Morning Pages Online - December 21, 2020

Good morning. So this starts again. My stream-of-consciousness blogging. It’s the first time that I’ve done this online and it feels a little strange . Keep getting interrupted (happily) in our home office here in Berlin.

My wife and family hero, Megumi, sits close by at her desk working hard at building her brand here in Germany. She has done well this year. She’s been offered a job at the Deutsch Opera, she’s created two online weekly broadcasts (Punk Mom Ballet and Das Überbrucken), started teaching, applied for (and received) grants, made 3-4 dance films, done some freelance dancing while keeping our household together.

It’s been a year of rebuilding and consolidating. It’s the first year that hasn’t felt like we had one foot in NY and one in Berlin. Especially for Megumi. And for me 2019 was totally consumed with making my first feature film, Before El Finâ. This year started with me trying to get my head around the post production process, including futiley trying to raise a post-production budget, and ultimately bringing my old friend and seasoned director and editor Rudolf over from L.A. to help me edit and we’ve ended up boot-strapping the whole thing, first doing an assembly edit, and then what we thought was a fine cut to get ready for the Berlinale in February. The result was premature, and I never felt that I really owned the film.

A couple weeks after the Berlinale, Covid hit and we all went into quarantine. Meg and I had more existential crises to face - how the hell we were going to make money, home-schoolling our kids, dealing with our apartment in NYC… Luckily, Christina, my Bearlift business partner had sourced another job through her friend who is starting a new hairstyling brand, and that led to a lot of work through the Spring, Summer and Fall. Then a trip to NYC in September to finally deal with all of the stuff that we had left in the apartment and fix the 1001 maintenance issues (new bathtub, heating system, electrics, painting, etc.) plus find a tenant. A planned 3 week stay turned into 6 weeks but it was a tremendous relief to sort everything out and get back to Berlin and our life here.

Since March, I’ve been slowly re-editing the film and really doing a deep dive into the rushes: something that I hadn’t done and was both painstakingly slow and rewarding. As I learned a new editing system (Final Cut Pro X) I also learned a truth about myself as a filmmaker: that I cannot separate the editing process from my work. I need to really get my hands on the film and work, on a granular, frame-by-frame basis with the material. Without doing this, I just didn’t feel ownership of the film, which had been a lingering problem from the 1st ‘fine cut’. I actually have one more pass to make before we settle on the Picture Lock, which, for better or for worse will be the version of the film that we send out into the world.

There are two main areas that I need to focus on now: Writing and Marketing. Subtly, in the past couple months, I have felt myself shifting out of the right-brained world of my film - with it’s myriad, agonizing creative decisions and all of my rookie insecurity. Now, I need to learn how to first market myself and then to market my film. I have been listening to podcasts and audion books and reading about social media and I am actually very excited about it. If it is approached with both patience and with a mindset that marketing is creative and about relationship-building, it could be quite exciting and fun.