in the apartment. It’s big enough for us to living there.. So I managed to get in touch with a friend who had an empty apartment and she kindly invited me to be there. And it’s been OK. It’s been pretty good. But I have no access to the Internet. I don’t have my phone. So I needed to. By the time I got here to really kind of reorganize my mind in my space in order to operate in this setting, basically.

[00:08:21 Robert] So you’re just in someone’s empty apartment with your phone and that’s pretty much it?

[00:08:27 Rogério] Yeah. I mean, the apartment has a bed has a couch. You know, it’s not empty in that sense. It’s empty because it’s like there’s nobody living here for quite a while. But yes, what I have it’s my phone. And it’s been quite an interesting experience. It’s experience of being by myself. And, you know, I only turn on the phone twice a day. Like in the mornings and then in the evening because I don’t have Internet. So I have like my data plan, which I could extend. But I decided to do a kind of exercise of kind of self with training and, you know, economizing on emotions and being more with myself in my mind and being there for people in my family at certain times of the day, not isolating myself from the words, but trying to bring a new experience into my life. You know, as I have to be isolated, basically.

[00:09:20 Robert] Well, that that sounds like in a way that sounds like a very smart reaction to the circumstance because you’re looking at it as an exercise now as opposed to a burden.

[00:09:30 Rogério] Oh, yeah, totally. You know, and I’m learning a lot of things. I’m learning that I can eat more of the same without a problem, for instance, because I don’t get food delivery every day. So I get food and I have to cook and I have to you know, it’s kind of like, you know, you you end up repeating things. And we very much use of going out and eating you know, choosing and picking. And then somebody I was in the situation of having to survive with less. Which was great.

Also, the lack of communication, since I cannot basically interact with people physically. How you observe. And I was there myself in silence in the street. The trees, the buildings, you know. And I try at the same time to think about things that I could changing my life. Taking this unique opportunity in a way what I see. It’s like that. We’re going through a very, very horrendous situation. We’re losing our elders in our venerable people. To me, when we think about losing our elders, it really kind of painful because they are the keepers of our collective memories. You know, collective consciousness. They are the keepers of our cosmologies. These are the people who are good parts from this earth. In these circumstances, and I think it’s kind of very upsetting to see the way, you know, our society, basically, it’s losing a very valuable part of its population. So spiritually halting. I think it’s kind of bugging and kind of it really kind of makes me feel sad that, you know, when we see the pandemics, it’s really vulnerable, sick, the poor and the people who probably have less conditional health or a pandemic doesn’t choose, you know, but it’s like that’s that’s what we’ll be seeing a the world. That makes me think they know about my position in this ward and the things that I want to do with my life, the change that I can make, you know, quite slow.

[00:11:42] But I think they’re quite important in terms of maybe they want to travel by planes that much anymore. You know, maybe I want to buy less. So I’ve been taking my time to think about the ways, like as a person, as a citizen of this planet, that I can cure my kind of my my life and the things that I can do in terms of, you know, opening up windows of dialog and being there for people being present and trying to be a useful member of society. So this is going on, you know, in my mind right now as a as I’m isolated. And they must see that in spite of all the suffering that I’ve seen the word. This is like this is a fantastic time for me. And I hope for other people to really think, you know, inwards and try to realize that it’s like so many things that we can change.

[00:12:35] And this is the first time that, like I said, I think since the industrial revolution, this is the first time that the whole world pause. You know, this is like this is major. We should try to look at this as a kind of a symbol, you know, to help change the patterns in which we have been through not being aware of. So that’s that’s my main frame right now.

[00:13:01 Robert] Well, you know, that’s very inspiring because I think we forget how busy we are in the modern age. We don’t stop and think we don’t have time leaders, you know, to to meditate, think about these things because we’re just so busy and we’re so connected. We have the Internet, we have email, we have social media, we have Netflix. We’re just going, going, going. And what you’re saying is that this is giving you an opportunity to reflect about it.

But I’m curious, as a filmmaker, obviously, you must also be there must be ideas germinating about film project that has some of those underpinnings. I mean, your work has all the I’m just thinking now about River Silence where, you know, you’ve done this amazing a beautiful documentary about, you know, the issues with hydroelectric dams in the Amazon. And, you know, you’re always, you know, taking us into the point of view of the people who are really stuck with these creations that that have gone ahead. So I’m imagining, though, you’re this must be germinating some ideas for a film for you.

