Credits:
Produced for: Dallas Museum of Art
Filming, Editing and Music: Ted Forbes
Assistant, Audio: Neil Sreenan
Interview: Laura Bruck
Behind the Scenes
Olafur Eliasson is a major name in the art world combining scientific phenomenon, conceptual thinking and a wonderful sense of light to his sculptural works. He’s best known for the Weather Project at Tate Modern and the Waterfalls in Brooklyn, NY.
In November of 2008 the Dallas Museum of Art hosted his traveling exhibition, Take Your Time. As a promo for this exhibit I got the wonderful oppertunity to do several video pieces with Olafur and his assistant Felix Hallwachs from Studio Olafur in Berlin. Olafur was in the midst of a pretty hectic schedule as he was only in town a short time and working on several projects in addition to giving a public talk. As I recall, we had about an hour to film the entire interview. Neil Sreenan was running audio and Laura Bruck was coming off maternity leave to do the interview.
As it turned out, the gallery representing Eliasson took him to Arlington to view the new Dallas Cowboy Stadium which Olafur had been commissioned a piece for. Arlington is quite a drive and I’m not sure the time was accounted for. Olafur didn’t arrive until 45 min into our time slot. This left us with 15 min to get the film produced. On top of that, no one had fed the poor guy (it was about 3:00 at this point), and he felt our interview was too close to material covered in the exhibition catalogue.
At this point with almost no time left, we decided to kill several birds with one stone. The Museum has a cafe – so the best we could do at this point was to go get some food, setup the cameras and have a casual conversation and get it recorded.
The whole thing was done in the remaining 10 minutes before Olafur was taken off to do a TV spot at KERA. The interview ended up being perfect for what we were putting together. I think this is a reminder that sometimes you can be over prepared. There is a ton of preparation that goes into doing video work. You have to have your location, lighting and sound all prepared and ready so the people you’re shooting can be relaxed and laid back. In this case, we had to completely toss everything and improvise. The cafe has a huge atrium window and the light happened to be just right. It was crowded (the King Tut exhibit was underway), but we did find some space that worked well.
Sometimes accidents don’t turn out so bad.