After Edit Blues

LUND--I am experiencing a letdown phase after finishing the movie. It isn't, I am thankful, a Hemingway "black bottom" mood, but rather a sort of general listlessness. This project has been about two years in the making, coming across the story of the children of the mangroves when traveling with Dr. Katy Kropf through Central America and first working with SARA during that time. It was then I took a large portion of the still photos and we shot some of the footage that I eventually used with a small hand-cam. Then, back in the US I wrote the grant to SARA, received the grant somewhat to my surprise, and began planning for it--researching equipment, making my lists, talking with friends and colleagues about ideas and themes and structures. In the middle of all that I came to Sweden and my life took another turn. But I went back to El Salvador and the mangrove jungles of El Espino, filmed for a month then spent the next months packing up and moving to Scandinavia. And then a long dark winter, editing, thinking, editing, thinking about editing. Almost everything revolved around or came back to the film. Now it is done. My friend Jeff Pasek did some of the soundtrack, practically at the last minute, Jesse Ewing did the DVD cover. Now I have sent out two copies to Bettyann Larson and John Gilberg and in the next days will be mailing more. It really is done. I still want to make a short film on the subject but more or less, for now, I am finished with the material. I hope to go back and make another film, a more intimate portrait of the children's lives and work but that is in the unknowable future. Now I am preparing to go to Ukraine and make a second film with all I learned from the first, in a very different setting. I will be taking much the same equipment, with the addition of a sturdy monopod and a long XLR cable with which I can put a microphone on a boom (which the monopd will double as). I plan to shoot a fair amount more tape than I did in El Salvador and have ideas for particular types of scene to shoot, particular extra footage to acquire and ways to better organize my material.

And now the sun is out in Sweden. I suppose it is a good time to be a bit listless. At least I can wander around aimlessly in the sun.