TRAILER – Le Numéro Barbette (Patreon)

Good morning, dear patrons – I survived!

First and foremost:
Thank you all for your support last week after my "Everything Is Ruined" Doomsday Friday report. Your comments and private messages genuinely lifted my spirits and helped me rally to go into the shoot day with the resolve I needed to Get It Done.  Things went wrong – oh, how they went wrong – but we got there in the end.

This was a new dynamic for me here on Patreon. I'm used to basically writing a little about whatever project or performing adventure has been happening and that's about it. I've particularly enjoyed the amount of interaction from you folks that has happened in the comments and private messaging regarding this act creation (thank you for that too!). You all support the work that I do financially, but I was genuinely surprised and touched by the emotional support you folks offered in response to me on Friday. You made me cry (in a good way). Thank you for that.

SECONDLY – 
So. Saturday was shooting day.
Technical glitches happened. Costume malfunctions definitely happened.
But Things Were Performed, Footage Was Captured.

I'm still recovering energy-wise from the weekend (I know I will be for a while, I'm not expecting to miraculously bounce back from overreaching the way I did in the last week or two, especially) but I wanted to write a few short things for today's post and start sharing the footage I got. There's lots more to write about, but we'll start here.

This is the short trailer I cut.
Producers are humans like the rest of us. If circus producers are anything like film and television producers, they're juggling a lot of balls in the air at once (sorry, couldn't help it), have limited attention spans, and need to make decisions with ruthless efficiency. Since the full act is 8m30s, I had always planned on cutting together a short teaser. That way someone can take 60 seconds and determine very quickly if the ~ v i b e ~ of it all is right for their production.  I'll eventually share this trailer online via YouTube and my socials, but you're seeing it first.

I have the FULL ACT recording and you beautiful humans will get to watch it tomorrow.
I hope you'll all forgive me waiting one more day for ALL of it –  I need to make some small adjustments that are annoying me in the current upload. I did a rapid-fire edit and sent it to the European agent because, well, time is of the essence; there's a couple little things I want to correct at the start and end with the intro and credits that are nagging me. I'm correcting those tomorrow and re-uploading.

I also have a mid-length edit that I pulled together that I'll share with you folks this week as well. It was really challenging to parse down an EIGHT MINUTE ACT into a 60s teaser. I found it helpful to kind of hack things down to a 3m30s cut. That longer trailer includes a lot more of the up-close shots that Tig took after we'd done the 2 full runs of the act. I think it lets you appreciate the costume details more, and it certainly lets me tell more of a story than the cut-and-dry, here's-what-you're-getting-if-you-hire-this full act video. It's not something that a producer would ever watch, and I don't feel like sharing it with the wider world, so, let's call it a Patreon bonus (wheee).

I'll share the few behind-the-scenes photos I managed to snap before the day really got rolling with you this week as well.

And yes – you'll notice the title is not "Ceci N'Est Pas Une Femme".
I don't know what to say right now except 'Le Numéro Barbette' was what came out of my fingertips as I typed in the title on my video editor and it Felt Right and I'm Going With It.
There's reasons there, I just don't have the spoons today to type 'em out just yet.

Thank you all, thank you all.
Enjoy this first look, and I'm looking forward to you getting to watch the whole thing tomorrow.

XO 

Ess