Okay, now it’s getting ridiculous; I managed to catch sleep at 11:30 am, meaning when I woke up at 3:30, I had only slept four hours and was both totally wiped out and dead tired. Nevertheless, I had to scramble myself up from the bed and head downtown to work with Tuomas, as it was his last day in Beijing.
Work was good, though. The additional footage we had shot a few weeks ago has found its’ way into the cut in a very nice way, and while it’s definitely not as well shot and lit as Mika’s material, add music, work the cut and focus on characters, it’ll go nicely. And watching Tuomas laying tracks on every emotional beat there made it look better and better every time.
We went for a cup of coffee across the street to the library café and discussed the importance of places like this, where the intelligentsia – counting us out, of course – would meet, compare thoughts and exchange information between countries and nationalities… We saw Beethoven’s notebooks, Tolkien’s writings, philosophy, Chinese literature, a Lithuanian professor prepping for a presentation… “All fit together, nice, nice, very nice… “, as the 53rd Calypso of Bokonon teaches us in Kurt Vonnegut’s “Cat’s Cradle”.
I read today a sad story in the news. A Finnish clown jumper – I’m not sure if that’s the right English term, but what I mean is a person dressed up as a clown and making a show of jumping down to water while clowning about – was found dead in his apartment. He had been dead for two weeks, actually.
This guy was known for a failed attempt at clown jump, which he botched by landing sideways on the water, falling 50 meters. He didn’t die, but went to a coma for weeks. I started thinking about this person’s life, what brought him up there, making that jump. Devoting your life on something as dangerous as clown jumps just escapes my understanding, just to entertain a bunch of people. I mean yeah, he was a professional at his line of work, a really dangerous one, too, and one which is definitely not very popular. It started to scratch something in the back of my head, like a story forming, and I did get flashes of interesting scenes in my head, and this character forming in my head.
Back at the hotel I started writing down some ideas while Tuomas was doing the music. We worked for good 5-6 hours and headed to the Libanese restaurant for some skewers and hummus, which I will definitely miss here, since we don’t have proper Libanese in Helsinki that I know of. Coming back home I turned on The Americans, but found myself dozing off halfway through the show. And then, lo and behold, I slept.
PS. Since we have had some pretty good progress with Chris, I decided to head home a bit earlier – on Tuesday, to be exact. The plan was to stay until Saturday next week, but why waste production’s money for a hotel room and driving me around, when there’s nothing really here for me to do at this stage. And it makes sense, I have a chance to catch a breather before heading over to Tokyo with Annika next week’s Sunday.
Vuorensola.com 