Today, for the first time in months, the respective members of our crew turned off their fans, pulled on their sweaters, and gulped their coffee without taking a sweat bath. It's still warm for Seattle, but autumn is in sight. Which lends us a handy framework for showing and telling what we've been up to.
In the age-old tradition of schoolrooms, what we did this summer is...
...completely restructure the film. Two or three times.
...take structural and artistic cues from Frances's forthcoming poetry book, which started as the film's narration.
...find a titleist to create dynamic renderings of Frances's erasure poems.
...write and record new voiceovers to tie end-of-project insights back to the scenes that sparked the film.
...capture new footage of the Duwamish river, the Duwamish longhouse, and the still-under-construction new Hugo House.
...conduct interviews with
a WWII internment survivor at the Wing Luke Museum,
a writer famous for describing the triggering town formula as "you're fucked, I'm fucked, let's have lunch" (see photo below),
and the teams of architects and developers shaping the new Hugo House.
Writer Charles D'Ambrosio spoke with us about Hugo's triggering town concept.
We've seen the skeleton of Where the House Was assembled as a very different creature from the one we thought we had not only at the start of the project, but even at the start of the summer. Still, the film is far from finished. We'll have picture lock at the beginning of September (which means that all the scenes are shot are where they're supposed to be), and after that our sound engineer Steve Fisk and our crack technical team will work on shading and heightening the story with color correction and soundcrafting. We hope to submit the film to SIFF in January of 2018, and after that we'd be spending a whole year making the film festival rounds before we could host public screenings and go to a wider release.
Which is all to say that there will be many more seasons before we can invite you all to watch with us. Well, there may be one chance coming up. Stay tuned.