The answer, I’m afraid, is “not quite yet”!
I owe you a better explanation, though. Previous videos I’ve made have been quite simple — go adventuring, collect the footage, edit, edit some more, and upload to Vimeo. That’s how the Lapland, Mongolia and recent micro-adventure videos worked.
Janapar is a bit different. It’s been in the making for almost 5 years. It’s an hour and a quarter long. It’s cost James and I tens of thousands of pounds to produce — and that’s just since I finished filming. It took 300 hours of raw footage, a year of planning and scripting, and months of editing. The actual file for the master film is about 100GB in size. It’s basically a ‘proper film’.
Our aim is firstly to spread this film’s story, and secondly to pay back the people from whom we had to borrow money. Doing either of these things is going to be a huge challenge.
But we do have a plan, and at the top of the plan is a list of film festivals. Sundance, Berlin, South By South West, Rotterdam are the largest and have already received our submissions, but we know we have precious little chance of acceptance, so there are several less well-known festivals on the list as well. These part-festivals part-marketplaces are our best chance of having Janapar seen by the people who might be able to distribute the film to a wider audience.
Aside from anything else, it would be a lot of fun to spend 2012 travelling around with the project. But the festival circuit carries a caveat — you can’t premiere your film at a festival if it’s already been made public. That means I have to hold back on the DVD, or arranging any of my own screenings, until this weird token of film-industry tradition known as a ‘premiere’ is out of the way, which isn’t likely to be for some months yet.
After that, it’s full steam ahead. But I hope you’ll better understand why I can’t just upload it to Vimeo!
Did I mention — Janapar’s website has been launched. Check it out.
Something to add?