Posted by Dave Bull at 7:40 AM, September 18, 2010 [Permalink]
After the major interruption of the last couple of days for the NHK filming, I'm now busy with the preparation of the tracings for the next pair of prints. Once I get them pasted down, I'll shoot some pics for the RoundTable, but there is nothing to see yet.
The filming went generally OK - a mix of the usual stuff, with the addition of a short episode up in the woods with me setting up my tent and then sitting there trying desperately to ignore the mosquitoes while they took some long shots of me 'relaxing' ...
We had a bit of a kerfuffle at one point though, when I had a standoff with the cameraman. We were at the part of the schedule where they needed a stack of my prints for shooting, and while I went upstairs to get them, they had started to put together a kind of stand with lights, for the filming. When I saw what they were planning, I refused, and insisted that we shoot them over at the wide north windows, under natural - and horizontal - light.
This is HD TV, so it is a very good chance to finally get the feel and texture of the prints exposed. But the cameraman didn't understand this, and wanted to do things his usual way.
We went toe-to-toe on it for a few minutes, but I wouldn't back down, and we ended up doing it my way. The camera guy - who seemed to have as much, or more, power as the producer - pouted for a while, and didn't want to cooperate, but after we shot the first few, he started to see the point (which he simply hadn't understood), and things went more smoothly.
Anyway, about the title of this post - update to My Solitudes. While we were shooting those prints, the producer asked how he would be able to read the story, to help with organizing the program. (The Solitudes stories aren't online, just the prints.) I made sure that he got a .pdf of the set, but it did set me wondering what I should do about that. I have published my own set of books - text plus prints - but I do have the feeling that it would be kind of a wasted effort not to get the material spread around a bit more widely. This is especially true of the Japanese translation side, which Sadako and I spent a huge amount of time on, and which to this point has only been seen by a couple of dozen people.
I'd like to shop this thing around to some potential publishers to find out if there would be any interest (unlikely I suppose, but who knows ...), but simply don't have the resources (time) to do that, so I'm kind of stuck. Anyway, in an attempt to crack that door open just a little bit, I've amended the webpage for the first print in the set to include a link to a .pdf version of the story that goes with it. If you were not one of the subscribers to that print set, now's your chance to enjoy (well, at least to read) the companion story to that print.
Not sure though, where I should take it from here ...
