A night to remember...

Tuesday 17th June, 2008 was a very, very special night. This was the night that My DDR T-Shirt received its first ever public screening - and what a resounding success!

In Fuel (a café bar in Withington) around 60 people gathered to watch the film. Admittedly, many of these were friends - I invited almost everyone I knew. However, lots of people I didn't know also turned up because they had heard about the screening somewhere and were interested in the subject. How cool is that?

Making My DDR T-Shirt was a pretty solitary affair. Obviously, filming the interviews wasn't but the long process of editing was. As the film played, I sat and watched the audience. They sat (or stood) and stared at the ironed duvet cover that doubled as a screen and seemed totally engaged with the subject. They watched like they would a proper film in a proper cinema. It is hard to describe how enormously rewarding this was.

At the rolling of the credits, they even applauded.

The posts of this blog serve as a record (of sorts) for all the ups and downs of the My DDR T-Shirt project. It may not be the most enthralling subject to read about but every setback and delay is listed here. It's a pleasure to report such a fantastic highlight.

Massive, heartfelt thanks to everyone who came along.

Poster from the big night.

Q&A session

Free Screening!

Yes, one of my New Year's resolutions looks set to happen.

My DDR T-Shirt will receive its first ever public screening on Tuesday 17th June, 2008. It'll take place in a bar called Fuel in Withington, Manchester.

A dedicated email notification has been sent to a select list (you can view it here if you like). A poster campaign is also underway and will be visible in suitable places throughout Manchester.

It's free so come along if you can.

That's it!

New website launched

A re-design of the My DDR T-Shirt website is now live.

Now that the film is finished, it is hoped that the new site will provide an improved platform for the busy months of activity ahead.

The new site will also eventually feature feedback forms and maybe a forum.

Nods so far...

So, discs are flying out left, right and centre! Well, almost. I've sent preview DVDs to all the interviewees and a couple of friends and family.

So far, feedback has been generally very positive. More importantly, I've had replies from two interviewees, Johnny Tarver and Ian Sanders. Both have stated that they have no objection to the way they have been represented and the way I have used their words and opinions in the film.

This has always been important to me. I don't mind if people dislike the film, or the way it expresses my feelings, but I'd hate to people to feel I'd distorted their words. I await feedback from the other interviewees.

For the record, I have not sent discs to the following interviewees:

• Lutz Bergerman/Bergman
• Sasha Ritter
• A dude called Conrad
• An un-named student

These were un-arranged, man-on-the-street, vox-pop interviews. We did quite of few of them but these four people made it into the final cut. I would like to offer these people chance to 'approve' their interviews but unlike the other interviewees, they only gave verbal permission to being filmed. This means they didn't fill in the full release form - therefore, no contact details.

Work is still being done to re-design the website and there's also a poster design in the pipeline to fulfil any future screenings.

The next stage

Over the last week or so I have dispatched around 20 rough cut preview
discs of My DDR T-Shirt. These were mainly sent to the people I actually
interviewed. For me, this is the first stage of the process. As these
people gave their time and discussed their experiences for my benefit, I
owe them (at the very least) the chance to see the film before others.

Here's an update on some other plans:

1. As promised many months ago, I intend to organise a very low-key My
DDR T-Shirt 'premiere' in Withington. I hope to have a date for this
soon. I am also looking at other venues for similar 'events' but will be
trying to avoid screenings in empty rooms. If you know of a suitable
venue, please let me know.

2. Now that the film is ready, we are looking at other ways to get My
DDR T-Shirt screened. A list of potentially suitable film festivals in
the UK and mainland Europe has been drawn up. I expect to spend lots of
time in Post Office queues over the next few months.

3. As we start to pro-actively promote the film, we'll need a new
website. We need something new and fresh with a consistent look and feel
for the project. We also need to look into streaming technology and
other methods to get the film 'out there'.

4. A variety of audio and visual tweaks have taken place since these
first rough cut preview discs were made. Around 30 seconds has been
trimmed away and some project file export problems have been solved.

If you'd like to see one of these preview DVD-Rs, email
info@ianhawkins.co.uk.

