Manana Films Daily: April 2010

Monday, April 26, 2010

Filming on the Borders

David, Mush and me are back from the village situated right on the borders of Armenia and Turkey, where we are working on our new film called Neighbors.

This was our third and longest trip to there; although it is really tough to shoot on the borders, especially when it is a film, not a news video report, we managed to film lots of interesting and exciting things and got to know our main characters much better.

As about the trip itself; it was cold, rained day and night, mud everywhere, and no drinking water at all. Oh yes, concerning the water; the dam up in Gyumri cracked when we were filming, and the whole village was warned to be ready to run like hell if the dam bursts, as the water will wash away the whole village (and most of the other located areas around, actually). We stopped complaining about lack of water when we heard that.

But the trip was great, as all our trips are. We’ll visit the village one more time early in May.

Meanwhile, we are back to Yerevan now to drink some water, wash away the mud and to work on 40 00 N, 45 00 E, which we hope to release in summer.

Here are some photos from the trip. Sorry for the quality, they all are shot by cell phone, as we forgot the photo camera. As always...

Monday, April 19, 2010

Green Day #2

As you may already know from my previous posts, we try to organize educational days for our studio regularly and to invite specialists from any sphere of film production for a meeting. Unfortunately, we don’t manage to do this as often as we would like to (hey, we’re making two full-length films at the same time after all!), but these meetings (we call them Green Days) are very important for all of us, that’s why I’ll do my best to arrange them more often.

This time our guest was Avo John Kambourian, an Apple product specialist from Los Angeles, who is currently volunteering at Birthright Armenia.

Avo organized a short and very interesting Final Cut tips workshop for us. This is the main editing software we use at Manana Films, but all of us learnt it on our own, that is why a workshop from a specialist was extremely useful for us.

Thank you very much Avo! Hope to see you as one of the Apple top managers in a few years. Don’t forget to send us a couple of free computers when it happens!

Related stuff:

Green Days

Avo’s blog

Friday, April 16, 2010

Press Conference for Neighbors Project

Right after officially announcing our new project called Neighbors, a press conference was organized in Golden Tulip Hotel in Yerevan, where the organizers of Golden Apricot International Film Festival, as well as Artsvi Bakhchinyan, the coordinator of Armenia Turkey Cinema Platform, and the directors - Diana Kardumyan, Arthur Sukiasyan and me presented the winning projects to media representatives.

Here are some photos from the event, and several links to the articles online (in Armenian only).

Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Project Pitching in Istanbul

We have some good news; remember the “secret” project we were recently working on together with other films? I was regularly uploading some photos and stills from our researching work which we were doing in far regions of Armenia. Well, there is no meaning to keep it in secret anymore, as too many people already know about it.

So, the new project is a full length documentary called Neighbors, which we started couple of months ago with the support of Royal Norwegian Embassy. The film is about two villages located right on the Armenian-Turkish borders. That’s it, no more information for now!

The good news is that couple of days ago Golden Apricot International Film Festival and Anadolu Kultur organized a film project pitching in Istanbul in frames of Armenia Turkey Cinema Platform, where I was among number of other filmmakers presenting their films for additional funding, and we got it! Thanks to these two great organizations for creating this opportunity.

Those who don’t follow our activities regularly, should check out the posts about the first, second and third trips to the filming location. From now on, you can follow the progress of this project both in this blog and in Current Projects page (as well as all the other active projects, by the way).

As about Istanbul, it still remains one of the most amazing cities in the world. As I am too lazy to take photos, my friends provided me with couple of them, so check our website blog for that.

Photos by Diana Kardumyan.