Attendance at the Eastern Regional Meeting all day  Saturday and Saturday Evening will be OPEN TO EVERYONE! (Subject, of course, to the capacity limitations of the auditorium!)




There will be no Registration Fee, no meals, and no hotel.

The Saturday Program will begin at 10:00 am (coffee will be served at 9:30) and close at 10:00 pm. There will be coffee breaks and adequate lunch and supper breaks  to allow everyone time to get something to eat in one of the many modestly priced restaurants within easy walking distance of the auditorium.

The Program will include the SCCA AGM, several Guest Speakers, plus a screening of the winning films and videos from the Annual SCCA Competition and the Presentation of Video Awards and Honours.
The Annual General Meeting will be held in the morning, after the Opening and first speaker, just before lunch. All members of the SCCA are expected to attend the AGM, and nonmembers are invited to attend as nonvoting observers, but for those who choose not to sit-in, there will be an alternative tour of the Hamilton Spectator plant.

Immediately after the meeting and tour there'll be a lunch break. There are several fast food outlets and a few family restaurants within a couple of blocks from the auditorium.

The meeting will reconvene at 1:30 p.m. with a program of Speakers and Videos.

Speakers

Don Svob of Wellandport is well known for his simple, practical, and affordable solutions to many of our problems as moviemakers, and will demonstrate accessory video equipment you can easily make yourself.

Jim Unsworth of Hamilton will show us excerpts of a video  Birds of Prey, their Care and Training which he produced at, for, and with African Lion Safari, recount some of the challenges, failures, and triumphs associated with the production, and describe a current effort to get Point-Of-View shots from the hawks in flight, using a small "spy camera" and transmitter.

Walter Strickland of Montreal (actually Dorval), who still works in Super8, will explain how he produces his superb travelogues, and illustrate his talk with some of his work. Walter's efforts have earned him eleven awards in the SCCA, and eighteen in the CIAFF, and while he works exclusively in film, most of the lessons he has learned over the past two decades can be directly applied to video to greatly improve the holiday, travel, and documentary videos which many of us make.

Jon Soyka of Hamilton has held various positions, from film stripper to retail sales, in Jamaica, Vancouver, Europe and Hamilton. In the U.K. Jon was JVC UK Marketing Manager, and later the largest distributor of audiophile recordings in Europe, where he produced two binaural recordings for his own record label. Since 1980, Jon has run his own post-production company, Adcan Video Services, in Hamilton. Jon will speak about audio-for-video and video editing.
 

Special Guest Speaker
 

David Mackay, film producer, is a pioneer of many extraordinary cinema and image formats including widescreen multi-image films for Expo '67and Expo ' 86, IMAX, 70mm 3D, mirror labyrinths, 3-D nine screen AVs, and 3-D multi-image "Panels-in-Space".

From 1952 to 1962 David was Graphic Art Director at CBC-TV . He formed TDF Film Productions in 1962 and left in 1971 to start David Mackay Limited.

David's CREDITS include A Place to Stand for the Ontario Pavilion at Expo' 67 in Montreal, Ontari-OH! for the Ontario Pavilion at Expo'86 in Vancouver, three IMAX films: Catch the Sun (the 2nd film shown at Ontario Place's Cineshere); Summertide (with the first IMAX under-water shots, for Ontario Place); and Silent Sky (the glider film for Ontario Place, the Smithonian, and many other theatres. He also produced Where the North Begins, shot in Techniscope and printed to 70mm for Ontario Place, a 3-D Reebok product-launch on 9 screens, and the Mirror-Maze for Ontario Place.

AWARDS earned by his productions include an Academy Award, Etrogs, Clios, a great many Art Directors awards when at the CBC, and numerous Tourism awards for films and commercials.

David has a number of unusual and previously unheard stories and will edit short sequences from a number of productions to accompany the unusual behind-the-scenes anecdotes.
 

Evening Program

We will break at 5:00 o'clock for supper and the evening program will begin at 7:30 p.m., (coffee at 7:00) and include the Presentation of SCCA Honours, Presentation of SCCA Annual Contest Awards, and the Screening of the Winning Entries. We will adjourn at 10:00 p.m. to allow time for those who must make a long drive home that night, but we hope to see them again in the morning.
 

Bus Tour
Sunday, October 25

The Photographic Historical Society of Canada  has held Photographica Fairs every year since 1976. Their Spring Fair was the first in Canada, and their Spring and Fall Fairs are the largest in the country. They can have up to 200 tables, though recent Fairs have averaged about 140 tables. Each one-day Fair is attended by about 1,400 people, many of whom pay $7.00 admission ($2.00 Off coupons are widely distributed) - your admission is included in the fee for the bus tour.

