Trailer for the Blue Sea Film Festival

11 Aug, 2023, No comments

The Blue Sea Film Festival in Rauma has become one of my favourite film festivals in Finland. People who organise this festival are so easy going and friendly that we made a lasting bond. This year they celebrate their 30th anniversary and I had a chance to make a simple video trailer for their social media profiles. Rauma festival is noticeable for happening in the very beautiful city of Rauma, for having 35 mm night screenings of the Finnish classic films e.g. from the directors Kaurismäki. Festival also hosts a short film competition "The Baltic Herring".

Production of the book cover

6 Jun, 2023, No comments

This spring I had to produce a cover for the new book that will be published by publishing house "Paperiporo", translator Mirja Hovila. It will be an anthology of Latvian poetry in Finnish language. It will contain poetry from six contemporary poets. Therefore the title of the book will be "Fime men in boat". I arranged photo shoots of six poets in Latvia. Photographer was Valdis Jansons. Pictures will be included in the book as well as will be used during promotion of the book when it is published.

New corporate promo video for LKOS

6 Dec, 2022, No comments

Two Helsinki based lawyers - Liene and Oscari - were ready to throw themselves out of their daily routine and comfort zone and go for a new audiovisual representation of their law office. After planning, after some test shooting in Helsinki and monitoring the weather forecast, we did shoot it. It was so much fun that we went out one another day to get even more sunny shots. The result is something I am very happy with. But the most important thing was to work with very open and creative people. End of the video animation was a fun challenge as my task was to visually show what four letters of LKOS stand for.

Small story about two choirs

1 Dec, 2022, No comments

In November 2022 I had an opportunity to travel to Loimaa and observe through my video camera how two choirs are getting ready for their concerts. One choir is the Finnish-Latvian choir "Ziemeļmeita. The second choir is "Atzele" from Alūksne in Latvia. Both choirs are preparing and gaining strength for the Latvian Song and dance Festival in 2023. In the video there are also three interviews.

Meeting Greg Sestero in Tallinn

29 Nov, 2022, No comments

In October 2022 I had an amazing opportunity to visit Tallinn and meet Greg Sestero. He is actor and producer. He became famous as actor in the cult film "The Room". This film has had the lowest rating on the IMDB therefore it is often considered as the worst movie ever made.

I shot interview with Greg. Intreview was moderet by Diana Sus. It was shot for Kino Kults who organised shows of "The Room" in Baltics.

Visiting Ventspils in a while

9 Nov, 2022, No comments

In October 2022 I had a rare opportunity to visit Ventspils in Latvia. Filming purpose. Translator Mirja Hovila from Finland was about to recieve an award for her translations of the Latvian literature into the Finnish language. Mirja was awarded the Silver Ink-Pot award. I did a short video for the Finnish audience on the behalf of her publishing company "Paperiporo". Name stands for the "Paper Reindeer".

Getting in to the final selection at the Uneton 48

8 Oct, 2022, No comments

This year I took part at the Uneton48 short film festival. It was successful and inspiring year as our film was selected and showed among finalists. Name of our team was "JAVA Productions". JAVA stands for the first names of Janis and Valdis.

Shooting of our Uneton48 short film in 2022 — Actor Eriks Krumins and director of photography Janis Kirpitis on the shooting set. hoto: Valdis Jansons

The whole experience this year was very interesting. As the whole idea of Uneton48 is to produce a short film within 48 hours, our team wasn't really sure about which creative direction to take. Luckily we met Latvian poet Krista Anna Lazdāne (Belševica) who agreed to try to write a poem according to the topic we would recieve as a result of Uneton's draw.

Name of the poem and our short film is "Everything That Is Yellow, Is not Gold". Film was shot in Raaseborg, in Finland. Actor Eriks Krumins. Original music by Diana Sus in Iceland (Spotify profile of Diana).

Some people ask technical details. Well, we shot film on the BlackMagic Ursa Mini 4K, mainly in ProRes 10 bit color codec. Ursa is a great camera for short films.

Video report about Loimaa project

31 Aug, 2022, No comments

Video report about the Latvian Days in Loimaa in Finland. Turn on English subtitles, captions.

Exciting work with Latvian - Finnish choir "Ziemeļmeita"

14 May, 2022, No comments

Latvian - Finnish choir Ziemeļmeita asked me to come up with some social media video to promote their spring concert in Helsinki in 2022. As a result of very creative and fruitful cooperation, two short videos were produced.

Livonian poetry and my Kolka roots

15 Oct, 2020, No comments

In Autumn 2020 I had a pleasure to record this video of Livonian poetry. Since my grandmother was from Kolka, Latvian town being part of the Livonian coast, was interesting to meet poet Baiba Damberga. I also found it very exciting being able to understand something in Livonian - thanks to my Finnish language skills. Poem was translated by the Finnish poet Olli Heikkonen who reads this same poem in the second part of the video.