Finished!!

Right now, I am sitting at my computer printing labels onto DVD-Rs. The labels say:

"My DDR T-Shirt - Rough cut preview copy"

I am in the process of sending these discs to the people who appear in the film - and anyone else who might be interested. Basically, what I'm trying to say is that the film is essentially finished. It'll need a tweak here and a little adjustment there but I suppose this will always be the case. What is really required now is to get people to watch it and revamp the website.

All this starts in earnest as of now. But for the time being, the biggest single creative project of my life is done. I have a stack of 15 or so discs and this means I have a product.

Email me if you'd like to have one of these limited edition rough cut previews.

Passing milestones

Woohoo! Last night, I sat down with my girlfriend and watched the first full edit of My DDR T-Shirt.

It's a rough cut with lots still to do. Even so, it's a hugely significant milestone with a great sense of relief, reward and achievement. My DDR T-Shirt currently lasts 56 minutes and has stretched our resources, expertise and patience to the limit. To remind you, the last Hawkinsian Production was 13 minutes long and featured just one interviewee. It's a big deal for everyone down at Hawkinsian Productions and best of all, the film itself is looking pretty good.

You may get a sense of the celebratory mood here at the Institute but here are the next steps:

1. It is estimated that it'll take another month or two for the film to be properly finished. Soundtrack, credits, tweaks, re-edits will be required.

2. Hawkinsian staff have already started to contact interviewees for feedback. This is an important process, although we reserve editorial control we would never want to distort anyone's words. Asking for interviewee feedback is our way to check the balance of the project. Problems may occur if, in the three years it has taken to get to this stage, contact details of these interviewees have changed.

If you have been interviewed for My DDR T-Shirt and have changed your contact details, please let me know.

3. After that, who knows? Watch this space for updates and contact us if you have any questions.

Nearly there?

From a My DDR T-Shirt point of view, yesterday (Sunday 24th February) was a really good day. Virtually the whole day was given to the project (for the first time in ages) and lots of progress was made. It is estimated that the first rough cut of My DDR T-Shirt is only a handful of evenings away.

As I have hinted previously, the rough cut is a gateway to a new round of editing, re-editing, soundtracking and voice over recording. In other words, lots to do.

However, this update is really meant to mark the progress towards that first rough cut. Remember, this project was conceived three years ago and it has been blighted by delays and set backs. The first test was whether the whole DDR T-Shirt idea had legs, the second whether a filming trip to Berlin could be funded, the third whether I could find enough interesting people, the fourth whether I could conduct and film good interviews. All these tests have been passed but one of the toughest tests has been to manage these voices and complicated issues with the limited editing skills and resources available.

The biggest project so far for Hawkinsian Productions was a documentary called Our Man in Harrogate. It had a cast of one (me) and was 13 minutes long. The jump from short films to a full length documentary has been a daunting and fascinating foray into the unknown - and an enormous challenge.

That's where we are now. At around 50 minutes, the first cut is nearly done and it's fantastic to be able to say it.

The home straight

Things are going very well with My DDR T-Shirt. The edited timeline is now up to around 45 minutes. The narrative is loosely separated into chapters and only one chapter remains to be edited. After that, the basic structure is complete and a new round of audio tweaking and edit smoothing commences. There’ll also be some test screenings and viewings to get feedback from trusted sources.

So, we are now on the home straight, nearly three years after starting the project. If you’ve been keeping up to date with this project, thank you for your patience.

On another note, there are all kinds of issues that emerge when making a film about this subject. Thinking about these issues is what caught my imagination in the first place. One of the biggies on the list is the subject of freedom. What does it mean to be free? Who is free? What is freedom? As ever, I don’t claim to have any answers but in my usual ruminative way, I have decided that these questions and issues may form a neat cross-over between this and my other blog.

To see what I'm blathering on about take a look at The Hawkinsian Institute blog...

Vive la Resolution!

If my New Year's resolutions are anything to go by, 2008 will be a good year for My DDR T-Shirt. I have identified a handful of what I hope will be achievable targets for the project. In stating them here, I'm trying to put my money where my mouth is.

