8 June 2012
Positive day all round yesterday with wonderful ideas and crackling creative energies.
Set up the “F” song for “Magic” to polish. We’re all really pleased with the way it turned out after all the gremlins earlier in the week. An incredibly powerful and scary performance. Full on, literally in your face.
Worked out a way round “Vigil” from the Coalmine and Poznan to interact and bring in the crowds from all over the tour on the walk throughs. Accidentally threw up multi screen on the monitor to review different sources and I remembered a technique Robert Altman used. Very 70’s but fitted perfectly with the intro of “invisible boxes”.Salvaged what we thought was a lost cause on “Pilgrims Address” where we had great audio and hardly any footage. Solved by studio filming of mime performance straight to camera and project in place to film Polish military to mix in with existing footage from 2 fragments of live performance.Found a neat complete buzzy version of “Punch and Judy” from Bielski Bala that even off the camera sound works well and fills a neat gap. Single shot, bad lighting but a 3minute kick.
Magic has so much tidying up to do as we are compiling the film from various sources, all live performances and all with synch issues requiring a lot of evil techy stuff to conjure up seamless performances. There are very few full shots of songs ( don’t ask:-) and few multi track recordings (don’t ask:-) and it’s pushed us into an area we didn’t really want to be in but is resulting in a fascinating mosaic.
The metaphor is a string of pearls where the road/backstage/personal footage is the string and the songs are the pearls, taken from different performances,some with flaws that make up their own little world from sources across the tour and mixed with some slightly surreal footage to give them an air of magic.
It’s a time consuming job but as you can see from the “State of Mind” clip well worth the effort.
I am sure some of you saw it for the first time and wondered why so many costume and stage set changes! 🙂
There’s still a bit of whittling on the synch to be done on SOM but we are for now concentrating on putting the pearls in order on the string while I am here so we can send packages back and forth and communicate on Skype before a final visit in the Summer.
This is a lot more than just a simple film documentary of the Polish tour, it’s a lot weightier than that and hopefully stands up alone as a unique piece of work destined for outside the circle of Fish. Time will tell.
Rounded of the night with a delicious meal at Aki’s last night. All the team present in his flat and we cracked jokes and bottles until after midnight. It’s fantastic wee team here and again I just want to thank you for all your positive comments on the “State of Mind” clip that John Reid graciously posted this morning for us. It meant a lot to us all as there have been hundreds of hours assigned from our lives to this project and this was the first chance anyone has seen out work in progress outside the circle.
We’d all appreciate if you could share this clip around to bring more people into the circle and as we move further toward the end game we will put up more clips and trailers in the next months.
Everyone is smiling in the Polish sun here today. It’s my last day for a while as I go back to my other job tonight on a flight to Copenhagen for the Swedish rock festival tomorrow.
I’ll be sorry to say goodbye to the boys but I know in my absence the good work will be continuing and there will be a lot more pearls appearing on the string.