Enter the WAV

It's pretty clear the main reason I was engaged to give a workshop at the International School in Como, Italy, this June was due to a recent acquisition: the NS Design WAV electric violin. The Italians weren't particularly impressed by my experiences with the Strad in Philadelphia - they'd just heard I could play a bunch of different styles. I walked in with the electric, and it pretty much sealed the deal.

Can't help but think the WAV might turn out to be my secret weapon through journeys to come...

(500) Days of Philadelphia

DAY (500): 10 December 2009. 7:59 pm.

The Philadelphia Orchestra's on the TV. You never get to see live broadcasts of the legendary ensemble where I live in Louisville, Colorado. I watch the audience find their velvet seats along the stage, already full of musicians, in Philadelphia's magnificent Verizon Hall.

There's a knock at my dressing room door and I turn away from the TV monitor. I give my bow one last swipe of rosin. I tuck a 300 year-old Stradivarius under my arm. I breathe.

For the past year and a half, I've known this day would come.

I'll never be able to go back to what I was. Now I go foward with a different confidence, one I hope will take me from this place I never thought I'd reach, to distant dreams I have yet to imagine.

A new work in a great space, SOTU rolls on!

Recently, the SOTU team has been looking at a lot of spaces, and considering the impact of the space on the work presented within.

Our first day of production on the film was in and around Mackey Auditorium in Boulder, CO. Truly a great way to kick off the movie, especially the concert itself, with about 2000 audience members packing the space to capacity for a performance of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Mackey was a great space for the work, being one of the biggest and best concert venues in Colorado. It's hard to think of a space that would be too big for such a monumental work of music, but the union of space, sound, and audience was just right on that evening.


St. John's Cathedral in Denver

Recently, we had the chance to attend the world premiere of Greg Walker's work titled Uneasy Sits The King, which is a reference to a passage in the great Choral work Carmina Burana, in which a king sits high... too high... and fears ruin. The work was presented at St. John's Cathederal in Denver in association with the Niwot Timberline Symphony Orchestra and the Colorado Choral Sociey. Greg's work was presented along with a powerful recital of Carmina Burana, which has been used as the epic climax music in so many films that it has become a cliche' of Hollywood movies. St John's is an awesome space although not well suited to music requiring precise timing or clarity of instruments. Due to the length of the hall, the reverberation (which is well suited to choral performances) made some of the instruments less clear than they usually sound in a more conventional concert hall.

Shortly after that performance, we had the chance to meet up with the folks responsible for helping us present Song of The Untouchable at the King Center on the CU Denver campus. We discussed how to best present the film, and how to get everything on the stage in a fashion that suits the concept of the piece, and still allows enough room for a full 65-piece orchestra. The concert, which is also the finale of the film, is almost a year away but still there are some technical challenges we need to start working on right away. Coordinating a concert with video projection and a simultaneous film shoot is a daunting challenge.

Currently, we're organizing the pre-production for our trip to India. It's a complicated process but we're slowly getting a grip on the trip!

Cheers,

Chuck

Off and rolling

Yesterday was the first day of production on Song of the Untouchable. What a great feeling to break the champagne bottle over the bow of a concept we've been discussing for months. The production team spent a long day at Macky Auditorium documenting the concert from the Boulder Philharmonic Orchestra. It was a terrific performance and we came away from the day with enough great footage to form the introduction of the film. I've taken a preliminary look at the footage and I think we're definitely on track. Here are a few frames of video from the shoot:



Performing the opening of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony



Violinist Gregory Walker


Gregory Walker rehearsing in the basement workshop


Getting dressed for the performance

India - Calm and Spacious

It's 3:34 am and I'm awake and thinking about landscape.

I recently edited a video that was shot in a hurried fashion over three weeks in Nepal. The footage (though there is a lot of it) is claustrophobic and never lets the viewer out of the frenetic pace of what must have been a busy, production-oriented trip.

As in the great film Baraka, which has been a huge influence on my approach to working with non-narrative storytelling as well as landscape, I hope to find the time during production on Song of The Untouchable to step back and find ways to portray India in many different ways. I think the frenetic, confusing, crowded part will be easy enough... but finding moments that go beyond the shakey and confusing path of a video camera through India will be the real finesse.



One thing I've noticed is that lately, and due partly to the fact that the camera I'm using is such high resolution, I've been discarding the rule of thirds in favor of composing my shots in a combination of thirds and fifths. I've been trying to place large structural components of the composition according to the rule of thirds, but I'll almost always have something important - or even the very subject of the shot - placed according to fifths. Here's a couple frames from the Wyoming segment of the film I'm working on now:




I overheard an interview with a wonderful film director yesterday, and he called his visual style 'clutter'... which he basically described as the secondary or tertiary layers of subject matter in a shot. I'm starting to understand what he is talking about, as clutter is not only a theme in the shooting I'm doing now, but is quite possibly a requisite component to any shoot in India.

Happy Holidays.

Chuck

a hundred-ninety minutes in warsaw

Ewa's voice crackles over the black, Soviet era loudspeaker: "The problem was een the solo violeen. We have to do eet again." The cellist to my left does another one of his little hyena whistles and the orchestra begins to kvetch in Polski. They're losing their patience and we're almost out of time. I glance down at the black page of notes on the stand, then back up at the stereo pair of mics positioned in front of my forehead, but there's nothing more to see. There's nothing more to think. Either my body knows this music or it doesn't.

It was 1:26 pm on October 29th, and I was in Warsaw recording a violin concerto written by my father, Pulitzer Prize-winning composer George Walker, with Ian Hobson and the magnificent Sinfonia Varsovia. I grasped the Strad, not like a $4,500,000 antique, but like the surgical, double-edged tool of musical illumination/personal confession it is. I had four minutes left to will it into a successful take of the insectile passage work.

In a sense, while I'd never experienced that particular kind of pressure before, it seems a microcosm of my life in music thus far, as well as the transformation I hope Chuck can capture with Leo's guidance in the future: Neurotic. Revelatory. Blurred.

Some Guidance from Leo Eaton

Leo Eaton

Last week I watched a series called The Story of India which profiles the journey of Michael Wood as he travels around the subcontinent looking for clues of India's past and present. This documentary was one of the best pieces of programming I've ever seen, and I immediately saw a few connections with Song of The Untouchable. As I scoured the credits of The Story of India - trying to decode some information on how the production worked - I came across the name Leo Eaton, who served as the lone executive producer. Though his boots were likely not on the ground during filming, no doubt Leo was guiding the ship.

After a brief introductory email, I called Leo this morning and he generously gave me about half an hour of his time discussing Song of the Untouchable and how we might make it a creative success as well as a financial one. Leo impressed on me how important it is to develop the journey as not just a series of points on a map, but a transformative journey within our main character.

Leo told me that "India will change him, the question for you as a filmmaker is whether you can capture that transformation or not."

Agreed. Emotional buy-in is going to be hard to achieve if all we're doing is connecting the dots on the map and lecturing about music.

Leo's blog is a well-written dialogue about his life as a documentary filmmaker, and has several interesting posts about the industry, society, and the recollections of a well-regarded professional who has been doing his thing since he was a teenager.

On Wednesday I'm off to Switzerland for the last international filming trip for my upcoming climbing film. I'm looking forward to seeing my friends and enjoying the crisp fall air in Switzerland, Austria, and Italy.

Cheers,
Chuck