Here are the first pictures from the production in LA. This is only a small part of the wonderful scenes we managed to shoot. More to follow.
Update, November 18:
Because I was flying back home all day yesterday, I wasn’t able to actually add anything to my post to describe the shoot. Here’s a little bit now.
On our the first day (Sat Nov 14), we filmed exterior shots in Waterman Canyon in the San Gabriel mountains just north of LA. It was a lovely spot, just perfect for replicating Thuringia in St. Elizabeth’s time. The leaves in CA evidently don’t turn in November, so it seemed almost like summer, which was when St. Elizabeth’s farewell with her husband actually took place. This in particular was the scene I had always dreamed about filming, and it turned out beautifully. The student actors from Azusa Pacific University did a splendid job, we had a great cinematographer (Michael), and the most beautiful location possible. Only the costumes were a little problematic, due to lack of budget and time. We had to make do with costumes borrowed from the Theater Department at APU, and some we rented from a local costume shop. We had to take what we could get, whether ideal or not.
We didn’t have to pay anything for this location, as it was a state park — at least no one showed up to object :). It was a bit different on Sunday. Michael and I had spent all day long Friday looking for an interior location without success (and he had spent a week previously looking). They all wanted insurance, which was too expensive for us, plus mucho $$$ for filming. Finally, on Saturday night, Hollywood Presbyterian Church (the founding church of Act One) agreed to let us do it for $500.00 plus insurance. We still had no insurance. But Michael got a cinematographer friend of his, Brad, who is quite experienced and has insurance, to come and be second cameraman on the shoot; we presented the church with his insurance certificate and paid him as well (still less expensive than purchasing insurance, which we might not have been able to get at the last minute anyway). Whew!
This second day went great too, but they only allowed us to have the place for 3 hours, which meant we couldn’t shot some things we had planned. But the lighting job Michael and Brad did was stupendous, and the second camera was helpful in moving things along faster. My brother Pat (with whom I was staying in Hermosa Beach) and his girlfriend Vera, had roles. Members of Michael’s family came along and filled in as extras in the church scene where Elizabeth lays down her crown. This was a grueling day, but well worth it.
More later.
Update: November 26, Thanksgiving Day, I’ve had quite a week catching up with work. Only now am I able to put up some more images and correct the ones I had already done.
The time is here at last! After months of frustration, everything has come together. I will be filming the final interview and the historical re-creation shots for the St. Elizabeth documentary A Woman for Our Time. I will be leaving November 12 for LA, and will stay until November 17 (St. Elizabeth’s feast day!). The recreations and interview will be filmed by my cameraman from Hungary, Michael Eaton. He is one of the up-and coming Hollywood cameraman with an expertise in digital video and has worked on a number of Hollywood productions, so it was difficult to coordinate with his schedule.
Please pray for this work. I could also use financial support. This trip is likely to drain all my funds, and when it’s done, I will will still have a lot of expensive post-production work to do.
You can donate online through credit card or Paypal here.
Please note that PayPal always adds $3.75 to your donation, because for some reason it always treats a donation in the same way as the price for a book, to which postage is to be added. I have no idea how to stop them from doing that. I don’t think it necessary to charge postage for a donation for a DVD. So if you want to donate only a certain amount, just enter $3.75 less than you want to give into the online box, and you’ll be all right.
Or send a check to Lori Pieper, Tau Cross Books and Media, 30 W. 190th St., Apt. 6N, Bronx, NY 10458-2553. Make the check out to Tau Cross Books and Media. Be sure to include your name and mailing address. Everyone who donates $10 or more will receive a free copy of the video. The actual price when released will be much higher. This is sure to be a very high-quality documentary and an excellent investment. Include your e-mail address for continuing updates on the video.
Here is the (more or less) final version of the trailer for A Woman for Our Time: St. Elizabeth of Hungary. With many thanks to Fr. Amando Trujillo-Cano for the use of his great song “Santa Isabel, Ensenanos a Amar.” (St. Elizabeth, Teach us to Love.”
Stay tuned for more news on the film as it takes shape.
Here it is - it’s taken a lot of work. This one was based largely on the interviews done in our last round of celebrations in Hungary, but covers a bit of every place we shot in. This time, the interviews were almost all in English, so I made this an English-language only trailer.
This is really a rough, unfinished version; there are still a lot of problems. One of the biggest is due to the fact that Michael was unable to use his light package in Hungary — his high-powered lights blew out the fuses in the place where we were staying. So we couldn’t move around for interviews, and had to gather as many of the lamps and other lights the Manreza Center could find for us all in one place — Michael’s room. So every interview was shot in the same spot, and from almost the same angle. It can be very tiring to look at. I hope there will eventually be some way to fix all this in editing, or at least not to have so many of the interviews with the same background one after another.
