Well, here I am again, back in China.
Beijing, to be more exact.
Right off the bat I felt the familiar raspy feeling crawl up my throat. The air quality is now moderate, but it’s already something you can feel everywhere. One month in Finland made me forget it, but I can tell it’s definitely out there, the pollution.
But the weather is nice. Sun is shining bright and Beijing looks interestingly different from October when I left to Qingdao, what feels now like ages ago. I also managed to escape Russia’s icy lick coming from Siberia, which is bound to freeze the whole country in the coming weeks.
Back home, I was feeling grumpy and detached the whole day of departure. I probably was acting like a ten-year-old who doesn’t want to go to the school in the morning: I didn’t feel like packing my stuff (and actually decided to go only with hand luggage for this one month trip…) or eat or do anything a grownup would do to make sure the one month that’s coming up would be relatively decent experience. I was snappy at my wife, who was suffering for the upcoming separation just as much as I did, but I apparently thought my feelings were above hers’. I’m sincerely sorry, Annika. You deserved a more considerate departure from my side. I’ll make it up to you soon.
What we begin officially now is the actual post production of the film Iron Sky: The Ark. The first 161 days were both pre-production and the production phases, and now we start putting it all together and making it into an actual movie. This has been going on already all the time, during the production, as our editor ms. Fang has been editing the film the whole time. Now it’s time for me to jump into the edit and start bringing my thoughts into the game, take it to the next level.
Obviously, I’ve been very nervous getting to see the film. I’ve only seen some assembly cuts and a bunch of hastily edited scenes, but nothing complete, so I have no idea how the film would work as a whole.
What we now have in our hands is a film that’s 127 minutes long (without end credits), with already some 45 minutes shortened from the first assembly cut. We are hoping to find cuts to bring the total length to around 110 minutes; anything longer than that has tendency to be a bit too long in theaters.
The edit happens at my old office at Jiabo Culture building, just a stone throw away from New Otani, my trusty old hotel. The suite itself is not very edit-suite-ish, just two computers screens and a table, but I asked for a bigger TV monitor and a decent couch, since I’ll spend a lot of time there waiting for the editor to make the changes.
But yeah, that’s what I’ll be doing for the next about a month. Originally, I thought about not returning back to my blog, but well, what else do I have to do here? Nothing much, especially since this time around I don’t have Mika with me, nor do I have any other Finns in town – save maybe Renny, but I’m not sure if he’s around either. Annika won’t come to visit this time since the visit is relatively short and she’s much of that time on a vacation with her family in Spain, so yeah, it’s just me and my laptop and VPN running hot.
And, most importantly – the story is not over yet.
There’s still quite a long way to go.
Vuorensola.com 