Blog thoughts

The Cathedeal in Siena, Tuscany, my photo.

If you are a subscriber to this blog, you might have noticed that I have been posting less frequently lately. This was not only because I was on a holiday trip in Tuscany, Italy, for two weeks. It was also because I have been thinking about what direction to take with the blog.

8 months after starting this adventure, with the help of my young friend and webmestre Kim Gjerstad, I was feeling both overextended and a little confused. Publishing twice weekly in both English and French was taking too much time, and I found myself tempted to do too much: review significant new docs, do my best help stir up debate about different issues, report on my own work – all this while maintaining good picture quality and occasionally inserting videos. Some of this activity was the result of good feedback: people seem to appreciate the blog and urge me to cover things. But it was getting out of hand and starting to get in the way of my work.

So I took advantage of my holidays to think about where to go with the blog. By serendipity I picked up a special issue of the progressive French paper Libération on fiction writers. There was an article where several writers talked about how they use their blogs – mainly as ‘carnets de bord,’ a sort of log book, a scrap book on the side, a place to talk about things that don’t necessarily fit into whatever they happen to be writing but need to be said. This brought me back to my original intent with the blog: to share my own experiences and thoughts on documentary filmmaking. So from now on I will write mainly about films I see and people in meet in the course of my regular activities, and of course about my own work. On occasion I will continue to use the blog as a tool to satisfy my own curiosity – I have enjoyed doing that and it has led to some interesting cyber-encounters.

I welcome your comments.