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Artquest June 22, 2009

Posted by joost in : directing, film, london, work , comments closed

Oh and in the category “why not?”: I found out about this three month arts residency called artquest where London based visual artists get to live and work in a warehouse in central Berlin for three months, sharing the space with all kinds of other artists – all expenses paid. With an hour to spare I have submitted my application 8-)

Current work June 17, 2009

Posted by joost in : editing, film, producing, work , comments closed

I’m currently co-producing a documentary on the life and death of Naji al-Ali. My involvement in this project started several months ago when I offered to help on what then was just a no-thrills simple shoot one half of an afternoon. Slowly but steadily this project has grown into a two part documentary to be broadcast on Al Jazeera before the end of this year – and with it solid (paid!) production work for me. I’ve started pre-production a while ago and we are aiming to shoot several elements (interviews, location shoots, crime scene re-enactment) over the course of two weeks early July.

I have also (finally!) started post-production of I/O recontextualized, the experimental short film that I directed during the Easter weekend. It took longer than expected to determine the best post-production workflow, not only because my film uses a myriad of source material (super16, HD, SD, cell phone) but also because we wanted to find the best and most sensible price/quality for processing the super16 film. We eventually settled for a transfer to HDCAM SR, 1920×1080 4:2:2. Practically speaking this resulted in a QuickTime file with a runlength of about 16 minutes and a size of 120 GB :-)

Simon, former classmate and roommate, will be editing the film over the next few weeks. Quite a challenge because there are many possible ways of interpreting the source material and piecing it all together. We will need to go through a couple of iterations where we want to be as free and experimental as we were during the shoot, but where we also need to get some of the key concepts across in the midst of all the artiness.
I hope to publish a more in-depth description somewhere soon on this blog of what the film is about, how the shoot went and what I am trying to explore. But first there is some producing to be done…