A film crew is amazing. I had a group of extremely visually focused people at my house this morning to shoot a short informational spot about me for people interested in The Orphanmaster.
First, they spotted a raccoon. Something I haven’t done in at least a year. As I said, their visual acuity is something. A hawk obligingly soared overhead and a bumblebee landed on a pink tulip for the occasion. The crew spooked two deer. The stink bugs stayed away at our request.
The director, cameraman and assistant went all around the outside of the cabin and into the woods shooting the “B Roll.” Chocolate syrup, emulating blood, was used to drawn a witika sign on an elm tree.
Next, they turned my living room upside down, putting all the furniture in the opposite place than it had been in before. Two years worth of dust came to light. I sat in a hard chair and we began.
They filmed not only me trying to be articulate about life in the seventeenth century but also my handwritten notes, various voluminous research tomes, the edges of maps, and whatever else they thought would make for a cool two-minute epic. Afterward they headed off to the Indian caves in Inwood Park, the inspiration for Orphanmaster‘s Place of Stones. Then they would wind up in lower Manhattan with the idea of capturing a kind of then and now snapshot of places like Wall Street (used to have a real wall) and Broadway (the oldest street in the city, a former Indian trail).
Luckily there were doughnuts for fuel. Or as the Dutch call them, Olie-koeken. Gil fried up about two dozen and most were gone by the end of the session.
Now that I have had my close-up, I am ready for my nap.
Jean Zimmerman 