Grant Proposals & Post Production

It's been a long week of last minute proposal writing. February 9th was the deadline for the Sundance Institute's Documentary Fund grant program. This year we submitted a proposal for a development grant. This would be money to continue developing a documentary idea of ours that involves climate change in the Karakoram mountains of Pakistan. 

The Sundance Institute and it's famous Sundance Film Festival have done a lot for independent films since the Institute's creation in the early '80's. Most notable to Seattle area people is the Institute's support for "Iraq in Fragments," the Oscar nominated film that was produced by local filmmaker James Longley, with help from John Sinno of Typecast Films.

Some people have been asking me about "Beyond Thought's Compass" and what's going on with that project. Well, "it's in post production," is what I keep telling people. But in reality it's in a sort of suspended animation. Since the Fall 2008 trip did not go exactly as planned (see my first post) we've had to decide how to wrap up the project without all the footage we'd planned on having. It's coming along, but takes time. 

We have recently found footage shot by someone else that show our injured expedition member being cared for in Gorak Shep and her helicopter evacuation the next day. I also received some pictures.

This one show our patient on the left with a few of the French doctors who helped treat her that night.

This one shows Fabrizio on the left, exhausted after a day of extraordinary effort. I'm on the right. Looking at this picture I keep thinking, "why the hell do I have a such a big smile on my face?"