Thursday 27 March 2014

Roller coaster

Life is a wonderful thing, isn't it? If you trust it and open yourself up to its infinite possibilities, you'll have an astonishing ride!

We're riding a very exciting roller-coaster right now. Quite where it will eventually take us, or how perilous it's going to be, remains to be seen, but at the moment we're having a huge amount of fun.

This afternoon we went up to the wedding venue and saw it beginning to take shape. The staging had been fitted, and loads of lights were being plugged in and tested. It was quite staggering, and a little frightening to think that everything was being done for our wedding. We're both still pinching ourselves, really. Neither of us really believe what's happening. It's like being in some sort of dream.

We went down to the edit suite in the late afternoon to see the opening sequence and our mother's duet beautifully graded and colour-balanced. They looked absolutely exquisite! The guy doing the grading was wonderfully eccentric and filled with absolute excitement about the film. He was very open about the fact that when they'd told him he was doing the project, he was a little non-plussed and slightly unimpressed, but when he saw the footage, he'd become entranced. He'd graded the Mother's duet rather darkly. It was a brave choice which I rather liked, so I asked him about it. He went into the most extraordinary monologue about how in each of the shots he'd seen shafts of light which he'd interpreted as hope, and pools of darkness which he'd interpreted as sadness. I never knew a process like grading could be viewed in terms other than, "that shot's a bit grubby, let's make it zing..." and I loved the fact that he'd treated the process with such creativity and intellectual rigour. His attention to detail shows very much in his work, which is just excellent.

At 7pm, we went up to Gray's Inn Road to film a live debate about gay marriage on Channel 4 news. The debate was kicked off with a little film they'd shot on Monday, which seemed to consist of my looking bloated and crying a lot, followed by a second film about Grindr, which is a social media site for slightly more promiscuous gay men. The two pieces were supposed to represent the two sides of gay culture, but I'm not sure they entirely worked back-to-back!

We were in the studio with a young girl columnist from the Spectator and a turd of a man called Milo, who we all felt rather sorry for. He couldn't look any one in the eye and has obviously put himself in the professional role of someone who says shocking things about gay culture for effect (and money.) He's religious and claims to be struggling with his own sexuality, but the poor lad should be in therapy, not sitting in television studios spouting spurious nonsense. It's astonishing what people will do for a "career."

It was all great fun, although I was a little insulted at the way Nathan and I were credited on screen. The girl from the spectator got to be credited as a columnist, and Milo was whatever Milo is, but we were just credited as Benjamin Till and Nathan Taylor. Like being an actor and composer respectively was somehow not quite interesting enough!!

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