By this time next year, I hope to:

1. Finish the film (and be happy with it)
2. Organise a 'première' screening somewhere in Manchester
3. Have the film screened by someone other than myself

Simple, huh? Let's see.

I have been able to use some time over Christmas for editing. The project has now broken the 30 minute mark (33 mins). Quite an achievement in itself, but not the only benchmark. The main thing was to catch up with the narrative thread - I think I succeeded with this and hope to march on with things from now on.

This is a longshot, but if anybody reading this has any footage or photographs of East Berlin prior to 1989, I’d be interested to hear from you. Even dull street scenes would help, with parked Trabbis etc. If you can help, please get in touch.

Progress report

Okay, so it's the firsts day of December 2007. This means it's been a long time since my last blog. For all those who've followed this project since its inception in 2005, you'd be forgiven for thinking it has gone into one of its hibernation periods. This is not the case. I just haven't had time to do anything since coming back from holiday.

Talking of the holiday, our three week trip round central Europe was fantastic. It was a brilliant, though unseasonably cold, insight into that part of the world. I also managed to get a few extra cutaways for My DDR T-Shirt and had some fascinating conversations.

A few things have happened:

1. The latest 25 minute rough cut has been passed around a few trusted friends for feedback.
   
2. Conversations have taken place about how to get the film viewed when it's finished - suitable festivals, websites, funding possibilities etc etc.
3. Potentially worrying problems with faulty DVD burns (causing severe screen freezes etc) have been identified and solved.

With Christmas around the corner, I hope to set aside sometime for editing. Let's hope 2008 is the year for My DDR T-Shirt.

My DDR pie in the sky

In just over a week's time, my partner and I fly out to Berlin. My third visit, her first. It is part of a bigger, three week tour of central Europe. We go to Germany, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland and Lithuania.

Other than a fantastically exciting prospect, the trip has worked as something of a My DDR T-Shirt deadline. In fact, one of the reasons for starting the tour in Berlin was to enable the Hawkinsian camcorder to capture finishing touches to My DDR T-Shirt. As readers of this blog will know, things have been up and down for the project over the summer, but it's good to report that things are nicely on track to take advantage of the coming visit to Berlin.

The My DDR T-Shirt working edit currently stands at around 25 minutes. There's a lot of polishing to do - in fact, it's still at the sanding down stage but a test DVD burn took place the other day and things are looking quite good. The original estimate of a 40-45 minute final running time is still about right.

And for the pie in the sky bit...
The other day, while reading some underground style club and band posters on a bar wall, it struck me as a good idea to organise a My DDR T-Shirt 'premiere'. Ideally, I'd like this to be in Withington, Manchester and there is a perfect room at a bar on Oxford Road. No contact has been made with the bar, and any public screening is many months away, but maybe this kind of thinking is a measure of the growing confidence here at Hawkinsian Productions.

All systems go - again

The impact of the corrupt project file reported in my last update has fully hit home - and what a body blow it was. However, it is great to report that most of that lost ground has been regained. Editing staff down at the Institute have been piecing the project back together and we are now back up to around 13 minutes running time.

We have taken the opportunity to assess and polish the edit wherever possible and it is generally accepted that the new 13 minutes is an improvement on the old 16 minutes. There have also been one or two mini-innovations (minnovations?) that bode very well for the end product.

Aside from these project details, there are a couple of small points...

The Hawkinsian software package has been upgraded in a measure to irradicate the buggy/crashy elements that caused the file corruption in the first place. It was actually sheer good fortune that a friend of the Institute happened to have the latest version of the Hawkinsian editing software program of choice. The newer version seems a little slow at some simple tasks but notably more stable. It also features some exciting new export/format options that will certainly be exploited when the film is ready to be distributed. People will be able to sit and watch My DDR T-Shirt from the comfort of wherever they are with a whole raft of downloadable options compatible with portable and hand held devices such as iPods, Nintendo DS, PocketPCs and a variety of others.

Good and bad news

There is good and bad news to report. After several weeks of fairly intensive editing activity, My DDR T-Shirt reached the heady heights of more than 16 minutes running time. In a project expected to be around 40 minutes, this is a considerable achievement and very pleased we are too. That's the good news.

