Having been teased by the IT Devil and toyed with by the Money God, The Hawkinsian Intsitute has a tendency to be a little polytheistic (believe in many different gods). Although not the official Hawkinsian spirtual belief system, it works in a part-time kinda way.
Anyway, if we blame the gods for problems, we should also celebrate them if good things happen. In this spirit, we'd like to offer thanks and laudation to the Film God.
Believe it or not, this project isn't the first to be fascinated by what happened in Berlin. It means it's very hard to do anything original on this topic, but it also means there are lots of resources and materials to take advantage of - like archive footage and newsreels.
My DDR T-Shirt has already utilised some of these but it's a prohibitively expensive resource for a no-budget documentary. The clips used so far are brilliant. They really add to the edit but they are preview-only files from a commercial film archive with a deliberately intrusive watermark and catalogue number on each frame. If My DDR T-Shirt is ever to be screened, or even just submitted to a film festival, full rights would have to be secured at great expense. It was a big concern that this would be an unaffordable cost when the final edit was done. Until now.
There are certain archive sequences in the existing edit that really cannot be replaced. They are just too good. However, in the hope of reducing future licensing costs Hawkinsian staff trawled the internet to replace more generic clips with similar ones from open source film archives. Several black and white American newsreels were downloaded and some may be useful to the project. But one, by some massive stroke of luck, featured all of the short clips already used in the My DDR T-Shirt edit. They are good picture quality, free of any watermarks or catalogue numbers and most importantly free of copyright restrictions!
In the next few days, these excerpts will find their way into the edit and the old copyright restricted versions will be deleted.
Thanks be to the Film God.
Thursday 26 July 2007
Monday 23 July 2007
23rd July 2007
This weekend has been a good one for My DDR T-Shirt. The Hawkinsian Institute has been a blur of log sheets, MiniDV tapes and FireWire cables. Well, kinda.
Having been forced into a two-year break, a little catch-up time is inevitable. No actual progress was made in terms of length of edited video but there's so much more to editing than total time. It's also fair to admit that the prospect of re-starting the project has been quite daunting. It's a big subject and the biggest editing project ever undertaken by Hawkinsian Productions - but suffice to say that real work is being done and the cogs really are whirring again.
On a slightly different note, given mistaken messages of hope and progress in the past, this blog entry confirms that systems really are go at Hawkinsian Productions. There was a small blip (an odd system crash) at the weekend but nothing to put the brakes on the project. Capturing, editing, exporting and burning are all functioning well.
Plans for the next few weeks include an interview with Christina Seidel (yet to be agreed/finalised) and baby steps along that editing timeline. That's the way we do things down at the Institute but as most of you sleep soundly in your beds, the Hawkinsian head will be churning ideas over - and over, and over.
Having been forced into a two-year break, a little catch-up time is inevitable. No actual progress was made in terms of length of edited video but there's so much more to editing than total time. It's also fair to admit that the prospect of re-starting the project has been quite daunting. It's a big subject and the biggest editing project ever undertaken by Hawkinsian Productions - but suffice to say that real work is being done and the cogs really are whirring again.
On a slightly different note, given mistaken messages of hope and progress in the past, this blog entry confirms that systems really are go at Hawkinsian Productions. There was a small blip (an odd system crash) at the weekend but nothing to put the brakes on the project. Capturing, editing, exporting and burning are all functioning well.
Plans for the next few weeks include an interview with Christina Seidel (yet to be agreed/finalised) and baby steps along that editing timeline. That's the way we do things down at the Institute but as most of you sleep soundly in your beds, the Hawkinsian head will be churning ideas over - and over, and over.
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