My last post was on October 22, 2010… wow, talk about dropping the ball! The documentary is finally in what I would consider a wrap-up stage. I am currently working with a group of Bring Me Hope volunteers to translate from Mandarin into English for the subtitles…

THE DELAY

As some of you might remember the original ‘deadline’ for the documentary was the end of 2010. Now here we are in May, 2011 with nothing ‘finished’ and it turns out that making a movie in a language that you don’t understand is stinkin’ hard. Due to budget constrictions and the time it was taking us to edit I had to let my assistant, Julia, go in January. She was extremely gracious and continued to stay on for another month with no pay and then did some more ‘paper editing’ via email. I would take her paper edits and select the timecodes she had given me and do my best (in Chinese) to edit it all together.

THE VIEWING

One thing I am really excited about is a group of students that have volunteered to do some ‘watchings’ of the movie as it progresses. At one screening during the first part one of the students (who was from a village) said that she didn’t realize there were poor kids like some of the ones she was seeing in the movie. This was really encouraging to me because the main purpose of the movie is to open up these students’ eyes to the reality around them and encourage them to be apart of the change.

THE EXECUTION

Originally we were thinking about production and a premiere in or around March. Now that March has come and gone we have a rework of the plan. I will most likely get a hard copy to the people that donated via Kickstarter in the summer and then near the end of the summer there will be a Premiere in Kunming where hopefully we can show it to a large group of students.

THANKS!

Thanks again for all the encouragement and thoughts we have recieved during this experience. I really believe that at least a few Chinese University students that view this will be inspired to get involved with helping some kids. This is all because of you guys so a continuing heartfelt thanks!

Hello all! Another update on the documentary. The editing is in full swing and we have almost finished the first animation about the story of the boy whose mom abandoned him. It looks amazing!

I wanted to share with you guys a little bit about how the music is progressing. The music director/composer is named Gou. He has worked on a few movies before and did some music for the Olympics in 2008 in Beijing. He has put together a team of musicians to compose some songs for the movie. We went to his house last night and got a preview of the theme song for the documentary. It is called “Prayer”. Here is a short video of him testing out the words to the song and playing us the latest version. And a discussion about getting old :)

ps. that's my beautiful (and smart) wife in the video doing the translation and laughing.

This is the first update since the project fully funded and I would like to say a huge THANKS! Because of you we have all systems go! I'm back from a much needed break and geared up to start editing. I just got back from a meeting with our artist and animator tonight and things look amazing! Thought I would share a short video of some of the brainstorming:

I would like to introduce you to the first child we have chosen to be in the documentary. His name is Sam. Sam is 9 years old and is a very sweet little guy. When we first met him at his house he told us that his dad drinks a lot and sometimes hits him. His house is a complete and utter mess. His Mom left when he was 3 years old and he is left with what appears to be an alcoholic father that tries his best but really needs help raising his son. Today we took him to the closest city to buy his first ever pair of new shoes and we got from him his first ever smile.