Mark Treon and I sat down for a conversation about Romania on 7/8/15, in my studio. Mark has been coming to Romania since 1991, has made over 30 trips to the country and has also adopted a child here, which has bound him even closer to the country. He is now renovating three Saxon homes in the village of Richis and plans to turn them into an inn.
This is the tenth episode of “Romania Through Their Eyes”, a show featuring interviews with foreigners living in Romania. The show’s purpose is to get their impressions about the country and to start a dialogue which will lead to a greater understanding of the issues facing Romanians and Romania.
Music: “Ballade no. 4 in F minor, Op. 52” by Frederic Chopin, performed by Frank Levy. Track is public domain, obtained from Musopen.org.
Four years and two months after the first interview with Tom Lovelock, we sit down for a second time and talk about Romania.
Tom Lovelock is a retired sales manager for Jaguar and an ex-policeman from the UK, who moved to Romania together with his wife five years ago (at the time of filming this episode).
This is the ninth episode of “Romania Through Their Eyes”, a show featuring interviews with foreigners living in Romania. The show’s purpose is to get their impressions about the country and to start a dialogue which will lead to a greater understanding of the issues facing Romanians and Romania.
Music: “Ballade no. 4 in F minor, Op. 52” by Frederic Chopin, performed by Frank Levy. Track is public domain, obtained from Musopen.org.
Episode eight of RTTE is now live on YouTube. This month you’ll see Debbie Stowe, a British journalist, who’s been living in Romania for the past 9 years and has found her home, her partner and her career here.
Episode seven of my interview series, Romania Through Their Eyes, is now live and can be seen on my YouTube channel. It’s an interview with Odessa Toma, an American from Louisiana who married a Romanian and moved to Romania. The interview recounts their story and the sacrifices they’ve made and are making in order to live in the country with their three children, two girls and one boy.
I’m happy to present to you the much awaited sixth episode of Romania Through Their Eyes, the first episode of the show’s second season — an interview with Damian Galvin, a Brit who left behind a job as a Design Manager at Aston Martin in order to live in Romania.
Damian moved to Romania four years ago and lives near Brasov where he manages properties (his own and those of his clients). He travels frequently through Romania to manage the various properties, and he also “commutes” between Romania and the UK, to keep his affairs there in order as well.
I’d initially planned to release this episode at the start of the month; busy schedules and editing issues intervened. However, the episode is so interesting that it’s worth the wait!
One last thing: the first season was broadcast in 720p. With this second season, I’ve started to broadcast in 1080p.
This (long-awaited) episode presents the story of Paul Hemmerth, a Saxon born and raised in Romania during Ceausescu’s regime, who emigrated to Germany with his family at the age of fourteen, and who came back, drawn inexplicably by the land of his birth, to spend as much time as he can, each year, in the Romanian countryside.
Paul has a website called SlowlyPlanet, where he promotes slow tourism — travel at a leisurely pace, where you can take in all that you see. We filmed the episode at Casa Noah, his B&B in Richis (Reichesdorf), a village near Medias in Southern Transilvania.
Various occurrences (some of which couldn’t be helped) delayed the release of this episode. The hard drive on my editing computer died, and the repairs took almost a week. We also had some scheduled travel abroad, and that delayed us by another week. Further shooting for the episode introduced an extra day or so to the workflow, and the extra editing time introduced by the show’s new format added another three full days to the schedule.
I really do hope you’ll enjoy the new format. It’s a lot more work for me during the filming and especially during the editing, because of the two-camera setup, but it makes the show more engaging. Just to give you a quick idea of the data behind the show, the raw footage comes to about 44 GB of 1080p video. The final version of the episode is 4.3 GB of 720p video, and it’s about 55 minutes long.
There’s an official Facebook page for the show, so head on over and give it a Like if you want to be kept up to date with day-to-day details about the filming of RTTE. There’s also an official website for the show. Also don’t forget to subscribe to my YouTube channel, where the show’s episodes are posted, along with other interesting videos I create.
I published the fourth episode of Romania Through Their Eyes late last night. It’s an interview with an American, Chuckk Hubbard, who’s from Philadelphia.
Chuckk’s story is interesting, because he chose to come to Romania to be with his Romanian wife, Irina Hasnas. They met while in college. Irina was there on a Fulbright scholarship, and Chuckk was studying music composition. At the end of their studies, Irina had to return to Romania (it was stipulated in the contract of her scholarship), and Chuckk came with her. They’ve now been here for almost four years, and in the interview, Chuckk talks about his experiences during that time.
I need to apologize because some fragments of the video are out of focus. It was a camera malfunction which I didn’t notice until the editing stages, weeks after the shoot. Unfortunately there is no way to adjust focus in post-production, although it would certainly be a very useful feature for any piece of software.
On a more fun note, has anyone noticed a pattern in the release dates for the show’s episodes?