On the other hand, this one uses a greater variety of images, and is faster-moving and more visually exciting than the first trailer.
There will be more edited footage as time goes on. So keep checking back.
I must confess that I have been very remiss about putting up any updates about the St. Elizabeth documentary since the end of December (here). A great deal has happened, not all of it good, but things finally seem to be back on track.
On returning from Hungary with a disk drive containing all the footage our camerman Michael shot, plus the tapes from my own camcorder, I expected to be able to start editing, or at least viewing the footage, right away. But when I made my first phone call to my mother when I arrived home, she informed me of my uncle Joe’s death. I left right away, and only after I returned from the funeral and Thanksgiving holidays did I discover that the drive was unusable. I couldn’t even read it with my computer.
Long-distance consultation with Michael didn’t help; I gave the disk to my brother Nick at Christmas, and he couldn’t access it either. So it eventually went back to Michael, who discovered that though it was supposed the be cross-platform, the formatting of the files themselves (at least that’s what I think he said), made it impossible to read on anything but a Mac. So he had to re-copy every one of the some 300 gigs of footage through his computer network from a Mac to a PC and then to the portable drive - which took around 200 hours. Which would have been fine, but he had to be absent on other filming gigs a good deal of the time during the next four months. I didn’t receive the footage until the middle of April, five months after I returned home. And even then we found footage that had not been copied, which had to located.
In the meantime, a lengthy illness, five separate tax returns for the back sales tax for my business, plus regular taxes on April 15, made it nearly impossible to keep up with my regular job (freelancers don’t get paid time off), let alone other tasks like writing the script and obtaining permissions for using still images and archive footage. I also had to test out various editing programs, and started learning to use Adobe Premiere Pro.
Then at long last, when everything was all set for editing, my laptop stopped working. The motherboard had fizzled out. Back it went to the company for repairs (thank goodness it was still under warranty), Then I had a replacement computer to set up, and finally to work — though I no longer had the trial version of Adobe Premiere, which was on the other laptop (you’re only allowed one trial version). To save time, I decided to resort to using the simple Windows editing program that I already knew for the trailer. Then when everything was ready again, I discovered that the drive I had copied my own footage on had failed. There were parts I hadn’t transferred to my laptop, so they had to be captured from tape again.
In the meantime, I finally got some good news: the Presidency of the International Council of the SFO (CIOFS) would be able to reimburse me for some of the filming expenses. They are also going to put the trailer on their web site and help promote the video when it’s done.
So things really seem to be back on track now, and the trailer at least is close to completion. In spite of the frustration, seeing all the tons of disconnected footage you shot finally connect and come alive into an actual story is thrilling. We already have a trailer from 2007 that focused on our interviews in Rome; this short teaser trailer will focus more on the actual experience of the Franciscans of the various orders who attended the celebrations in Rome, Assisi, Esztergom and Budapest, as well as an outline of Elizabeth’s life. It should be much more visually exciting than the first trailer.
So keep checking back here for the trailer, which I hope will be done in a couple of days. Then on to editing the real thing!
Oh and one more thing; if you want to be put on the e-mail list to receive updates about the documentary, just write to me at editor@taucrossbooks.com.
Pausing to look at all the sights on our way to Jerusalem. . . Mainly about faith, the Church, film, writing, famous Christian authors, and anything else I'm interested in at the moment.
The photo above was taken at St. Peter's Basilica in Rome in March 2007.
Quote of the Month
"The history of the Catholic missions is by now a long road: at the beginning of that road is the Father of Mercy, who holds out his arms to all his children. All those who encounter the missionaries encounter the Father. And they also encounter the Son, the first missionary, who, obeying the Father, comes to earth, becomes flesh in human nature, is one of us, in solidarity with our misery (except for sin) and ends up dying for us in order to then return to heaven, carrying on his shoulders the human race his has won back.
Out of the same mold are the missionaries, who repeat, in some way, his journey. They too leave their fathers and families and depart to go among a foreign people. They too strip themselves of the refined culture they have acquired in their homelands; and of their native customs and habitat, of a hundred little comforts, in order to be in solidarity. With who? With a people who are on one hand naked and poor, and on the other rich in possibilities, which the missionaries intend to respect, value and elevate."
Albino Luciani (Pope John Paul I), to the people of his diocese of Vittorio Veneto, on his return from the diocesan missions in Africa in 1966
