We have made some more videos at Jinja Honchō, and they went up on YouTube at the end of last week, so in this post I will introduce them. First, the three-minute version.
We filmed this last October, on the same day as last year’s hatsumōdë video. I talked about the process of filming in the earlier post, so I will write about the content today. It is probably better to watch the video first.
The concept was an “image video”, with no words, that gives an impression of what a jinja is like, and shows how to visit it. This is why we have establishing shots of the precincts, and of a priest and miko going about their duties. I mentioned before that the miko is actually a priest (one of my colleagues at Jinja Honchō), but the priest is actually a priest at that jinja. Permission is needed to film parts of a ceremony within the prayer hall, but because we needed to film that to show the real function of a jinja one of our conditions was finding a jinja that was happy to let us do so.
We did lots and lots of takes for the various sections. The foreign visitors kept walking too close to the centre of the sacred path, or bowing too soon, or too late, or not deeply enough. For the purification section, we had to shoot from several different angles, and we only had two cameras, so multiple takes were needed. (Also, cameras would have been in shot.) As you saw, we also got quite a bit of drone footage. You need permission to use drones at a jinja, but we had it. It did take a bit of effort to find a suitable jinja, but at least they don’t have to worry that Jinja Honchō will be annoyed if they say yes.
And then we did the editing. The professional who was doing most of the work sent us a first cut. We sent back comments. And this went around multiple times.
The biggest problem was that we wanted to show all of the etiquette, but not have the video be dominated by it. That meant several discussions of what could be cut, and requests like “Could you cut the first second and last two seconds of this bit?”. I think the final version works, and I particularly like the scenes where they turn away from the jinja after paying their respects, and nod to the “miko” on their way out.
We also made three thirty-second versions. These had different themes.
This one is the etiquette. Getting this into the time was hard, and you might notice that the video is a bit longer than thirty seconds.
This one is the jinja itself, so a bit more on the surroundings, but still showing the foreigners visiting, because that is the main point of the videos.
Finally, this one is more focused on the priest and “miko”, although the foreigners do get a cameo.
We wanted to make jinja look like places that foreign visitors to Japan would want to visit, show that they are welcome to do so, and make it clear that they are not just tourist attractions, and that they are primarily sacred spaces. That is quite ambitious for a three-minute video with no words, but I hope we have succeeded.