We'll have to leave promptly at 11:00 a.m. to reach our next destination, the Music Building at the Canadian National Exhibition Grounds, for a tour of  Immersion Studios , founded by our hosts, visionary international artist Stacey Spiegel and computer genius Dr. Rodney Hoinkes. Please look in on their web site as there's far too much to even attempt to describe here.

Our next call will be the  Canadian Broadcasting Centre . Half the group will tour the CBC while the other half enjoys lunch, and then the groups will switch. Tours are simply not conducted on weekends, but we've been able to persuade a tour guide to work on Sunday, and management to permit it (because you're special and we're persistent). The $3.00 tour fee is included in the cost of the bus tour: your lunch is not!

One of the highlights of the 1985 SCCA Convention in Hamilton was the appearance of Foley Artist Terry Burke, who, among other things, won two Genie Awards in 1980 for his film Track Star demonstrating the work of a Foley Artist. His costar in that film, Andy Malcolm, wowed us at the 1993 SCCA Convention, also in Hamilton. Now we're going to visit the studio where both of these sound men "perform". Our host at the Foley Theatre of Deluxe Studios (formerly Film House Sound Studio) will be Japanese born Goro Koyama, who came to Canada for film study in 1991. After graduating from Confederation College Film Production in Thunder Bay in '94, Goro started training with Andy Malcolm. Goro's list of credits is too long to reproduce here, but they include Fishtail Soup for the National Film Board, The Santa Clause and Mystery Alaska for Walt Disney, Star Gate and Cutthroat Island for MGM, Bride of Chucky for Universal, Johnny Mnemonic for Alliance, and six IMAX films, including Across the Sea of Time. Oh! I almost missed his 1997 Genie Award for Best Sound Editing for his work in The Sweet Hereafter for Alliance.

Our final stop will be Gajdecki Visual Effects, who boasts of the country's top effects supervisors, model builders and digital artists, and of delivering the industry's most diversified and professional range of visual effects. With a studio in Toronto and another in Vancouver, and experience working on location in the U.S., Europe, Asia and the Arctic, GVFX is able to take on all manner of visual effects. Their credits include Stargate SG-1 and Poltergeist: The Legacy, a Gemini Award nomination for Gridlock and three for The Outer Limits, an Emmy Award nomination for Friday the 13^th, and Gemini Awards for TekWar and The Arrow, The Toronto studio is the only Canadian effects facility with an in-house model shop, and the list of techniques and equipment, from prop construction, green screen, motion control cameras, hero miniatures, pyrotechnics, digital animation, compositing, and on, and on, and on, is too diverse to list completely here. Some will remember our host, Rick Gajdecki, from the '97 SCCA Convention in Kitchener. The realization of how much this man could show us in his home environment was the inspiration for the whole concept of this bus tour to Toronto's production studios.

By 4:00 o'clock we should be headed home, with a slight detour to return to our first stop. People who live in Toronto won't need to come to Hamilton to join the bus tour: they can meet us at 10:00 a.m. in the parking lot of the Queensway Lions Club Community Centre, southwest of Kipling Avenue and the Queensway in the west end of Toronto. Those people coming from other locales (such as Ottawa and the Quinte region) far enough east of Toronto to require spending Friday and Saturday night in Hamilton, should join us at the Spectator parking lot on Sunday morning, follow the bus in their own cars to the Queensway Lions Club, and join the tour there.(We won't be able to find them among the 1,400 people, but ours will probably be the only tour bus!) By dropping the Torontonians at the Queensway Lions Club we'll save them an hour's drive to Hamilton in the morning and two hours getting home. Those spending Saturday night in Hamilton and going home Sunday evening will also be spared the one-hour bus trip and a one-hour car trip returning to Toronto, so they can start home from Kipling Avenue shortly after 4:00 p.m. instead of 6:00 p.m.

To encourage the largest attendance possible on Saturday there will be no Registration and no Registration Fee. HOWEVER, the bus tour will require payment of a $20 ($13.50 U.S.) Bus Tour Registration Fee. That will cover the charter of the bus and the entrance fees to the Photographica Fair and the CBC tour, but no food. We need a minimum of 32 people to make the tour feasible at that price. Therefore, we are requiring advance registrations, with prepayment, for the bus tour.

If we don't have 32 prepaid registrations by October 16, we'll have to cancel the tour and return the prepayments. On October 16 we'll confirm with the bus company and once we've passed that point-of-no-return, we'll accept additional bus reservations up to the capacity of the 48-passenger bus, and up to the moment of departure Sunday morning, on a FIRST COME, FIRST SERVED basis.

If you want to see it happen, reserve your seat immediately.