Folklife, Day 1; A Commentary

Today, we arrived at the 35th Annual Northwest Folklife Festival at around noon. It was still warm and sunny at that point. Gene parked in a handicapped spot (legally) in a church parking lot. Jack, Gene, and I walked around Folklife, familiarized ourselves with the surroundings, and procured three VIP buttons (they get you into the hospitality tent... which had no food, but lots of sodas and a Sobe Adrenaline Energy Drink or 5.

We then went back to Gene's car to grab film equipment, and the Priest noticed us and made Gene move the car... oops! So then we went and did a few interviews... none of us had remembered to bring headphones, so Jack unwittingly plugged the mic into the headphone jack.... OOPS. Luckily for me, the built in mic picked up most of the interviews, even if it picked up just about as much background noise as well... we can clean up the audio in Final Cut Pro.

Then we met up with Lucie, and she did an interview with an artist, and this time Jack had headphones, and by this time had realized his mistake... so that interview came out with wonderful sound quality!

We then went over to the KOMO 4 Headquarters, right across the street from Folklife. We were shown into a conference room right behind the front desk, which has security guards posted at all times, through a door that requires their pass to open. We get this room to ourselves for the entire weekend, so we don't have to haul the computers around. As we were heading towards the building, it started raining.

As soon as the rain let up, Jack and I headed back out to redo some of the film that we couldn't salvage from before (and Gene went home). Before we did that, however, I interviewed Irena, a face painter. After I wrapped that up, she offered to paint my face (Jack filmed it) for free. It ended up looking a little more detailed than the camera could capture, but here is the photo, taken on the cell phone and e-mailed to my flickr account:



So the last couple interviews I do, and that includes the intro, which I had to redo, have me with a painted face.

We then walked around and found a few other interesting things, one of which is a band made up of 14, 15, and 16-year-old members, called The Neons, who were incredibly good for their age. Their website can be found here. Then we proceeded to walk back towards the KOMO headquarters and came across what looked like a Pakistani wedding dance, Artis the Spoonman with a guitarist/singer whose last name is Paige, according to Jack, and a R&B dance group in their early teens. Only at Folklife would you be able to find such a large variety of music in one 10 minute walk.