A Gift for the Village Trailer Revised 2-11-10 from Tom Landon on Vimeo.

Our latest video upload: let us know what you think!

Jane and Jenna's Art and History Project

Jane Vance has just been featured in another story in the Roanoke Times. This time it's for a neat art and history project at Jenna's school, Prices Fork Elementary, in Montgomery County. Here's the link to the story . I especially like the way she fit a South Asian elephant into a painting of a Prices Fork coal mine. Verisimilitude, for sure.

A Premiere Date!

Jane reports that she's secured a premiere date for our film in Blacksburg during the week of February 20th as part of an international students event sponsored by Nepali students on campus. We'll have more details soon.

Things continue to move forward. Thanks to portable hard drives Jenna was able to work with Jane and made a big push just as summer was ending to get the film in a state of near completion, and now I have the files here in Cambridge, Mass. and have been tweaking, tightening, and mixing audio for the last several weeks (while also working on finishing a really fun Hindu wedding Jenna and I shot October 2 in Blacksburg.)

We have some good news on the narration front: a nationally known narrator is going to take a look at the film in the coming days and let me know if she's willing to help us out. I won't give her name just yet but she is perfect for the job, and we hope she'll say yes. In the meantime, Jane's producer friend Dee in San Franciso has been sent multiple copies of the latest version of the film to critique and may be providing some professional help with color correction and finalizing the video - depending on budget cuts and other variables. Even if she's unable to help, I think we have a great film on our hands. It feels so good to have a finish line for this production marathon.

Jenna has been rockin!

While I've been busy packing up our house for a one year move to Massachusetts and starting the school year, Jenna took the editing controls and has been hard at work for the last week or so, tightening up previously edited scenes and tackling the sequence that shows the festival in Jomsom, which is some of our most complicated work, shot with two cameras and requiring a lot of thinking! Jane reports that it looks great, and the next step will be to keep tightening the entire program and start the graphics work, along with color correcting and more work on the soundtrack. It feels like a big corner has been turned, and I for one can't wait to see the results of Jenna's latest efforts.
T.

Progress feels great!

This week we came together once again to do some more editing and we're pleased to report several new developments.

First, we continue to add new content to our program and keep finding little nuggets of video that we knew existed but hadn't yet pasted into the timeline. With almost 40 hours of raw video to choose from, we keep finding things that astound us. The trick is to find a way to fit it all into our alloted time of just under an hour.

Second, we seem to be closing in on an order of things for the program that makes sense. Deciding where to introduce Tsampa and Jane, for example. Beth Macy watched what we'd done to date and asked really good questions that helped us focus on what is really important and to think of information that viewers will want to know.
Third, we met with some folks who are offering some help and support to us as we work our way through the end of the editing process. We paid a visit to Cabell and Shirley Brand in Salem. The two of them have traveled all over the world, and are the owners of a beautiful Thangka that I wanted Jane to see. While we were there we showed them a preview of our work, and it appears that soon we will be able to do some fundraising under the auspices of the Cabell Brand Center for International Poverty and Resource Studies. We'll have more to report on that soon.

We also met with Mike Gangloff and Nathan Bowles of the Black Twig Pickers, a tremendous band. They are going to provide us with background music for several of the Virginia segments of the program, and we couldn't be more pleased about it.

We're meeting in Blacksburg on Monday to shoot more video of Jane's art, so stay tuned.

Every great film deserves a great theatrical trailer, right?

Though we missed Jenna horribly (she's in Sweden serving as part of the support team for an extreme cross country race), Jane and I huddled in Roanoke over the last few days and spent an equal amount of time getting organized for an upcoming edit session and working on a video segment that will serve as both the trailer and opening segment of our film. What do you think?

Still making progress!

Imagine a mobile studio that instantly materializes on a kitchen or dining room table - one minute an empty space and the next a surface covered with multiple computers and monitors, a spider web of cables, and lots of notebooks, tape cases, and external hardrives which hold the current state of the documentary. Jenna, Jane and I have met several times like this in various locations - at Uncle Frosty's river house last year, in our dining room, and most recently at Jenna's house in Blacksburg. With each meeting we make a little more progress and set the agenda for our next working time. I'll be posting a short snippet of some of what we've accomplished so far here soon, but I wanted to take a minute to remind our friends that one day, hopefully soon, we'll have a film for all to see.
T.

What Exactly is a Thangka?

A recent story in the New York Times does a pretty good job of explaining the importance of the thangka painting in Tibetan Buddhism. The reporter visited a site in Tibet where the traditional style of thangka painting is still practiced. If you're interested, here's the link to the story: NYT story on Thankgas.

The story spreads...

Not too long ago a story was written on the Blacksburg online news site, "Planet Blacksburg" about Jane and our project. That story was then picked up by The Buddhist Channel, USA Today, and news outlets as far away as Finland. You can read the story by going to http://content.usatoday.com/topics/article/Organizations/Schools/Virginia+Tech/0cuUcPI99Sc91/34

Today Jenna and Jane and Tom are working on the documentary, aiming for a July showing, location t.b.a.