Not So Much

On May 14th my Media Studies class and I took a trip to Toronto to visit the much anticipated, and quite honestly the only reason some people took the course (me not included. I want to become media literate!), Much Music! If you were living under a mountain during your pre-teen/young teen years then Much Music is a station that is mainly based around celebrities, music and drama shows. One of their highest rated shows is Much On Demand, a somewhat interactive show with a young audience, young hosts and a variety of activities and interviews. We were part of the audience on that show. It looked exciting from the viewers standpoint, but from our point of view it was not what it was cracked up to be.


Like on most shows, we were told to applaud, when to be quiet, when to look excited etc. We made it look exciting. What did we make look exciting? A guy getting his hair cut. Some host on the show decided to get his hair cut live on TV. Woo. We sat there extremely bored and chatting amongst ourselves, only reacting when the “Pep Guy” told us to cheer. It went on like that for an hour. Throw that in with blazing hot lights and live cameras pointing at you exposing you to the world, it made out to be not what many of us were expecting. If you want to know what happens during the commercials, the seemingly nice Leah Miller orders people around while stuffing her botox-injected face with thinnsations. But that’s just what I observed. Devon Soltendieck was nice and talked to the audience while we were there, like human beings. Too bad he’s not a regular host and usually just does the MuchNews segment. Tim Deegan, aka Hair Cut Dude who by the way only got a trim and nothing exciting like a comb over, was also nice and talked to us, even remembering some people who had been there over a year ago. So all in all, our one-hour excursion with Pep Guy, Botox Lady, Flamboyantly Down-To-Earth Guy and Hair Cut Dude is not up there on my favourite moments in life. But what can you do.


Luckily, there was another part of the trip. In this part we visited the Toronto Film Board. Here they make films, more specifically flash and stop frame animation films. After watching some examples of some stop frame animation, some funny some disturbing, we were able to make our own. It ended up being more amusing then anticipated with short movies of walking into poles, sword fighting and being eaten by giant heads. However, we also realized how gruelling the process is. If making the characters and props weren’t hard enough, we then had to make small changes to positions and shoot frames one by one. A 30 second film took us about 2-3 hours to makes. It was fun, but I find it hard to believe people like Tim Burton can focus and spend so much time, money and effort on one film. For anyone out there who does stop frame animation, kudos!