However...
The other day, after attempting to burn a test DVD, the Hawkinsian System crashed. No big deal - this happens from time to time and we are now accustomed to frequently saving our progress. The big deal is that when re-booting and re-opening the editing project, the file has somehow become corrupt and unopenable. Without wanting to be melodramatic, many hours of intensive activity have been lost.

This a considerable blow to the project and massively disappointing. However, in the grand scheme of things, it isn't the end of the world - or the project. The biggest loss is time and early estimates suggest that it will set the project back 2-4 weeks. That's the bad news.

Testing times

Work is progressing with some positive results. With the new start, the initial edit had been stripped back to just over five minutes. Total time now stands at nearly eleven minutes.

These eleven minutes are just the beginning but they have helped establish a provisional narrative structure - though still subject to change. It is much easier to estimate the overall running time of the project and this is looking like around 40 minutes.

A rough cut of the first 10 minutes was made available to a select few a couple of days ago. Feedback was very positive - including a great response from a German colleague of Ian's. Being able to show just an intro to the project was particularly rewarding.

On a slightly different note, the longest Hawkinsian film to date is 'Our Man in Harrogate' at around 13 minutes. Jumping to about 40 minutes is presenting its own challenges. Editing staff down at the Institute are grateful that the interviews have such engaging content, but innovation is much harder to maintain on a longer project. We aren't looking to cater for short, choppy attention spans with short, choppy editing. My DDR T-Shirt is designed to let people speak and communicate their views and experiences - but does a series of unbroken talking heads make these experiences a little too dull?

It's the current hot potato down at the Institute.

Archive breakthrough

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.

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.

A new start - 25th June 2007

Well, Friday 22nd June 2007 was a momentous day for My DDR T-Shirt and Hawkinsian Productions.

In autumn 2005, all progress on My DDR T-Shirt was halted due to inexplicable hardware and software problems. These issues exhausted the knowledge and resources of Hawkinsian Productions' IT department. We are delighted to announce that we have finally overcome these problems and the long winter of IT discontent is over.

A similar (and sadly premature) announcement was made just two posts ago but a video-capture, edit and export/DVD burn trial were successfully completed on Friday. It has cost hundreds of pounds (our entire IT budget for the last two years) on three different PC upgrades but our elated staff will now begin work on the project in earnest.

Other news...
Flights have been booked for a visit to Berlin in September. This will be Ian's third visit and his last chance to film material for the final edit. There is also talk of one or two new interviews and plans to explore new media and internet resources (like YouTube) for relevant stuff.

Look forward to regular updates from now on. Let's hope the IT curse has been permanently lifted.

First posted 26th February 2007

Well, as usual I've been very busy - some of the photo galleries reflect this. But the My DDR T-Shirt project is still present in the minds of all down at the Institute.

We are pleased to announce that a new page has been added to the My DDR T-Shirt website. As it turns out, Johnny Tarver has generated some interest from some of his old comrades in the Communist Party of Great Britain. Some of these people spotted Johnny's picture on my site and posted the link on a political forum.

After a short exchange I agreed to make the Tarver interview available for download. You can find the whole interview as a series of MP3s on my new Johnny Tarver page.

First posted 13th November 2006

NB. The update below about IT faults turned out to be not entirely accurate. The faults were not fixed (as it was believed at the time) but the information about new galleries was true.

GOOD NEWS!!
We are delighted to report that Hawkinsian IT and Hawkinsian Productions have been very busy over the last few months. A year and a day after acknowledging some serious technical problems, the faults are fixed and My DDR T-Shirt is back in business.

We look forward to making progress over the next few months with improved IT facilities and new gusto. The first development to report is the release of some new My DDR T-Shirt Photo Galleries. Some of the pictures will already be familiar to frequent visitors, but some are published for the very first time.

We are prepared to commit to many more updates over the next 12 months. So please do pop back from time to time to find out the latest news - we can't wait to tell you.

For the record, thanks must be given to Kirstie Adamson for her wonderful encouragement. Thank you, Kirst.