eKaqchikel 2007 - Making Families

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Long production day yesterday. The hotel cyber café had closed by the time we had returned from dinner, so here's yesterday's update...

Completed the first two of the family dialogues today. Did the first one in the morning, but got a late start so we didn't finish until almost 12:30. The delay was due to a traje crisis.

Traje is the very colorful, traditional Maya costume. Every village has it's own distinctive traje color and pattern. It's incredibly ornate and decorative, but still daily wear for the folks here. The crisis? In the photos we took yesterday, Mario's family was dressed in their vivid blue Santa Catarina Palopó traje. The teachers we were using for the exercise today, Ix'ey and Ix'kat, showed up dressed in the traje of their own region – a very distinctive red and maroon pattern. In order to reconcile the two disparate looks, Valerie took the teachers to the market to buy a set of Santa Catarina Palopó traje for them to wear during the shoot. The trip to the market and the requisite haggling before any money is exchanged set us back a good hour. Still, the shoot went well, though we were all baking in the tropical noonday sun by the time it was finished.

The clouds started rolling in after lunch so we moved the production indoors. Marie took the hit for the team and let us rearrange her room for the dialogue shoot. The rain started just as the teachers arrived around 2pm, and unfortunately this was no simple pitter-patter drizzle. A full out downpour began and lasted for at least an hour. We were dry, but the roar of rain on the roof was deafening (or so it sounded through the headphones). Fortunately, when it ended there were no further impediments. We shot the dialogue with Tijax and Aq'abal, and wrapped up production by 4:30.

There was a lot of Photoshop magic happening around here, today, too. As I mentioned yesterday, we couldn't get a shot of a full family group to use for the family dialogue, so we shot Mario's family and left a spot to composite in the grandparents. We ran into a picturesque and willing elderly couple on the way and took pictures of them posing similar to Mario's family. When we returned to the hotel, we e-mailed the relevant photos to Gina back in the ILC and asked her to composite the "grandparents" into the photo. She returned the photo the next day, and after some tweaks from Marie, including inserting Ix'kat's face in place of Mario's wife's, we had our family.

Tomorrow we do the long family dialogue, which includes the Photoshopped family pix. So far the hotel locations have been wonderful. So long as we can keep avoiding the extraneous sounds, we're doing well.