.M.

We caught the 6:50am red-eye flight from Stansted and then a cab straight to the venue with half an hour to space. The International Centre for Culture and Management was built on the grounds of the Trapp Villa. The villa itself was not open to the public, now owned by the Brotherhood of the Sacred Blood, a catholic order. An order of magnitude smaller than the palaces used as sets in the film, the Trapp villa nevertheless was immediately recognisable from the front as the basis for the film. It was a very lush family home nestled amoungst the trees. A small stream runs nearby but no lake.

The property is very unobtrusive and well off the tourist map. One possible reason for this is that once the Trapp family had fled Austria, their home was acquired by Himmler, Hitler's number two and head of the SS, as his private residence. No Austrian we met had either seen the Sound of Music or knew where the real residence was.

The ICCM building was a squarish 70s style building comprising a central auditorium and monastic cells for the brothers. It had originally been designed as a place of worship but had been handed over to the Australian government for cultural activities as the brotherhood declined. I gave my talk at the altar! The building had very minimalistic decor, with many potplants tastefully arranged along the bare wooden walls. A tree sprouting from a coconut was one example.

There were about twenty participants at the school from a range of countries (Poland, Austria, Netherleands, UK, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Belgium, Slovakia, Germany).

My talk, Web3D - the future of film-making, was second on the programme and seemed to go down fairly welll. I did talk far too fast for an audience of non-native English speakers. I got some good feedback and encouragement to enter future work in the Europrix competition. Apparently the Interactive Fiction category would have been a walk-in for HfC this year (this from one of the jurors). I hadn't heard of EuroPrix before Wednesday, it's impossible to keep up with all the festivals and events.

After the talk I met up with Mich and Sophie (Mich's cousin). Sophie turned out to live only ten minutes from the Trapp Villa. We quickly decided to make that our base and stay with her instead.

On Sunday we got up late and went on a bike tour of Saltzburg. Sophie claims she came up with the idea for a Sound of Music bike tour around the town and subsequently she worked for a couple who ran this as a buisiness for a while. She certainly knew all the locations. We saw the palace on the lake used for the rear location shots - now owned by a group of Harvard Uni alumni, including the Bush family. We saw the Mozartorium, a music school used for the front of house shots. The gazebo (built for the film) used to be in the grounds of the palace on the lake but we found it transplanted to the Hellbraun, a large park nearby. We saw the abbey where external shots only were shot. The town cemetary and tombs inspired the climactic 'hidden in the crypt' sequence but no filming was actually done there. Sophie pointed out that the tombs themselves were not deep enough to hide behind gravestones. I was hoping to visit the lush grassy slopes where Maria runs from at the start of the movie but this wasn't to be as Julie Andrews was actually airlifted into the German Alps for that one.

After all that sightseeing, I returned to the summer school with Mich and attended some of the sessions. I decided to postpone my flight back to go to a day on exciting (but handy) subjects like European Commission funding. One of life's milestones passed me by on Sunday night. We had an emotional experience watching a CDROM, of all things. The work was Svetlana, an Irish student work, that documents the Chernobyl nuclear disaster by looking at its impact on the life of a local woman. The vide footage together with shocking details of the death toll and cover-up (that continues) was both highly depressing and inspiring in some perverse fashion.

All in all, I met some interesting people, found out that places like Slovakia are producing excellent content and perhaps met some future collaborators. I had time to write up the trip on the way back on September 11 as my flight was delayed by two hours. Next weekend, Switzerland.