Honest Answers | The Royal York Hotel Edition

we went downtown and checked in to the royal york hotel and dropped off our backpacks and headed over to Wayne Gretzky’s for lunch.  kids never been and chantal has not expanded her food selection and she settled in with the grilled cheese that was really good.  noah and myself picked up “the great one” burger which was really good with a double patty.  seventy four bones later we hit the hotel to check out the pool which was warm, narrow and long.  a little hot tubing.  we were pretty full so we decided we would eat after the movie.

i picked up some tickets for the movie “Free Solo” which was up on bloor.  hit this blog post for more about the movie.  the plan was to go there and eat after and hit snakes and lattes and play games into the night.  the movie was awesome and after we went down the street to starbucks and filled up on sweet foamy goodness.

snakes and lattes in the annex was packed with a 3 hour wait.  so we hit the google and found another boardgame cafe south on dundas west.  we called and they held a table for us and we got there to play some new games and a little cockroach poker.

my goodness… almost 1am.  time to grab a taxi and get back to the hotel. we still have a round of honest answers to record.  at the hotel we each wrote our 7 questions on some hotel stationary and we set up my phone to record us in bed answering the entire 21 questions.  we shot 38 minutes of footage that i knocked down to 9 minutes that you can watch on YouTube.   I had to cut out some questions to protect the kids and me with some of our answers.

 

how to make coffee at the royal york hotel below…

Ziggy Alberts | Concert In Toronto

a friend at work discovered ziggy from my early morning playlists.  he is from the land down-under and this was his first trip to north america on tour.  we was going to play at the drake but due to selling out they moved it to adelaide hall which i never knew existed.  we went downtown and hit queen west all the way to ossington ave and up oss to dundas and back towards the city…  along the way we hit kensignton market which was having it’s jazz festival so we had dinner and drinks at the supermarket which was nice and walked to adelaide to the venue for the concert.  such a warm day.  the watch said we walked over 20km.  cara from work is heading out west for school… so it would be nice to fly out to visit.

ziggy is a great little artist and he was so good.  the venue was packed and hot inside but it was such a fun concert.

Casey In Toronto

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photo: alex gayoso

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Casey did the keynote at BufferFestival in Toronto on the weekend so I picked up some tickets to see the short films after Casey’s talk.

( I loved Melanie Murphy’s short film about abortion and the struggle women in Ireland face  BTW at Buffer Festival)

The kids went downtown Toronto since we were going to hit the all night art fest.  I’m a Casey fan on how he documents things and his storytelling.  This past July… he did a keynote and I wanted to post it below if you ever wanted to listen to him a little more.

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Casey Neistat is an American film director, producer, developer, and creator of popular YouTube videos. Neistat attained commercial success with the HBO series The Neistat Brothers and indie film Daddy Longlegs. With ten years of experience in creating TV commercials, Neistat took his story-telling ability and married it with his commercial experience to re-define branded content on the internet with companies such as Mercedes and Nike. Most recently, Neistat’s technology company, Beme, was acquired by CNN.

Two videos.  Above is the storytelling on how he jumps around to tell a story that is shot by just him.  How he moves the camera around to get a different POV and help with focus on different parts.  How he uses music and old footage of him.

Below:  Yes a quick trip but just how he films traveling which is tough and he tries to capture it a different way by counting down the hours.  His cuts and how he moves the camera around to capture from a different POV.