Between now and the last time I posted something non-reading-ish a whole month has passed. Then, I was in Heppenheim with Dasniya and Florian; now, Vienna and still with the two (though Florian caught a night train to Berlin for what we’ve been sweating on the past month.)
The day after we drove back from Heppenheim, I was back in Alte Kantine with Das Helmi for the second block of filming Adrian Jacobsen’s Reisebericht, now titled Der von einem Stern zum anderen Springt, almost two weeks of puppets, foam, cardboard, musical instruments, that got progressively weirder until it completely untethered itself from any faithful telling of the story. I managed two part-days off at the end of filming—I wanted to write a whole post about the Zeiss lenses I was using, but ah, not much time besides hauling camera and sleeping—before dropping into editing land, my first proper slab of time in front of a computer since early-June, and the intervening months reminded me how much my body prefers to be moving around.
So, two weeks; one of syncing audio, cutting the rubbish—bad takes, shaky camera, loss of focus, general meh—and dealing with 12 hours of footage from the second block plus at least familiarising myself with the first (most of which we’d redone, but a couple of scenes at least had usable stuff), and the second, finishing yesterday, of sorting out a rough cut. The first version of that ended up being 50 minutes, twice as long as required, giving Florian and me some gratuitous moments of slashing to solve that.
About now, he’s with the Dahlem museum showing the 15 seconds short of 30 minutes version which we’ve watched twice and have a lot of work to do to shave off a few more minutes, clean up the editing, add and remove things to make the story more coherent and flow better, clean the sound, correct the colour, miscellaneous other things, all in another two weeks starting Monday.
In the meantime, on Sunday we three jumped on a plane at Tegel Airport and arrived a short time later in Vienna for a week at ImPulsTanz teaching Yoga & Shibari. The sultry weather turned stormy and not-summery the next evening. The workshop is sold out, twenty people, once again in the farthest studio from the front in Arsenal. Hans is here to perform, Ivo also is here. I’m not taking any workshops for the first time just to have some leisure to see some of Vienna and the festival in a way that isn’t rushing from one place to another.
That then is the past month as I remember it. A couple of very good books in there also.