[00:13:58 Rogério] It does. In fact, like I work with human rights and I work with social issues. But I’m also a poet. I’m also a writer. So as a me into isolation, I’m actually working. Right now, we have a grant from the Arts Council, Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec. And one of the projects that I hope to do besides the shooting of part of my film was to write the script. So what I’ve been doing right now and this is really, really interesting that you’re pointing out, is that in the seven days that I’ve been here, I’ve been really digging into my original project and writing the original script that I have to deliver.

And the entire film is changing. You know, my entire concept of, you know what I want to say. It’s changing because of this. Right. So instead of being more of an investigative mind right now, I ended up writing a script that it’s poetry and expiratory about people and the cities where they leave. And I’ve been reading. Margining those spaces, and it’s quite interesting because I just had a book in my hands, which is by Italo Calvino the Italian writer – Invisible Cities, where he reinvents city as Marco Polo traveling and describing to the emperor that I don’t remember his name like his empire and the cities that he visited and people in all of that. And then suddenly this has been like a sea and they’ve been transforming, you know, a hill. They have a kind of a harsh look into reality, into a more poetic kind of look into the lives of people in the Amazon. I think it is the necessity of bringing a little a little bit of dream and beauty into the harsh reality. And this is really influencing the way I’m writing it to the point that it’s like I do documentaries and I’m almost writing a fiction script, you know.

[00:16:06] So it is it is causing a huge impact on me and on my creative process.

[00:16:10 Robert]. I’m sort of not that surprised, though, because your films have a very poetic look and feel and and pace to them. So, yeah, if you’re bringing that into the script now, they find that really interesting and you can’t wait to see what’s going to come out of that.

[00:16:25 Rogério ] Thank you so much. But you’re right. I mean, I bring I tried to kind of cuts like, well, I use what we call magic realism. Right. Which is kind of a space within reality that we can breathe and then we can dream. So I created those poetic image, you know, to counterbalance reality.

[00:16:45] But in the documentary, something you have to be more careful when you’re doing it, of course, because you don’t want to designate like reality from, you know, your own perspective as a filmmaker.

[00:16:55] That’s a huge issue for me. And. When I make a film, because I could exaggerate on that. And, you know, it’s a process of finding the right equilibrium between that. But right now, especially because I’m writing, I’m really kind of overtakes over. You know, that’s rule lens. Oh, I’m mostly interested to find out what’s going to be at the end. You know, kind of I’m not sure right now. And I just hope that the Arts Council would be happy with the kind of, you know, influences that I’m having to produce something that it’s not quite what I propose.

[00:17:31 Robert ] I think that a process it sounds fantastic to me.
And I think that, you know, there’s going to be a lot of shifting of perspectives and ideas and projects as we go through this and continue to go through this and figure out what the playing field of our new world is going to be when we come back. And I’m I’m hoping that it will take some of the good and some of the positive things, the kind of things you’re talking about into our world when we come back into whatever new new normal is going to be.

[00:18:00 Rogério] Yeah, I agree with you. And I hope that we can go beyond that movement. Right, because the opposite can also happen.

We can bring the best out of ourselves in situations like that. But I also know we are humans. We can also bring the worth of ourselves into that type of situation as well. I mean, we’ve seen that with Trump. We’ve seen that we have both tomorrow, you know, like us world leaders or politicians. And that also kind of somehow permeates through our lives, in our communities, in our society. So I think we have to be on guard. We have to be aware of this and really shift our perspective. But also, you know, go inwards, go into our inner self and, you know, kind of take the moment to analyze who we truly are. And, you know, what is what is it what are the chances that we have to maybe do some important shifts? You know, I think that’s that’s that’s the biggest lesson, you know, that I can learn from it in spite of all the real necessities. You know, you need to work on Monday. You need to to keep on living. You know, life is not going to change, basically, you know, like the planet in this structure, the economic structure and capitalism and all of that is still going to be around, you know. But there are things that we can do to soften that and basically rediscover ourselves. Mean, that’s my biggest hope.

[00:19:25 Robert] You know, Rogério, so lovely to speak with you. And I’m so excited to hear to see what comes out of your work. What’s the first thing you’re going to do when you are done your 14 days?

[00:19:40 Rogério] I’m going to go for a walk, because this is the thing that I really miss.

I love nature and I love observing nature and the like. Stuck in an apartment, not being able to go for a walk. It’s something that I still struggle with. I have I’ve accepted it. But this is going to be the first thing I’m going to open the door and it’s going to be this incredible feeling of freedom, you know, and virgin aeration as I was. The door and I will be able to breathe like fresh air and feel the cold. You know what? That’s gonna be great.

