After Teaser
Since Jan 2023 I have been a student at Humber College’s School for Writers – Creative Writing Graduate Certificate in play writing. This is the reading I did for the final meeting.
Aug 13, 2023 5:53 pm
Theme Music:
Magistar by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Music promoted by https://freemusicbg.com
Audition – AFTER – Audio Drama Serial
Since Jan 2023 I have been a student at Humber College’s School for Writers – Creative Writing Graduate Certificate in play writing. Under the guidance of my mentor, I have written the audio drama script – After. The play is six 15-minute episodes. The goal is to post as a podcast.
The next step is to test record the first two episodes. The play has seven main characters and several one-episode parts. I will be sharing the script interested people soon.
Monologue – Summer of 69
The problem with being a camp counsellor is assuming you know how to do it.
It’s the summer of 69, and I just finished my first year of university. Last summer, I was a local camp counsellor, so hey, I know the ropes. This summer’s job is camp counsellor for boys from the slums of New York City. The camp is 14 miles from the August Woodstock concert.
While all the kids are boys, the counsellors are both men and women. The women have the young campers. We’ve been warned that these kids are hard.
Cares Monologues
For the George Brown College Playwriting course, we were asked to write several short monologues. These three monologues are short dialogues of myself discussing the CARES system for aging missing children by computer.
CARES (Computer Assisted Recovery Enhancement System), a computer system for aging missing children announced on July 4, 1986, was a joint project between the Metropolitan Toronto Police and IBM Canada Lab. CARES was the first computer-based child-aging system in the world. View CARES details and press coverage
1. Monologue – CARES
Picture it, 1986. Jim Clark was head of the Youth Bureau of the Metro Toronto Police, the organization that finds missing kids. The challenge was finding kids that had gone missing for years. His artist wife Betté was working with a doctor at Sick Kids Hospital learning how kids age.
Learning an Italian Accent
I have been through a fascinating exercise in the past few days. I am thinking of auditioning for a part. (Paravicini and The Mousetrap) The character is Italian so requires an Italian accent.
Basically an accent is when a speaker uses their native language phonetic rules to pronounce the English words. This gave me an idea. I went into the Amazon Web Services Polly. Polly is a text-to-speech engine. I put in the character’s dialog and asked Polly to treat it as Italian and read it.
Amazing. I had found another site on Italian accents for the stage. When I listened to Polly’s reading of the dialog, I hear many of the guidelines followed.
The Mouse on the Moon – Stageplay
On July 20, 1969 two spacecraft landed in the Sea of Tranquility
one from the most powerful nation on earth, the United States, the other from the smallest, the Duchy of Grand Fenwick.
Who got there first?
Adapted by Rich Helms from the book The Mouse on the Moon by Leonard Wibberley
© 2021 by Rich Helms
CIPO ref# 1188353
ISBN: 978-0-9938829-4-4
www.richhelms.ca/themouseonthemoon/
Music: “The Complex” and “Marty Gots a Plan” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
Clarion Turf Racing Photo Wins Honourable Mention
Today my photo “Clarion Turf Racing” won the honourable mention at the SPARK Photo Festival Themed Juried Show. The theme this year was “Motion.” I originally shot this as a Kodachrome slide in 1970 at a race in Clarion, PA with a Russian Zenit-E 35mm camera.
The Zenit-E was just about the most manual camera ever. You even had to manually close the iris before pressing the shutter. I found the slide a few years ago while scanning with a slide scanner. It could scan with high enough resolution to print at 11×17 at 300 dpi in 48 bit colour. With photoshop I could pull out the detail and colours as well as clean up dust and such. When I heard the theme was “motion,” I immediately thought of this race.
I am so honoured to receive an Honourable Mention. I am privileged to be included in such a remarkable group of photographers.
Announcement Video
My announcement starts at 1:20
Mentos in Diet Coke
Did the classic Mentos in a bottle of Diet Coke for the grandkids. Dropped about 6 Mentos in. The video was shot with an iPhone 11 at 1080P 240 fps slow-motion. I thought it worked rather well. Diet Coke was used so there is no sugar mess left.
Rich Helms’ Farewell When He Left IBM in 1997
Margaret stars in a pet store ad
What’s On Digest – Parksville/Qualicum approached me about using a picture of Margaret for an upcoming ad. Here is the result.
