Tatiana Konstantinova
Exchange Student: Lottie Gammon

My name is Tanya. I was born in 1987 in Alma-Ata, a former capital of Kazakhstan. This city is surrounded with high snow mountains from 3 sides, so there is no wind and it is like in the hand of a giant. After the Soviet Union collapsed in few years we moved to Ekaterinburg - the city in Russia located on the border between Europe and Asia. When I was finishing school I thought that I want my job to be part of my life, and though I loved adventures and repairing technical things and was a really disobedient kid, I decided to listen to myself and be a documentary film director. Since 2005 I study in VGIK (Russian State Institute of Cinematography) in the workshop of Alexey Uchitel. In all of the films I try to observe and find the ways of communication between people and nature, cause I think that the nature is our home and you can find all the answers in the dialogue between her and yourself.

Film: On the Level of Water
2009 | 23 mins | UK

This film is about a couple that lives on a canal boat. They move their shelter along the flow of life looking to what's going on from the side and facing their own unique challenges.

Crew
Director Tatiana Konstantinova | Camera Tatiana Ermakova
Assistant director Sanath de Mel | Production Manager Arnaud Orford
Sound design Ilya Puzikov | Sound recordist Mike Taylor

Tatiana's experience in London
The exchange project was very useful for me. I would say this was the most complicated project I took part in. Though the experience I got is vitally important. I learned lots of things like how to deal with hard situations in the strict limits of time, how to work in a team and meet people whom I've never known before to inspire them to help to make a film. It was very hard for me to start planning exactly what and when we can film, cause we were dependent from different people all the time.

Our main character was working during the whole daylight time of the day so we had to film him either really early in the morning or during his dinner break or on holidays. This resulted to our lack of sleep and a really tough schedule, cause when our character was busy we were filming some views from the canal boat and hiding from the security guards in Paddington Basin (which was the area where we were prohibited to film and absolutely had to do that, cause at that time the boat of our character was moored there).

Also it was an experience of the collision of thoughts and the reality. This was the time when the script of our film was changing every half a day and it was a cloud of doubts and nerves connected with the sudden fears or unexpected disappearing of our main character.
The main thing I understood is that in order to make things happen you need to have a positive mood, an unbreakable intention and no doubt in certain things. Then the "magnetism" will do the rest.