[00:20:18 Robert] Fantastic. All the best to your family. I hope everything’s okay with your parents.

[00:20:23 Rogério] Thank you so much. All the best..

[00:20:26 Robert] Are you going to be able to pick up your film where you left off. How hard is it gonna be for you to go back and and and finish what you started?

[00:20:34 Rogério] Well, I have to kind of deal with those issues. But you know what? I think we have to be creative.

You know, I’m gonna try to work. We’ve got a perfectly. Yeah.

You know, I think we have to change, you know, perspective. We have to change things. Art is about, you know, not only manufacturing things, but those who, you know, remote in. You know, re-creating concepts and ideas. And this is what I’ve been thinking right now. It’s like I could go back into my original project and I could finish it.

But it’s like I have the chance of doing something here that is that has shifted in. It’s different and it’s more simple in a way, but it’s more effective for what I’m feeling in the whole my creative process going on right now. So I might end up with, you know, working with much of it that I hard and I’ll be very happy with that.

[ Robert] Rogério Soares in Montreal.

For links to COVID-19 resources, links to some of Rogério’s films, as well as transcripts of this podcast, please visit the Web site at www.podcasthouse.ca/yellowjack.

And if you or someone you know is in self-isolation and you’re happy to share that story, get in touch with me on the website. There’s a form that you can fill out and I’ll get back to you as quickly as I can.

I’m Robert Ouimet in Vancouver. Thanks for listening.

Filed Under: Transcript Tagged With: film, Montreal

Yellow Jack: Pause Everything

April 1, 2020 by Robert Leave a Comment

If we could just somehow pause all rent, all mortgages and pause all interest for this time period, I think that could help everyone. Because then those small businesses won’t be paying for a building that they can’t run a business out of.

Grant baldwin
Yellow flag on a blue background with text: Yellow Jack Podcast Episode 6 Grant Baldwin

Yellow Jack Podcast, Episode #6

(Ouimet Presents Episode #17)
Grant Baldwin and his wife Jenny Rustemeyer were in Costa Rica on holiday with their two children when the COVID-19 pandemic broke out.

They are both film makers at Peg Leg Films in Vancouver. So when they got back home safely, and into their two weeks of self-isolation, they decided to put together a family film project.

https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/media.blubrry.com/ouimetpresents/content.blubrry.com/ouimetpresents/yellow-jack-grant-baldwin_1.mp3

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Email | RSS

Grant Baldwin, Jenny Rustemeyer and their children in Costa Rica

2 Meters

2 Meters: Behind the Scenes


ISBN: 978-1-926758-28-2

Show Notes:
Stop Motion Can be Exhausting When You’re Six
Still Able to Finish Latest Film on North Shore Rescue
Just Pause all Rents, Mortgages and Interest
Value of this Job?
People Coming Together and Checking In
New Appreciation for Home Schoolers
First Thing I’m Going To do

Transcripts:
Read the full transcript
Download the full transcript (PDF)

Links:
Grant Baldwin on Facebook
The Mountain Life
Just Eat It. A Food Waste Story
North Shore Rescue

COVID-19 Resources:
COVID-19 Prevention and Risk (Government of Canada)
Outbreak Updates (Government of Canada)
Government of Canada COVID-19 information portal
BC Government COVID-19 Symptom Self-Assessment Tool
John Hopkins University COVID-19 Interactive Map

Et cetera
Yellow Quarantine Flag (Wikipedia)
Be a guest on the Yellow Jack podcast

All episodes in this series

  • April 5, 2020 Yellow Jack: The Whole World Stops
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Filed Under: Ouimet Presents, Podcast, Yellow Jack Tagged With: Costa Rica, Peg Leg Films, Stop Motion Animation, Vancouver

Transcript: Yellow Jack Ep. 6

April 1, 2020 by Robert Leave a Comment

This is a transcript of the podcast Yellow Jack Ep. 6

Host: Robert Ouimet
Guest: Grant Baldwin

Hi, I’m Robert Ouimet. this is the Yellow Jack podcast.

[00:00:09] This podcast is about everyday Canadians who have found themselves in self-isolation. They are the quiet heroes doing their bit to flatten the curve of controlling the spread of COVID-19. A lot of the people I’ve been talking with are in self-isolation because they flew back to Canada from a vacation or a job somewhere. Some are in self-isolation because there’s a risk they were in contact with someone who may have had COVID-19 and are isolating as a way to avoid spreading the virus.

