I have heard it said several times that you couldn't get to Telluride by mistake. How true. I had wanted to go to Telluride several years before I actually made it. Now I can't seem to help myself. I fell the tug and I have to go.

I live in Santa Rosa, CA now. In order to get to Telluride, I drove down to San Francisco last night. The Super Shuttle came to pick me up a 5:00 AM. The one saving grace was that I got to fly to Denver on Big Chair Air. I will now change planes to a 19-seat turbo prop in order to get to Telluride. Is it worth it? I think so. All great journeys should start with a trial.

My trial this time was born of my own stupidity. I had dropped off my laundry do be done on Saturday. I was working and forgot to pick it up until late in the day. Of course the laundry was closed. Since I am living in a motel while I cook for affordable housing in Santa Rosa, I don't have many cloths. Well, I needed new socks and underwear anyway.

I am now typing this from seat 5F on a United 767, the miracle of modern technology. Of course my Retro-Grouch Father would say that I could just have well written this from seat 5F using a pen and paper. But what fun is that?

Later that day.

Well the trials and tribulations continued. United Express canceled our flight to Telluride and they re-routed us through Cortez, Colorado. I met up with two of our fellow Mountainfilm people and we shared a van with 10 people for an hour and a half to Telluride.

The weather is wonderful here. They say it hit 80 today.

I dumped my bags at the house where I will stay and went to the office.

I was immediately sent to get a case of beer. Thus sets the tone for the festival. There was a bottle of Jack Daniels floating around the office as well.

I took my hostess to dinner at a lovely restaurant and all is well with the world. Tomorrow I will scope out my booth to find out what I need to do in order to get it ready for the festival. Bye for now.

Ian

We had a meeting at 9:00 AM for all the production people. I almost didn't make it because of sleeping in a wonderful place and getting over the altitude. This was a lot easier when I lived in Denver.

After the meeting I went to the Nugget theatre where I work and took out the 16mm Hortson projector. It was where we put the Digital Projection video projector. I set up the video table. I am now waiting the arrival of the video projectors tomorrow.

I wandered around town and took some photos, which I thought I would share with you.

To look at the pictures go to; http://www.rialtocinemas.com/mountainfilm2.htm

Enjoy,

Ian

Also, don't you mean a "Mr. John Daniels"? ("When you've known him as long as I have...HA.")

We don't actualy work for Vespucci Pictures, we just steal their equipment.

Well, this has been an interesting morning. We had our Tech breakfast and meeting this morning.

They did the full technical briefing. We are showing slides, 16mm, 35mm, Beta SP with our Digital Projection SX video projectors, there will be a little VHS, and we are doing 35mm silent-speed at 18 frames per second with a live orchestra. Yes, folks it's the Alloy Orchestra.

We had been trying to get our special guest Babu Chiri Sherpa to Telluride. However this year he shattered the time to summit record for Everest. He did it from Base Camp to the summit in 15 hours 56 minutes! The old time was 27 hours or so. So Rick, or festival director, was trying to get a helicopter to pick him up at base camp so he could come to Telluride. We learned this morning that the Prime Minister of Nepal wouldn't let him go because he wants him in a parade in his honor on Monday. So Rick thought we could get a satellite uplink with him. Of course there is no satellite truck in Base Camp or Telluride. I mentioned that there was a group collecting garbage on Everest and they were sending satellite video images through the Internet each day.

So we called the president of MountainZone and he told us that there was a Quokka team covering the Everest action from Base Camp. They were currently sleeping but that he would try to get in contact with them to set up an interview with Babu Chiri Sherpa. They would get an interview with the man and download it to their server in California. He then told me that he could burn a CD-ROM or a Beta Tape and ship it to us. We don't have a fast Internet connection in Telluride so that would be best. I will let you know how it turns out. If it comes on CD-ROM then I will present it from my laptop through the Digital Projection 8 SX video projector.

I spent the rest of the day with the tech from Digital Projection unloading video projectors and putting them in place. There will be a lot of set-up tomorrow.

Telluride is famous for it's characters. They have some interesting pets. Here a couple of photos of the weird ones.

This is the local sports shop owner's parrot. It hangs out on a bench on the sidewalk and loves to have you spray with water

This was an act that walked up and down the street all day. Look closely and you will see that it is a mouse, riding on a cat, riding on a dog.

To see these photos click on http://www.rialtocinemas.com/mountainfilm3.htm
Brad doesn't want me to clog up the thread with pictures.

Untill tomorrow,

Ian

Here are the first set of pictures which were here before Ian freaked and removed them:

Today was our last day to get ready. We will not be showing any shows until 5:00 PM on Friday. In most venues there are afternoon seminars so we can't be fooling around with the equipment.

I spent the day cruising around for the proper cables. I finally got everything wired together about the time Karl (our video tech) was ready to set the channels in our projector. We set up four channels in the video projector. There is a channel for 4x3 Beta, there is one for 16x9 Beta, there is one for 4x3 VHS and finally there is a channel for my computer.

Last year I had a professional videographer hanging out in our booth. So we used his camera to take images from outside and play them live on the screen. We called this Video Intermission Music. It was quite successful and the audience loved it. Well that guy has moved on and I don't have a video camera.

This year what I have put together is my computer with a cool screensaver. One of our programs is called Colorado Then and Now. William Henry Jackson and John Fielder are two photographers 130 years apart taking the same photographs. I bought the screensaver and will play it between films. I am looking for more screensavers like this one so I can have a little variety. The photographs look gorgeous on the screen. It ties in with one of the programs in the festival.

The schedule was posted today. There are some interesting sounding programs. I will try to give you a description of a few that strike me right off the bat. Of course, I will not know the best ones until I discover them myself throughout the weekend.

Robert Fulton's Pilot Notes: Journals of a Solitary Aviator. This fellow flew all over South America in a little plane taking photos of places that have never been photographed before.

True Whispers. Will tell the tale of the Navaho code talkers of WWII. We will have some of them here in person.

Jonathan Shackleton will be here to talk about his uncle Sir Ernest Shackleton's epic adventure of being stranded in Antarctica.

John Rubin is a NASA Astronaut who will be here to present some of his images taken while he was walking in space.

And we have the ever-popular ADRENALINE program where we get extreme skiers, races in the mountains and the ever-popular BASE Jumping. BASE stands for Bridge, Arial, Skyscraper and Earth. The Jumping part usually involves a parachute, but not always.

Tomorrow will involve some fine tuning and then, on with the show.

Sorry, no photos today.

I did run into an interesting projector when I went to the Telluride Museum for the reception this evening.

Goodnight.