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I did in fact have the film edited to almost its finished form by the time I announced the premiere in October; what was not yet complete were the Japanese subtitles that were to accompany it, which were essential, as the premiere was taking place in Hirakata-city, Osaka. The transcription, translation, polishing, programming, reviewing, and adjusting of those subtitles took the entire time leading up to the premiere, though I had a serviceable version on disc several weeks in advance. In the final days, I concluded that the subtitles would be better broken into shorter phrases on a single line that were then displayed for shorter periods of time individually, and this adjustment was completed on December 22nd, and the disc burned and tested.
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Partly as a spur to encourage myself to complete the feature as soon as possible, and partly to pad its somewhat short running time, I had also decided to try to complete several shorts that would also premiere on the 23rd and accompany Double Eagle. I considered showing the ‘running’ short from my Turkey vacation video, but decided to show only new material. I focused my efforts on two shorts: a farcical look at the activities of my everyday life, and the ‘window view’ time-lapse short I had been taking stills for since moving to Hashimoto in April of 2007. The daily life short, called ‘元NOVA教師の日常生活 – kyuu Nova kyoushi no nichijou seikatsu’- ‘Daily Life of a Former Nova Teacher’, had been conceived originally as a straightforward record of my everyday life in Japan, showing my apartment, my bicycle commute, my lessons, and so forth, but I had an idea for a silly visual gag that I could barely resist throwing in, and once that door was opened, I quickly abandoned the idea of filming it seriously and just made the whole thing a farce. I filmed the first scene with my Japanese teacher on the 11th of December, and feeling it nicely communicated the idea and feeling of the film, I used it to show to people to convince them to take part. It seemed to work quite well in this regard, though it is possible they would have agreed anyway. Other scenes were shot over the next 12 days in my apartment, during lessons in Kuzuha, and at my temporary Santa Claus gig in Makino. The last shot was completed the early morning of the premiere, and it was incorporated into the almost-complete edit. It was my first film in HD, and the format presented some problems. To start with, my camera records to an SD card in a format called ‘AVCHD’- Advanced Video Compression Hi-Definition. Indeed, it is so advanced that most computers can’t even view it. It took special software to process and expand the footage into hi-resolution Quicktime files that my Powerbook G4 could just barely view, and the process took ages. I ended up having to use the faster ‘experimental’ mode of the software because the standard mode kept crashing, but even so, a 20-second clip would take 30 minutes to process. One challenge of the shooting was thus to make the takes as short as possible, which was quite difficult for the shots that I recorded myself on a tripod, hitting record and then running (or biking) into place to act. Once the quicktimes were created, I had to re-render them to a lower-res format in Final Cut Pro to be able to edit them. Finally, at about 7am on the morning of the 23rd, it was done enough to show, though I knew I would revisit some of the editing later.
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The window view film was almost abandoned for the premiere, but I had been talking about the project for a long time, since back in my Nova days, so I felt I should make a stab at showing something just to give people the gist of it. Starting as I did the morning of the premiere, I knew I didn’t have time to adjust the positioning of each frame to make the transitions smooth. It was hard enough to just get the frames into the right order, and then to choose which few frames I wanted to represent each month, as I had far too many exposures to use them all in the 2 minutes that the music I had selected would last. The version of this film I showed was choppy, but the basic effect was present.
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I had scheduled my lessons on the 22nd to end by 2:30 so I could go out to Kansai Airport to meet Uriah when he arrived. However, the night before, I was alerted to the weather situation affecting Seattle and much of the Western United States. In internet communication with Jumana, I learned that Uriah’s plane was delayed, then cancelled, then rescheduled, delayed, and cancelled again – that he had been rerouted, was spending the night in San Francisco, and then, finally, from him directly, that he was on a plane about to depart for Narita. I issued him instructions for how to get from Tokyo to Kyoto on the Shinkansen, and hoped he would make it through immigration quickly upon his scheduled arrival at 6pm, as the last train he could take would leave at 7:45. Right on time, he called me from a pay phone at Narita, his train ticket in hand, and at 11:20 that night, I met him in Kyoto station and we went to my apartment to prepare for the premiere, him by sleeping, me by finishing the movies I was to show.
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We arrived at the venue at 11am, 90 minutes after I had told Tanaka I would show up. He had been working in his office, I think, so I don’t think he was overly inconvenienced. We were let into the room, and set up immediately for a test of the projector and sound system. I also set up my computer to test and then burn the disc for the shorts. Both endeavors went perfectly, and we set up 12 rows of eight chairs – 96 in all, with one to the side in the front facing the audience for me. I discovered I had forgotten the speech I had written, and Uriah volunteered to return to Hashimoto to look for it. The tests and setup were complete by the time he got back with it, and we ate some lunch that Tanaka had gone out to get, with Esther, who had arrived. It was now 1 o’clock. I was still in the middle of recopying my speech when the first audience member arrived. People started to drift in starting at 2, and by 2:25 we had an almost full house. We hadn’t had time to make signs or posters directing people down to the room, so Tanaka stood outside and waved people inside. At 2:35, I took to the stage and, microphone in hand, recited my speech. The lights were dimmed, and I pressed play. There was some genuine laughter during the daily life film, though some of the jokes were a little flat, either due to the roughness of the dubs and editing, or just missing of some of the cultural references. There were a few murmurs about the snow during the timelapse film. Then I switched discs, and the feature showing began.
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The subtitles looked great. People seated in the very back told me that they had no trouble reading them. Ironically, the Japanese speakers reading the subtitles may have been able to follow the film more clearly than the few English speakers listening to the dialogue.
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I sat facing the front row for most of the showing, and tried to watch peoples’ faces to gauge their impressions. Most of the Japanese audience members had neutral expressions, probably concentrating on paying attention more than enjoyment, but I got a good look at Uriah’s face- he looked worried going into some scenes I suspect he was unsure of, such as the Russians’ car conversation, but for the action scenes, which turned out rather well, he was wearing a big goofy grin.
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