I will make little “making-of” clips for this blog, showing how I make my film. One of my ambitious aims is to keep myself and my camera “invisible” in the film, meaning that the characters act naturally, with no interaction to me or the camera. No interview, no questions, no “directing”. Just observing (that is where the term “observational” comes from - observational documentary).

I will show the “strategies” I use for being invisible , and how they work (or not). I will also deal with the technical challenges, with the ups and downs of doing the shooting alone, with no crew… I will show funny, behind-the-scenes moments. But I guess things will become really interesting when I will start editing the film: I plan to do that in the home of Constantin and Elena, and I expect very interesting things to happen when my characters will interact with footage of themselves, some being more than one year old. I will be in the room that you’ll see in this first episode, transformed into an editing room, and I’ll keep documenting the documentary.

Meanwhile, I made this first episode more or less as an introduction, but especially as thanking for the people that helped me come so far:

Roberto Blatt (Multicanal, Spain) who frankly, is the one who made this project possible;

Walter Murch, who through a great chance, became a friend and supporter besides being my idol;

Leena Pasanen, who played a great role in making my little project international;

Donata von Perfall and Peter Symes (Discovery Campus) for their advise, trust and recommendations;

Ritva Leino (YLE Finland) and Claudia Schreiner (MDR Germany) for their interest;

Olaf Grunert and Suzanne Biermann (Arte) for their great feedback;

Renate Roginas, Gitte Hansen and Hanne Skjodt for their support;

Alexandru Solomon, Corneliu Porumboiu, Dan Burlac, Adina Brateanu, Steven Seidenberg

and others.

I’ll probably explain in future posts how and who can help a documentary idea become a film. For now, I’ll let you watch Episode 1 of the making-of and hope we’ll stay in touch.