What we've been up to

It’s been a long time since our last post, and I decided to make a brief update of what we’ve been up to for the last couple of weeks.

Mostly we are busy with working hard on 40 00 N, 45 00 E project, which was launched on October. This is an interesting mix of documentary and fiction stories, three stories are already filmed and are being edited, another three are still being filmed. Production period took a bit longer than we expected, mostly because of the fiction episodes, and the release date will be postponed for about a month.

Besides, we are working on our online store, and soon we will be able to get rid of that annoying “Not available yet” sign, and you can purchase some of our films there. The coolest thing about our new store is that there won’t be any DVD-s. I personally hate DVD-s, I can’t stand them, I feel sick when I read the words “PAL/NTSC” and “region codes”, I feel a monster waking up inside me when I’m trying to play a DVD, or to burn it, or to copy it, I want to…

Ehm, excuse me. What I was saying is that our films will be available in totally other format, and both getting and watching them will be much easier. And don’t ever ask us for those shiny useless rounds!

Stay tuned, I’ll post some “Making-of 40 00 N, 45 00 E” photos soon.

Researches

Most attentive visitors of our website may have noticed that Manana Youth Films is more into documentary than feature filmmaking, although this tendency is being changed now. But for now I should admit that we are much more experienced in documentary, as real life seemed more interesting to us.

Documentary filmmaking requires lots of researching. Sometimes this process can last even longer than production part itself. Actually, the phases like production or pre-production often don’t work in documentary; researches can turn into actual filming, and the research object can unexpectedly change, too. That is why we spend most of our time traveling around, gathering interesting facts, meeting people and looking for interesting stories for this or that project.

The most interesting in documentary is that you keep shooting all the time, even when you are just visiting a possible location. Nobody wants to miss a good story. And interesting things usually happen the moment you relax and think about doing a break for lunch.

Everyone who has ever worked in this sphere, knows this simple rule very well. That is why Alfred Hitchcock’s opinion on documentary filmmaking seemed perfect to me for choosing it as our “Quote of the week”. Yes, the one on our homepage, you probably didn’t pay any attention to it. Thank you.

What was all this about? Ah, yes, we did some researching trips recently for a new project, the one we did our previous trip for. And we proved the rule once again; lots of interesting things happen during ordinary researching trips. Good stories never check if you have a camera with you. Fortunately, we had one. Two, actually.

Check out some stills from the materials.