Six days on the trans-Siberian, from Beijing to Moscow. An opportunity to edit videos, catch-up on logging, write blogs, treatments, outlines, fund raising bids, and performer pages. But also a chance to sit, reflect, and worry.
Filmmaking is an artistic process where you have to first create the tools you will later use to make your art. In this sense it is unlike any other creative process.
For a writer there are words. For a painter there are paints. For sculptors, dancers, musicians, designers; the raw materials already exist. Not so for filmmakers who have to conceptualise, locate, arrange and shoot footage before they can begin to put it together to form a cohesive whole. It’s like making a jigsaw a piece at a time.
This is terrifying. Especially when making a film with a global perspective and collecting the pieces while travelling. What happens if we accidentally erase that special fitting Indian piece? Or forget to create the Beijing piece that we know would’ve been perfect for that gap between Singapore and Seoul? What happens if, in five months, when we are on our way home from Rio de Janeiro, we realise that we have forty different pieces (or more likely four thousand) that just don’t fit together?
Excessive amounts of forethought, organisation, and planning become necessary. We have a holistic vision, although it bounces between divine inspirations and Darwinian growth. We have shot-lists, cutaway lists, storyboards for a range of performances, and creative imagery for our conceptual ideas. But still, at the end of a destination, as we leave for the next city on train, ferry, bus, or plane, we always wish we had that overlooked shot. It’s frustrating that the ‘word’ we need is still in Jakarta or that ‘special colour’ is left lying in Jaipur.
The flip side of the coin? Imagine the creative freedom of re-writing the dictionary!
Chris