The excitement of the promise of creativity woke me early this morning. Practically every day includes a certain amount of right-brain thinking, but yesterday was especially fun.
For awhile, we’ve been working on editing a project for a school in Bulgaria. Half the project was in English, sorting through many takes of interviews of people speaking in their second language, as they tried to get the words just right for their foreign audience. The other half was in Bulgarian and we’ve been limping along to discern if this babbling-sounding audio says what this indiscernable text on the title screen actually means.
Joel and I fell in love in Sofia and we always credit Bulgaria with having a serious effect on our relationship, so there’s also quite a bit of nostalgia attached to this project.
Maybe that’s why we’ve been afraid to let it go. It’s taken a year to complete this project!
Well, whatever the reasons for it’s delay, we stood at the post office on Monday, paying way too much for postage to make sure these DVDs make their deadline. For a week, I pushed myself through the meticulous details, telling myself that when the DVD was complete, I would take a day off to paint watercolors with a new friend in town.
So, project completed, I went to my friend’s house, who has practically a studio to perfect her craft, and I slipped into that land of creativity where your left side of the brain goes numb and you leave feeling lop-sided, but warm and content.
At least that’s how I feel. And no matter how creative I try to be when editing, the fact that it’s on a computer and I have to worry about matching the timecode with the audio track….and that means numbers…..which reminds me of math…..means I have to use both sides of my brain! The break of painting on paper was fantastic. No matter how ugly the picture became, the paper was never going to give me an error code! I loved it.
It was such a fun morning, in fact, that I’m sneaking over again to her house this morning and hope to finish!
When we were shooting this video in Bulgaria, we stayed at the school for almost 2 weeks. We were the only ones in the building at night and sometimes got a little restless, so we made up our own games. My favorite was our “Photo Contest” where we took turns with the digital camera and, depending on that night’s “category,” had to try to get a shot of something that the other person wouldn’t recognize and have them guess it, or, as in this case, try to win the “Best Photo” category. Ironically, I remember now Joel’s was of my travel set of watercolors! (above)
This was my entry into the “Best Photo” category. As you can see, they have amazing pastries in Sofia! We stumbled into a bakery and saw these delectable goodies and their label, “чикаго.” Always trying to be a good student of the culture, we engaged in conversation and asked what they were called. Our new friend looked shocked at these silly Americans, as if we must have these on every corner! “Of course, they are ‘Chicago’!”
Of course.
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