This Ain’t Your Daddys Folk Music, Part 1: Preparation

You hear a lot lately about the “good old days”. Maybe we’ve always heard about them. I love the good old days. I had a blast there. I love telling stories about them. What I hate is any thought that the old good old days are any better than today’s good old days. They aren’t, unless you think they are. To me, anyone who thinks the old days are better are cheats themselves. The past is for reliving with your friends and family while having a good time right now! (While this is completely my sentiment, I have to confess to paraphrasing from Danny Michel at this years EFMF)

A few weeks ago I went to my 20th or so Edmonton Folk Music Festival. Each one has been better than the last. I anticipate my time with my friends, wife, and kids more every year. Because I go there expecting to have the…

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About Ava K

Ava Karvonen is multi-platform producer and the founder of Edmonton’s Reel Girls Media. She has produced more than 100 hours of content for the global market including TV, web and mobile. Her work has seen more than 90 worldwide screenings and been internationally recognized with more than 40 awards (including Best Original Cross-Platform Content at the Alliance for Children and TV Awards, the CFTPA Award for Best Convergent New Media, a Japan Prize and the Ojai California Festival Theme Award: “Enriching the Human Spirit Through Film”). She recently produced the feature length documentary, Finding Bobbi (After 50 years in the wrong body, Bobbi tells her story while preparing to step on stage for the first time as a woman) and directed/produced audio and video stories for the new Royal Alberta Museum. Her credits include creating and producing four series, ten one-hour documentaries, more than 100 webisodes and podcasts, audio & video for the new Royal Alberta Museum, and an online companion to an animated TV series where users can create their own comics and stories. In addition to producing, Ava also writes and directs. She directed seasons 1 & 2 of Chaos and Courage for APTN; was one of the directors on the CBC series Keeping Canada Alive; wrote and directed The Lie Detective; directed and produced Homefront (a story that followed five soldiers and their families during a deployment to Afghanistan); directed Seeds of Change for Panacea Entertainment (an hour long documentary that tells the story of a friendship between two scientists and how they worked together to help restore the health of China’s Yangtze River). Ava believes in giving back to her community. Ava has been teaching credit and non-credit courses for NAIT, FAVA, MacEwan, Raindance; served on juries in Canada and abroad; and has served on the advisory committees of Salute to Excellence for the City of Edmonton, the Aids Network Black and White Affair, CFTPA, NextMedia, and NAIT. She has also helped develop industry policy while serving for the past 20 plus years on the boards of the Edmonton Arts Council, AMPIA, Alberta Foundation for the Arts, Documentary Organization of Canada (DOC), and DOC AB. She is the chair of WIFTA (Women in Film and Television Alberta) and sits on the advisory committee of the Edmonton Screen Industries Office.

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