Evan's metaphysical Journey of enlightenment

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Where the hell am I?
Well that's a question I seem to be asking myself more and more these days, of course from a purly literal level I am still in lovely California, although I've switched locations and moved a little further up the coast to Santa Monica where I have been staying in the Doubletree Hotel on 4th street. 3 blocks from the beach and just a short hop from the 3rd street promenade. My current partners in crime are J. (john) Reed, former roommate from USC campus housing, and one Andrew Stevens, a fellow USC film pupil from the good state of North Carolina where he operated as a professional fraternity brother which as far as I can tell involved a lot of drinking and um...fratrinizing with associated sororities. Anyway here I am wittling away what little money I have left on some sort of semi-vacation that started on the meritable auspices of a job hunt and quickly degenerated into a melee of debouchery and mischief. Yes the three of us have been devising stupendously clever ways to waste time and money which has resulted in, among other things a scratched cornea and a happy helping of Vicoden (to be explained). To be honest I suppose I just needed to stay one more week to convince myself that staying would be a bad idea. If that doesn't make sense then to hell with you, it's 3am and I don't have time for rational thought (let alone grammatcal accuracy). L.A. is so charged with the business of making the business that it slaps you in the face every time you walk out the door. I have a hankering for the simpler people of places like Toronto and even the really simple people from the places like Cambridge (ha! There goes my welcome home party). I think what I'm trying to say is that I don't want to turn into one of these fame groping yuppies who stake their chances on who they know and what they can do for them. Now I haven't become a cynic and it will take a hell of a lot more to make me Jaded, I've just come to the realization that for all its glitz and glam this isn't the town for me, and if Hollywood wants to come knocking on my door some day well... it can do that, I'm sure it'll know where to find me. Old, rust colored cube van, parked under that bridge down by the river... I'll answer the door all mangy and unkept, a bottle of Old E in one hand and a roasted river-rat sandwich in the other...yup that'll be the day. Anyway I was working myself towards a point before my delusional fantasies of grandeur got the best of me and that point was this, I'm a Canadian, and I'm going to come home to make films in Canada...and if that doesn't work...well it pretty much has to work because I don't have a back-up plan. But I do have some stories to tell and some films to make and I'd like to thank everyone for all of there support and for believing in me, And I'd like to thank some other people for believing in me both with their hearts and their wallets. I won't name names but you know who you are, you're the ones taking out second mortgages and selling those few organs you have that aren't totally necessary for life support just so I can chase a crazy dream. Well its much appreciated even if I don't always show it. I'd also like to take a moment to thank the academy-- No, sorry, those damn pesky delusions. I usually save that one until I'm in the shower.
So I'm coming to Toronto to ply my trade and earn a nickel. If anyone's in the area and interested in getting together I'd be more than happy to sleep on your couch and eat your food and watch your televison at strange hours in night. It's a favor I'd like to do for you, the gift of my character for an unspecified period of time, yours for only a few dollars a day and possibly a ham sandwich or two. As mastercard would say....Priceless. And now without further ado.... some photographs.

see everyone soon, make your donations payable to the Evan Aagaard Fund. (a division of UNICEF)

- Evan

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Photos

The Universal Backlot! It does exist.
These are some photos from the last shoot I worked on. It was a thesis film being done by a USC grad student who had rented out space on the backlot of Universal. The DP was one of my T.A.'s so he asked me to come and help out on grip. We were working on some of the most famous territory in Studio history, it gave me chills, but I had to put the chills on hold while I lugged around lights and cables for 13 hours.

New York New York
Allow me to put this into some perspective for you. This entire city was a "set". The universal backlot is made up of dozens of these mock environments. This one was a carbon copy of 1930's New York city but they also had an old west set and a European set and some newer ones like the one they used for War of the Worlds with the crashed 747. Of course these buildings are nothing more than plywood and fake brick paneling but they all looked totally authentic, except when you knocked on them and they made a hollow wooden sound.

suckers....
haha, this was the best part. every ten minutes a caravan of tourists would pass through the set as part of the universal tram tours and a hundred cameras would snap in our direction in the hopes that some of us might be major stars working on a big budget production. Somewhere out there a young Japanese girl is showing a very blurry picture of me to her friends as proof that she saw Tom Cruise working on set at Universal...hey what can I say the likeness is uncanny, I can't help it.