The Roast Rooster: How We Made a New Film :). We’ve released a new film about transiting the Panama Canal on a sailing yacht! We tell you about the totem animal that helps us live, create, and actually get something done.
The captain’s and my totem animal is the roast rooster. The one that pecks you in a certain well-known place.
The Roast Rooster
Ours isn’t particularly wild and mostly sleeps, but when it does wake up, watch out. In my youth, my roast rooster woke up twice a year—during exam season. The day before an exam, it would leap up and crow, “Cock-a-doodle-doo! Lie on your side and rule!”—and in a single night I would somehow manage to learn half the exam topics, tackling the other half in the corridor outside the classroom. I would go to my “Golgotha” among the last.
Our totem animal is the best motivator, generator of ideas, and kick up the backside. Without it, I’d never have amounted to anything. I wouldn’t have passed my exams with top marks or smoked half a pack of cigarettes in a night while sipping my eighth mug of instant coffee. I’d be switching from summer to winter tyres by March, and stocking up on cucumbers for pickling once they’d started looking like marrows.
YouTube Channel
Now to the point :). As well as the roast rooster, we have a round-the-world YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/travelyfamily (subscribe, and don’t say later that you weren’t warned 🙂
At first, we filled it with little sketches, in the spirit of: “Maybe we should finally edit a film?”—“Well, we could, sometime...” A month later, the conversation would resume with the same result.
But then, by sheer chance, we found ourselves in the same place as the internet (this was in Colombia, on Islas del Rosario). There I discovered that submissions for the My Planet Awards closed in four days. Deciding that, as an author for the portal, it would no longer be fair to submit written pieces to the competition, I found the “Amateur Travel Video” category and came bounding over to Andryukha with my laptop:
“Look, look! We could make a film called ‘How to Set Off on a Round-the-World Voyage’ and enter it in the competition.”
“How much time do we have?”
“Well...”
The First Film
There were four days left before submissions closed. Four days to plough through four years of yacht-kids-sea footage, pick out the bits that didn’t shake, make a film from scratch, sail to Cartagena to find internet capable of handling video, and upload it...
What did we have on our side? The roast rooster, and the fact that Andrey had just downloaded an editing program, though he had no idea how to use it.
Needless to say, we saw almost nothing of Islas del Rosario. We didn’t see our pillows, the children, or even the food they carried to us in their little beaks.
That’s how we made our first film. It didn’t win a prize, but it did reach the final :). And we moved up to the next level of filmmaking.
...At that very moment, another totem animal raised its head—the perfectionist woodpecker.
The Perfectionist Woodpecker
Over the course of a year, we filmed a loooot of beautiful places and interesting people, from Colombia to Tahiti. And one day, diving into terabytes of footage, I discovered that I couldn’t film for shit. We released two short, fun films on YouTube—A Day Aboard a Yacht in the Ocean and Crossing the Equator: Neptune Visits Travely-Family—and headed out into the Pacific, where the internet ran out. Completely. Once every couple of weeks, the subject would resurface:
“So, maybe we should finally edit a film?”—“Well, we could, sometime...” And then: “Write the script BEFORE filming, not afterwards”...
I even sketched out something about the Panama Canal, while Andryukha assembled snippets of footage. And then we dissolved into Polynesia.
Tahiti
And then the guys from Blagovestiye generously shared their own fast internet connection with us. On 12 October, I happened to see a banner on the MP website saying “My Planet Awards,” and, trusting that there was about a month to go until the final, I opened the terms and conditions. Submissions closed on 15 October.
I dashed over to the captain:
“Look, look! We could make a film called ‘The Panama Canal, French-Style’ and enter it in the competition.”
“How much time do we have?”
“Well...”
Allowing for the time difference, there were three days left. And my number-one totem animal shoved the perfectionist woodpecker into a corner.
Realising there was no bloody way we’d finish in time, I turned enormous eyes on the captain:
“Oh, come on, it’ll be brilliant! We can make it in time!”
To my surprise, the captain said, “I need a script,” and opened the editing program.
The Rooster’s Victory over the Woodpecker
You ask us what Tahiti was like? We never went to any Tahiti :). We spent a week using the internet so generously bestowed on us by Max and Natasha to clear the backlog of things we needed to do, and then... the roast rooster pecked us again: submit a film in three days. We saw nothing but the monitor.
I fell asleep in the middle of the night right there at the table, treacherously abandoning the captain to review, cut, adjust, and recalculate. Before that, my woodpecker had been hammering away in his ears, saying that the voice-over needed rerecording and that there were loads of problems with the sound. But my eyes were closing against my will, while the captain’s eyes promised nothing good.... Anyway, Andryukha went to bed at seven in the morning, having first uploaded the sixteen-minute film to YouTube.
And I’m afraid to watch it in case I get upset :). Because the roast rooster pecks you in that well-known place, just as it did in my youth, at the very last moment. It ought to do it well in advance. As for the woodpecker, it keeps tapping at my temple: “You should have cleaned up the mistakes, rerecorded the voice-over, evened out the music...” and another 150 details.
But overall, in the company of the fat caterpillar of laziness and the perfectionist woodpecker, we would never have made any films. Not a single one. If not for him, the roast rooster.
Now for the main thing—on the My Planet website, the film: “The Panama Canal, French-Style”
And here it is on our YouTube channel: How to Transit the Panama Canal on Someone Else’s Yacht without Suffering—and Quite the Opposite.
The stages, special features, and bottlenecks.
And this film is also about how, at seventy-five, life is only just beginning.
May everyone have a dream—and see it come true!