In this conversation with director Vivian Säde and producer Eve Tisler we talk about a short film we’ve been working on (named Echo and created around the monodrama Sentiment by Juliana Hall and Caitlin Vincent) in order to talk openly about all the work that goes into any creative project, even when things never actually "click" to make the project to happen. We also talk about "women filmmakers," budgets, artists and mental health and how opera on film is gatekept, among other things. YouTube version (with supplementary images): https://youtu.be/7nKWWPi-pWg A blog post talking more deeply about the EU grant escapade: https://soprano-on-the-verge.blogspot.com/2021/11/was-ist-kunst-on-bureaucracy-and-work.html Contents (add 30 seconds to accommodate intro): 00:00:00 Intro 00:00:18 The Logline 00:01:29 The First Two Years: From Test Shoot to EU Grant Escapade 00:09:28 New Beginnings: Teaming Up with Vivian 00:13:15 Eve Comes on as Producer 00:13:59 Choosing the Right Collaborators 00:16:27 A Detour with a Czech Producer 00:18:48 Women in the Film Industry 00:24:45 Echo: The Producer's Point of View 00:27:11 What IS a producer, anyway? 00:34:53 Our Estonian Experimental Film Fund Application 00:36:15 The Realities of Short Film Budgets and Paying Your Crew 00:41:21 Women Aging IN to the Film Industry 00:45:48 Artists and Mental Health 00:52:32 The Committee Evaluation of the Estonian Experimental Film Fund 00:58:36 The Particular Difficulty of Funding an Opera Film 01:02:52 Reinventing Opera, the Voice, and the point of making Echo 01:08:23 Final Thoughts (and a Final Plaint About the American Funding System) 💋👁👂🏼 Website: https://onthevergetrilogy.com/