It's getting almost too regular: I'm still here.

 Hi there.

I felt kind of obliged to do an update.
Of course, I am still here. It's just that I started a new day job to provide some income so I am quite occupied by that at the moment.

I still am a filmmaker by profession. That is something I will always be. But nowadays it has become really hard to make a living out of making films. About 5 years ago it still was possible. We were stuggling then too, but we managed. After that, the pond dried out, hard to catch any fisn in it.

In those times of scarcity, I had an an amazing stroke of luck and got a freelance job in the regional archives, describing and working with archival films, lots of them from before the second world war. I learned a lot about archival work and since history always was one of my interests, I really wanted to make the freelance job a steadier one. One that I could do to provide me with a steadier income ans still being able to make films. Unfortunately, that job wasn't possible at the regional archives in my province.

A little more than a month or so ago I applied for a comparable, but much more extensive job at the regional archives in the neighbouring province and... I got accepted!

So, since a week or two now, I am managing the film and video archives in the regional archives in the province of Drenthe. There is so much to learn and to do. Due to illness of my predecessor, the collection was more or less neglected for more than two years. There is a considerable backlog to be dealt with and we also have to move the archive itself to another place in the depot. A big task and I really am enjoying it. So with all that, there is little time - and I must admit also little interest in doing a lot of paper model building at this time. I hope you can forgive me for that.

Other news is that the latest film we made, ANS - The first Dutch space adventure, will be shown on the island of Texel in september and there are negotiations going on to get it on national TV. Keep your fingers crossed!
The second premiere in Groningen went great, the carillion concert was touching. Satellite of Love, Across the Universe, Rocketman, All for this film and the little satellite. The film was very well-received. There was a little Q&A afterwards and people were genuinely interested in the history of ANS. ANd a newspaper review said the film felt like "a boy's adventure book".  I remembered that backin the days we tried to get the film off of the ground, an executive producer of a TV program we tried to get involved in broadcasting the docu, told us he didn't think the subject was exciting enough to make film out of. We proved him so wrong. HA!

I do have some model plans, I want to do a bigger model (in 1/48 or larger) of the Dragon capsule and trunk, there is this little model of the Blue Origin New Shepard I still want to finish for the National Space Museum and I am working on a Triumph Sprite (Frog Eye) model which is on the workbench as we speak. All that will be postponed util I feel there is time again. But for now I really have to concentrate on my job for a while. There's so much to learn and get acquainted with...

See you soon, stay safe, healthy and from the Netherlands a heartfelt 'long live Ukraine!'

--PK