I really enjoyed this. Was nice to have the focus entirely on Giger. I completely understand why you didn't take too much of his time up. Was great to hear him talking. Very fond of the sound clips/video clips inter-cut with the tour of the museum as well. All came together very nicely. Excellent work, Dennis.
I'm very interested in visiting the museum now. Was it busy there? How long did you stay? Was it an expensive trip?
Itinerary:
Driving from the UK Sunday afternoon (13th December)
Monday 14 th December - film Giger
Tuesday 15th December - film Museum/start return journey
Wednesday 16th December - return
As a 'handmade' film I had to cut down the cost as much as possible hence the decision to drive down and not take a flight plus the worry about having the camera equipment go missing at airports these days. I set off Sunday afternoon around 2 o'clock (13th December)
So the ferry to France and back costs £45 inc. and getting my SatNav to avoid the French toll roads and driving via Belgium through Germany to Switzerland - must have cost approx. £250 in petrol.
I had to catch some sleep in the back of the car (Ford Escort) - I took duvet and blankets for that, very cosy and warm by the way. I also took along some freshly baked bread, cheese, tomatoes, sweet red peppers (as a treat), and a small camping gas ring and my old faithful Italian cafeteria to brew fresh coffee after the few hours sleep in the back. That's the food I happily lived on for the few days trip. An email from Tim Ayling suggested I should have made a small video of the trip down, looking back I think I should have.
The trip took around 12 hours to get to Zurich and after I met up with Sebastian we both went on to Giger's place and did the interview, afterwards Sebastian had to catch the plane back and I went straight on to Gruyere and slept overnight in a car park just outside the village. I spent around 4-5 hours there. There was a steady stream of people mulling about and I remember being quite surprised about that being that time of year (15th December) - I got in free as you would imagine but the admission price was about 8 euros which seemed reasonable for the amount of work there is in there, so after the filming I did the bar.
When I first arrived in the bar I managed to catch the lunch time crowd so it was fairly busy and by the end of the filming it had pretty much cleared of people (good for doing moody shots). The Alien coffee wasn't as acidic as I expected though. I then decided to do some more filming in the museum as I started to get nervous about not having enough material from the first session so I must have spent another hour snipping shots (which I did eventually use) of other sections of Giger's collections.
After the whole filming session I started my return journey to UK that afternoon (5 o'clock).
I seem to have the total cost of getting there and back at around £300-350 - Wednesday night I was fast asleep in my own bed.
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