I mentioned the podcast on Facebook and the next day my friend Teri Snelgrove left me this voicemail message

[CLIP: Teri Snelgrove on Voice Mail:]

Hi it’s Teri How are you guys doing? Holy cannoli weird.

[00:00:50] Anyway, I was I was looking at Facebook today and you know who I thought would be a guest. Filmaker Grant Baldwin and his partner Jenny Rustemeyer and their 2 kids just came back from Costa Rica. They are seven days into their isolation.

And the other day they made a stop motion animated short called 2 meters, which was really well done. And then Grant made a fantastic “making of” mini-doc. Hilarious.

Ok,, I just wanted to put that bee in your bonnet, because I think they would be perfect guests for you show. Okay. They say, well,

[Voice over: Robert] Terry, thanks for that bee in the bonnet And I was able to connect with Grant and his home studio in Vancouver.

[00:01:44 Grant] We’d started to watch some of the Nick Park work, which is famous for Wallace and Grommet and now the spin off Shaun the Sheep. And and I was trying to explain to my son, you know, that’s all done. You know, one picture at a time. And so he was really interested in that. And so I’m like, well, we can we can we have the stuff here and we can do that. So we decided to make a stop motion. So, you know, everyone pitched in like Jen made the little set. And then we just took the Play-Doh that we had and made characters. And, you know, my son just made his guy and I had no input on what he was making, let him come up with his own guy. And I made a character for my guy and we took turns animating and doing the photos. And it was a great experience. I mean, he did get pretty exhausted. He couldn’t believe how long it took to move somebody, you know, a couple inches. But it was it was a good experience. I think he started to understand a little bit more about what I do from working with with me on that. And yeah, feedback’s been really good. I mean, we didn’t really have a script or anything. We just sort of started moving characters. And it’s really short. It’s a lot.

[00:02:56] It’s a lovely little piece. I love it. I thought it was both fun and poignant and has a really important message in it. It’s just a really nice little piece of well done.

[00:03:07] We made a silly behind the scenes documentary about the making of it as if it was some massive production. It’s a bit of a parody.

[Robert] So now so with you and your wife, Jenny Rustemeyer, you have a film company and you’re obviously, you know, working all the time. Suddenly now you’re in a world where you can’t go outside and even after your isolation ends, you’re gonna be really restricted in what you can do. So how does that sort of fit at the moment for you? How are you guys feeling about that?

[00:03:39] Well, if this happened a year ago, it would have been devastating. But where we are right now, we’re doing a five part television series on Search and Rescue Northshore, the volunteer search and rescue team here. And we were going on their calls, every single one of their calls for a one year. And but we’re in and post we’re finishing up the post-production on that show. So we’re actually able to work from home, which is the timing where we’re really, really lucky. It could have been really, really challenging for us if we had to stop shooting. But we’re just add in that lucky position that we can work from home. And I just think about how many people are in that position where they just have no income coming in.

We talk about it every night. The way that we’re approaching kind of helping people out is, you know, Trudeau wants to give people some a bit of money. But I really see that the biggest issue is, is small businesses, because they’re the ones that are going to go bankrupt. You know, like if we could just somehow pause all rent, all mortgages and pause all interest for this time period, I think that could help everyone, because then those small businesses won’t be paying for a building that they can’t run a business. So. And that’s that’s my biggest worry is that author, all those medium and small businesses are going to be completely floored by this. And and and that’s a lot of employment.

[00:05:16] Yeah. I mean it it is because it’s so across the board. You know, I mean, everybody’s affected. Every industry is affected. Anybody who’s paying rent on an office is still paying rent on an office and there’s no business, You don’t know if you guys work out of your house. I work out of my house. So if I don’t if I’m not working, I don’t have the office overhead to maintain it. Right.

[00:05:36] Yeah. We’re we’re in that same position. You know, we did have an office when we’re in production, but now we’re in post we don’t need it. So we shut that down. But yeah, exactly. It’s it’s, um. If we could just pause everything. I mean we we’re actually landlords as well. We have rental property and I have no problem holding the rent as long as they can pause the interest on our mortgage. I mean I no problem. That just so. I just wish we could all agree on that.

[00:06:06] I think that, you know, I I guess what I’m seeing is that because things are changing so rapidly, you know, this is where we are today. You know, I don’t know where we’re going to be a week from now in terms of those economic moves and the things that are in place now that may or may not really work. It seems inevitable that the sort of shift in the economy is going to be profound enough that we’re gonna have to find some new ways of doing a lot of things.

