Got myself a boom and a blimp! The blimp works great but the Røde boom is hopeless. Painfully fiddly to open and lock the different extensions and one of them jammed right away. I’m still using it but we are not friends.
For the past couple of years I have worked as a night guard at a nearby tourist camp every spring. Not every night but sometimes. Washing dishes, cleaning and taking care of everything, because as mentioned before, the income from my film work is rarely enough.
I made this video 2013 when the first guests stayed there.
My film from Råne river, about its fish management, premiered in February and I was featured in the local news paper and was interviewed in the radio. I also tried for the first time the ‘film premiere’ function in Youtube and made an event of it on Facebook. The Youtube premiere was screened at the same time in our movie theater. At most I had around 40 persons watching the film at the same time. Now when I look at it I get the feeling that somehow my gamma and/or color settings were wrong. It looked good before but when I watch it now it doesn’t, so I think I must have changed my computer or external screen settings since then. Did I have the right settings before or do I have the right settings now? Bummer! A screen calibration set is surely going to be my next investment. I really should have done it long ago, I know!
I decided to make the first 100 DVDs of my fishing film with a special dedicated print. I think there’s still 97 left if you’re interested.
NRK, the Norwegian national TV is using tripods from the same manufacturer as I.
We went to Tromsö to see ski jumping live for the first time, mainly to see Noriaki Kasai, but he didn’t qualify for the main competition. Our sad story was mentioned on Eurosport.
One more quick trip to Finnmark in Norway to meet the remaining participants in the film that I hadn’t had the chance to meet earlier. Did some additional shooting too. Photo on the left: Repparfjord close to Hammerfest, photo on the right: Norwegian US$ 15 breakfast.
I shot and edited a local revue. A 25 year anniversary performance. Here I’m struggling to get the levels right with 11 layers of sound. I use Davinci Resolve for editing but I couldn’t get the sound editing to work. It was very frustrating so I paid for Reaper to get the job done. It was recommended on a FB-group as a fantastic software but it was so complicated for me to do even the simplest task that I needed to have a chat with the developer. I tried to read the instructions provided with it but it was very technically written with little or no thought of making it easily accessible to a complete beginner like me. It was overwhelming to say the least!
I have now figured out how to use Davinci to do it. My computing power is not enough to run it smoothly and it has its ways of showing it but I have now learned how to deal with it.
I was working a couple of times with my Russian colleague in Boden, Tamara Soushko, with her documentary about a Russian musician working in Arjeplog. I was mainly helping with the sound but did sometimes a little bit of filming too. Premiere is planned to be in May 2020.
Making a DCP of ‘Voices from Finnmark’. It takes time…
First I need to save the whole file as an image sequence. Then convert it to JPEG2000. Then convert it to MXF, and finally make the DCP. My film was 2,5 hours so I needed a lot of storage space and time. One of the steps mentioned above took over 24 hours to complete!
I’m using Open DCP. Free and easy to use and tutorials can be found on the Internet.
DCP=Digital Cinema Package. Files for digital cinema.
Our community house. It received ‘cinema of the year’ award in 2018 by the chain we belong to (Folkets Hus och Parker). It is the smallest digital cinema in Sweden and here I can test my home made DCP-files on a big screen. My summer job was to paint this one wall but the top part was too high for me.
My Macbook Pro 2011 turned completely useless and I needed it to finish ‘Voices from Finnmark’. Apple service repair told me they didn’t find anything wrong with the machine (!) and it was a vintage model so they didn’t have any spare parts. Okay…
Thank God for Youtube! “Take out the motherboard and bake it in the oven at 170 C for a few minutes”…? First I thought it must be a joke but everybody seemed to recommend the procedure so finally I bought everything needed and went for it. And it worked wonders! There was something wrong with the graphics card and this took care of it. Apple service, up yours!
After seven years of work it was time for the premiere screening of ‘Voices from Finnmark’. It happened at the Nordkapp Film Festival in Honningsvåg in Finnmark, as far north as you can get on mainland Europe. Well, maybe a few km short but pretty close! As usually I wasn’t in the movie theater to watch it, and I always come to think about the Mel Brooks movie ‘The Producers‘ when I sit in a café or somewhere waiting for the film to finish. What happened next wasn’t exactly as in the Mel Brooks’ film but close enough. I got questions and comments, and afterwards some of the audience came to me, shook my hand and thanked me for making the film. “Finally somebody made a film like this about Finnmark!”. It made me feel pretty good, and on top of that the organizers told me that they had decided to help me with my transportation costs!
Next week was a second screening of ‘Voices from Finnmark’, this time in Kirkenes close to the Russian border. They showed all the films twice: once in Kirkenes in Norway and then in Nikel on the Russian side of the border. I was supposed to go to there too but because of silly mistakes with the paperwork I couldn’t get a visa.
I overheard an older couple in the audience talk after the film. The husband telling her wife that now he finally understood her wife’s background.
Konstnärsnämden, the Swedish Arts Grants Committee, actually granted me some money to attend this festival!
A few days later it was time for a third festival screening, this time in Luleå. On the way back from Kirkenes, driving through northernmost Finland, I saw an amazing display of northern lights!
At the Q&A after the screening In Luleå I heard something I wasn’t prepared for: “this film didn’t feel too long at all!” It was Ingvar loco Nordin who surprised me with his comment. Usually it’s the opposite, people think that maybe it is a little too long. And sure, 2, 5 hours is longer than the average film but it’s nothing extremely unusual. Saving Private Ryan, Apocalypse now, The Irishman and others are about the same length. The difference is that my documentary doesn’t have any quest or story that is easy to follow. You can’t guess how far in the film we might be or how close to the end. It just goes on. But if people think it’s fun to watch so called Slow TV for hours where nothing much happens, how hard can it be to watch a documentary? In our cinema we showed a few years ago an award winning documentary that was nothing but beautiful images from around the world without any plot to follow and it was over 2 hours long. I’m not alone with this one.
And I just have to mention this: along with Ingvar loco Nordin came a woman who had acted in The House of Orphans!
Below is the trailer for ‘Voices from Finnmark’ and in May 2020 I will upload the full documentary on Youtube.
I continued working with Gunnarsbyn-TV (my local TV-channel) and made 9 episodes this year too, same as the year before. This year’s English interview is with an Argentinian world cyclist. Now, at the end of 2019, I have a grand total of 52 episodes in the archive. In the beginning (2015) I was getting thousands of views every time but now it only occasionally gets near, or past, one thousand and the average is somewhere around 300 views two days after posting it.
If you would like to support me you can visit my Patreon page and here’s a link to my playlist on Youtube with all my English (or with English subtitles) documentaries on Youtube.