The Saal organ (Dutch)

documentary | title: restoration of the Saal organ | Karin Merx 2005

This documentary was the first attempt to make a longer than 3 or 4 minutes documentary. It is original 35 minutes. It started when organ builder Hans van Rossum told me about a very nice organ that he had to restore. I have a profound interest in crafts and his work as musical instrument maker. That's probably because I'm myself a classical trained musician, although not an organ player, the sound of the instrument, when well played, can deeply touch me.

I started filming when the instrument was in his workshop and completely dismantled. We did a session on the restoration of the case a session on the pipes and one when it was completed in his workshop.

For the last session we went to Saal and captured the surrounding of the church, the church itself and the inauguration concert. All was well, I thought until I started editing.

Hans van Rossum told me that they found another name and that he had to change things about the history he told in one of the first filming sessions. No problem I thought we re-record that entire part, and so we did. But, the timing of his voice was different and the sound did not match quite as good as I hoped for. But in my edit I solved most of the problems, although there still was a difference between the sound of the first session and the re-recorded one. Well I thought, we have to accept it. Learned a lesson here.

The second problem arose when the music that was recorded for a cd, came to me. The problem was that the organ player had a different timing in his recorded music for cd than what I recorded with the concert. In the edit I had to find ways to solve the problem what seemed to be working well in the end.

The documentary still is an important document for me, and I still like it although there are a few things I will do differently next time.