We’ve taken too much time off this blog — but it’s not because we were idle. Quite the contrary.
At least a month and a half were filled with us doing two fairly tedious jobs for this film, much of which we couldn’t share — because it is simply way too boring: We had to review all the material that we’ve shot, and log every clip and its content in one endless long spreadsheet. The result: 3913 entries so far … This was necessary for two reasons: One, the person who has done this (that’s Nick) now actually knows our material, has remembered again scenes we had shot and forgotten, and can now spontaeously find things that can become useful for the edit. And two, before we only had countless film clips — now have a searchable database with all our material.
The second job: We had to transcribe the important interviews with our two main protagonists, Katherine and Lorenzo. For Katherine, that was 4 hours 37 minutes, and for Lorenzo a whole lot more because we also included a few of his speeches and TV appearances, and we also spent a bit more time with him than we did with Katherine: 12 hours and 16 minutes. And I had to turn all of that talk into written words … but now that that’s done, it gives us our second searchable database! And we can now really work with the material, it’s great! A lot more fun to edit when you can search and access every single clip you’ve filmed.
And then we’ve been busy with a few more things: We produced a short documentary film together with our friend Ben from “Wolf & Wonder Productions” — it was designed as a pitch to Netflix about a climate change initiative. And we worked very hard on the collaborative climate change show “vollehalle” (in German) that we began developing back in 2017. In early May, we performed it live at the big German Web & Society conference re:publica, and the result is now on YouTube.
And in the past few weeks, a couple of new opportunities opened up — after re:publica, we’re now getting a bunch of requests for our show; we are in the process of discussing the show with some investors who might donate to help us fund its development; we’re beginning talks with a few movers and shakers in the German entertainment industry, about further developing vollehalle; and finally we hope to establish a collaboration with a larger and more established film production company for this very documentary film project — they very much like the project, and want to help us with financing, post production and distribution.
So … a lot has happened these past few weeks and months, but we’ll return to working on the actual film now, and we’ll also try to figure out how to return to sharing more of that experience with you — now that the phase of shooting it is over, and the post production phase has begun. Which may seem less interesting, but it is actually the really fun part: Now we’ll assemble the film from all the material that we’ve collected — now we get to actually make the film!
