And since Bob could not make it to Beirut, it was the fist time we were going to perform it together in its finished form (in the fall, there were «work in progress» performances at the Guelph Jazz Festival and at the Transart Festival in Bolzano in Italy) We were extremely well prepared. When I was back from Beirut, I started to rehearse with the recorded music I had. I sent a dvd of one of my rehearsal to Bob so that he could also rehearse by himself. It was the first time in 6 years of Living Cinema that e went through such an intense process of preliminary rehearsals. In San Francisco, the day before the performance, we did two full rehearsals of the piece. Everything fell in place easily, no bad surprise due to the fact that we were suddenly together for the first time since a while. Our complex cue system linked to timers on our computers worked easely. The performance was good, the public was happy, the people of the Festival and of the Museum were happy and our friends were happy. So it seems we are going to start booking this performance.

After this performance, I went to the Victoriaville New Music Festival to do video mixing for Joane Hétu's piece Filature. We had been doing this for the first time lasr year at Usine C in Montreal. I had been involved on this piece very late in the process and it did involve a lot of work (one hour and a half of video). So when all the musicians (10 of them) and the dancers were all ready for the public performance after weeks of rehearsing, I felt that I was sort of two weeks late behind everybody else. Considering my late involvement and the enormity of the task, I was quite happy with what I succeeded to do. But still it was a bit frustrating of not being able to go through the complete process. So I was quite happy that we were doing it again in Victo, this would give me the occasion to be really prepared for the public performance and make my part of the piece really the way I wanted. I had to make many changes because, there were no dancers this time (the video work for the first part of the piece relied a lot on the interactions between my animated images and the dancer) and the overall length of the piece was much shorter. So I had to redo the accompanying dvd (the piece was based on a combination of pre-recorded material on a DVD with sections I could reset to the live music using a chapter system and live video mixing using pre-animated material that was stored in my computer, which allowed a much closer synchronisation to the music) but still I had a lot of time to rehearse on my own and with the musicians. Si here again, I was as prepared as I could and the result music wise and video wise was very succesful, I believe. Again rehearsing really made a difference. It seems that for me this last season was really about reheasing like it never was before.

After Filature was done, I felt really releived after a very intense winter and no travel or performance in the near future, but I had to put myself to work right away to finish my new film Herqueville that I had left aside since last summer. I will elaborate on this in a later post. The reason for being suddenly in a rush to finish this film was that the DVD set of my films that was being produced by the NFB (National film Board of Canada) was finally ready and that there is a plan to do something special at the Festival du Nouveau Cinéma (Festival of New Cinema) next October. So I really want Herqueville to be ready for the Festival.