Dear Backers,
We are just a few pixels away from finishing the film.
When last you heard from us, we had just left Philophon Studios in Luxembourg where re-recording mixer Loïc Collignon took more than 1,000 tracks of sound created for "My Love Affair With Marriage" and mixed them together in Dolby Surround 7.1, a pretty advanced sound system for cinema viewing.
Loïc
Assisted by Anthony Juret, Loïc also created all the Sound Deliverables: the 7.1 and 5.1 versions for cinemas, and separate 7.1, 5.1 and 2.0 versions for TV broadcasters and video-on-demand platforms. They also included the separate "stems" of Dialogue, Music and Sound Effects (D-M-E) should there be any reason to remix in the future.
The sound for the film was finished!
Then we headed to Riga, Latvia to work on finalizing the picture with the Team at Studio Locomotive. Although the film had been edited and locked for several months we had a long list of changes that we had to make: title cards, end credits, font sizes, and color corrections.
In addition, we needed to master the film. For that we turned to Raimonds Lužinskis.
Raimonds / Raimonds in shadow behind the monitors
Raimonds took all the digital files of the film - audio and picture - and created the Digital Source Master from which the film can be converted to all the various formats, from cinema to home video, used around the world. Many of the streaming services even have their own technical specifications, so for maximum flexibility you need to have a good Digital Source Master. At the moment, Raimonds and his Team are creating the Digital Cinema Package (DCP), a format for screening the film in movie theaters.
The Latvian Team at the first technical-test screening of the film in a commercial movie theater
And if you want to improve the chances of your film being seen, you need a good sales agent. Sales agents strategize to get a film the best premiere possible, and then make deals with distributors and streaming platforms. It helps to secure a spot at a top film festival where film buyers congregate, and critics hope to discover the next big hit.
Meet our partner Jan Naszewski, CEO of New Europe Film Sales:
NEFS / Jan
New Europe Film Sales is a boutique world sales company based in Warsaw, Poland and is one of the fastest-rising sales companies in Europe. They were instrumental in the successful release of Signe's first animated feature "Rocks In My Pockets" in 2014, and we are thrilled that Jan and his team are working with us again. We may have news of the premiere soon. Cross your fingers, please!
Back in New York we still had work to do on the film. One big job was subtitling - creating a SubRip Subtitle file (.srt file) in English which can be used as a template to subtitle "My Love Affair With Marriage" in any other language. We lined up the vocal track with the subtitle texts right down to 1/100th of a second. For translators, putting their words in exactly the right place will be as easy as a song.
Sturgis creating English subtitles / a portion of the .srt file
Many films farm this task out to subtitle companies, but "My Love Affair With Marriage" has a lot of dialogue, songs and voiceovers, and we had strong opinions on how they should be presented to a foreign audience. So, we did it ourselves, 1,697 lines of subtitles in all.
Signe has been active at pro-Ukrainian protests and organizing benefit screenings of "National Museum", a documentary by American-Ukrainian filmmaker and friend Andrei Zagdansky. For his U.S. premiere at Scandinavian House in New York City, she made 100 paper flowers to hand out to the audience. The event raised close to $5,000 that went to support Ukrainian refugees.
Signe / the fundraiser at Scandinavian House
For Signe, the flowers are a symbol of the beauty and fragility of Life, but also of Resilience.
Thank you for all the support you've given us over the past six years.
Love,
Signe, Sturgis and the entire "My Love Affair With Marriage" Team