Backpicture

I know there are “thousand and one” movie blogs but here I go creating another one. The idea is to take a bit closer look at what’s going on behind the movie screen and write more about production, technologies, art ideas and business decisions involved in film creation.

For me the process itself is sometimes even more fascinating than its result. It seems kind of unfair that people spend just two hours watching the movie – which has been created often by hundreds of people working for years – without much thinking about it and then usually just forget it. For me it’s really interesting to follow the movies development, especially the bigger ones (like Avatar or Inception from recent ones), from their first announcements to the premiere date and beyond. You develop a close emotional connection with a film, it becomes much more important and you feel genuine joy if the movie is successful or the grief (or sometimes the inevitable “I told you!”) if it fails.

A bit about my movies history. I was born still in Soviet Union, so almost all Western and Eastern (except strangely for Bolywood) movies were locked out. But I managed to see Star Wars (in Polish) when I was five, then the martial arts movie, which was shown in parts on Russian travel TV show (only recently I found out that it was Shaolin Temple 3 with very young Jet Lee). And then the Iron Curtain fell and everything poured over from both sides and during few years of copyrights absence, TV channels, cable, rentals just rolled all the most famous movies of at least past couple of decades. So it was fast learning time.

I tried to involve my studies with movies as much as possible (and still hope to do that in the future). There were some interesting courses and tasks (like watching The Trainspotting almost frame by frame) and the final work about then still a gimmick stereoscopic 3D (I’ll try to sum up the work and put it here). I remember there was just one question from the professors: “When it will come to cinemas?” I gave it five years and almost guessed it. Now let’s see what comes next!

Richard

ricardas.jascemskas@gmail.com