[00:06:33] Mm hmm. Mm hmm. You know, the other thing I kind of was battling with since this started was that how how useless my job is to society. And I’ve been feeling this way for a week about, you know, I you know, I start really valuing truck drivers, value service people, and especially that I’ve always really valued the food production business. But man like, who cares? Documentary filmmaker. But then someone posted something today like, well, everybody’s stuck inside. They’re watching art and things like this podcast are there. This is where they have time to do all this now. And so we’re helping people get through this as well. So maybe feel a little bit better.

[00:07:21 Robert] It should make you feel better because I think that, you know, it’s super important, I think in any of these situations that we have people who can tell the stories of what’s going on and who can see the stories of what’s going on. Maybe with a different eye, you know, that’s all we need, all of that. We still need all of those things. And they’re all really still important.

[00:07:39 Grant] Yeah, there’s I mean, this made some some good side effects from this in terms of people have been reaching out to each other more to check on people more. And if we had if I had a friend come visit and he he stayed out in the yard and had a beer at city rain and, you know, through the window or whatever. It’s been nice. And then we had we played a game, a board game last night online with a bunch of friends in the states and you know, some of them in New York and pretty freaked out. And I think everyone really needed that that sort of that connection. And it’s something we probably wouldn’t have done if if we weren’t forced into this. So it was nice to to have that moment.

[00:08:20 Robert] Yeah, I live I live in North Van. I live not far from the Capilano sorry, the Cleveland down. So I walk up there every day pretty much. And, you know, this neighborhood is, you know, a lot of working couples or working professionals. You walk up and down, you don’t see anybody outside. You know, if it isn’t three o’clock when the kids are coming up from school, you don’t see anybody on the street. And now, you know, as I walk up this, it’s about a mile from where I live. You know, I’m seeing families sitting out on the steps, you know, playing badminton or whatever there is they’re doing. They’re actually altogether they’re, you know, talking. They’re doing stuff together. And I’m seeing people walking with their dogs and stuff. So there is a really interesting community side effect that I hope, you know, we can hang on to some of that when things go back to whatever normal is going to be.

[00:09:06 Grant] Yeah, I do like that, too. You know, at seven o’clock we go outside a bank heights bank. We we actually bring out the snare drum. Oh, nice. And we get pretty loud. And that’s really neat, too. And those are some things I’m going to miss from this. But, you know, I I would be really interesting to see what what comes out of this in the end, what we take away and what things we hold on to.

[00:09:34 Robert] So so you got super organized in order to deal with your self-isolation for you and your family. And that’s a pretty big chore. So congrats for doing that. What’s been the biggest surprise or what’s been the biggest challenge so far?

[00:09:49 Grant] Well, it’s the hardest part. It’s the kids. Both of us trying to get work done. Like, you know, Jen finding time to catch up on anything. So we’ve just basically accepted that we’re probably delivering our project late at this point. We’re just we’re running at. Half efficiency right now. And also I one of the biggest takeaways is those people that home-school new appreciation for for the amount of energy that takes, right. Well, you know, you could check in with me in three weeks and see how we’re doing. I mean, we feel like we’re organized now and it’s going well. But who knows? It might start falling apart.

[00:10:31 Robert] Right. Well, I do think that the thing I’ve noticed, I’m finding that anything I’m I’m doing in the community is going to take twice as long as it did before, simply because either the staff are able to only deal with so many people. Whatever the reason is and the reasons are different in different places, but everything is taking a lot longer. So I’m sort of kind of putting myself in that holiday mode where it’s like, okay, I’m just going out now. I’m going to go to the grocery store and I may take me two hours and it doesn’t matter because I can’t make it go any faster.

[00:11:01 Grant] Yeah. I’m really curious about the world out there. Going to see it again. We were basically can go next sets or are we a week away. Next Saturday we can go out and I can go get groceries and things like that. And I’m curious to see what what’s open out there and what’s closed. And but I am looking forward to going for a bike ride with the kids for sure. But it’s all a bit surreal and it’s so unknown where we’re going. And so I’m really just trying to go with the flow as much as we can.

[00:11:33] Grant Baldwin He, along with his partner, Jenny Rustemeyer, are in self-isolation with their budding filmmaker children who are 2 and 6 years old.

[00:11:48] If you visit the Web site, you’ll be able to see the animated short “2 meters” along with the documentary “Making of” film. There are some other links there as well. There’s a way for you to contact me if you’d like to be a guest on the podcast. The website is www.podcasthouse.ca/yellowjack.

That’s it for this episode. Stay safe then stay apart. I guess. I’m Robert Ouimet in Vancouver. Thanks for listening.

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