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I'm not finished here, yet...



I'll be back.

...The last stand of our intrepid collegiate hero as filmmaker in training...

Our film project screening was tonight. It was the last official thing I had to do as a college student. I suppose now is a time for reflection.

My, what a way to go out...

This last week of project work was mad with intensity. As crunchtime began to creep in on us, we felt the need to shoot more and more. We had plenty of footage for what eventually became the finished film. However, our time spent in this city lead us to other interesting locals for particular shots.

And then, of course, there was the tagging.

One evening last week, Kelly and Sean headed one direction and I in the other. I wanted to come home and tweak my basic timeline (which was seriously revised for the final film), but they had a few specific shots that the needed to pick up. On their way back to the apartments, they began discussing the idea of tagging The Wall at Mauerpark as an intro to Kelly's section.

This idea was perfect.

This idea also inadvertently sealed the graffiti motif around which our film was built. It also gave me a natural transition from what became the final edit of my section and Kelly's section.

It's so refreshing when things like that happen.

The thing that I know that I most need to work on is sound editing. Our mics were crap, which is a shame because I spent a decent amount of money on mine. Maybe it's not a problem with the mic? Maybe it's the input in my camera? I'm not sure. I just know that our film would have been much better if we had better sound equipment.

But, hey...at least we finished the film.

I think it played well. I was really rather surprised by that. I had absolutely no problems with Kelly's part, Sean's part, or Dung's part. I was rather unsatisfied with my visuals, voice-over, etc. I did, however, like my soundtrack. I'm glad that I was able to include two of my current favorite songs in our little project (Arcade Fire's "Keep the Car Running" which opened things and DeVotchKa's "How It Ends" to close out the film). Those songs have continuously fit my moods over the past couple of months.

And "Keep the Car Running," in particular, stands out because I have a very personal reaction to it. It reminds me of so many things. I recall most vividly those long Oklahoma summer nights which I spent alone driving around in my little Dodge Neon with a Pepsi and a stack of good CDs...just driving and listening and watching the radio tower lights flash and storms rolling across the plains.

It's a song that constantly reminds me of all of the good parts about being alive.

Therefore, I had to include that song in a film about "memory."

And so now I sit here on my bed in my little former East Berlin apartment preparing for one last grand adventure before I depart from Deutschland. I am nervous. My stomach is a mess. But I feel good.

I feel hopeful.

I don't think that I'm finished with living in Germany. Who knows? But it's one of several possibilities to consider...

So for the time being, I will shift my thoughts from memories to possibilities and I will smile.

Wish me luck!

...Journal Entry of Frustration...

Project updates are supposed to be fun. I'm suppose to write about our progress and how things are coming together. I'm sure that the four of us all have the basic shapes of our movie pieces put together. We have things scripted. We have written. And so it has happened, as it has happened so many times before for me, that we have hit quite a large snag.

My hard drive has started to crap out on me.

We have almost all of our footage captured, and we were going to put together large chunks of our movie tonight. However, it seems that this will not be happening. This evening, I'm going to have to figure out a way to recover our footage so that we don't fall too far behind.

I really wish that technology would actually give you a warning before it screws up.

Where is the "Danger Will Robinson! Danger!" of our youth?

In other news:
I will be working on some sequence editing once we are able to access the footage. I may also try to help Sean out with recording his voice-over parts. The idea is that we are going to put together his sequences first, so he can get a feeling for the flow of the scene and thus will know how quickly or slowly to speak.

I want to get the bookends finished by Tuesday night.

I need to do some talking head stuff either on Monday or Tuesday. We will have to see which one is the most open.

I'm kind of frustrated right now and not completely satisfied with my footage, or with technology. As such, I'm lacking any sort of proper transitions from topic to topic.

The film we watched this week, Me Boss, You Sneaker, was an anarchic comedy which lampooned asylum seekers, immigrants, and those living in the country to which these people have come. We had a very good discussion about this film and the readings in the class. More people than usual spoke up, and I was really happy about that. We discussed the idea of the "melting pot" and assimilation, diversity of specific countries and/or cities, and characterization was a key component of discussion. Where people playing the roles or were people actually becoming the characters? This particular concept was best shown in the change of the kid in the movie and the way in which he changed his own identity and self-identified as the son of the non-parent Dudie, even as they were about to be deported.

For me, this raises a whole series of questions regarding identity, how people self-identify, and how people would identify other people. I read somewhere that only 2% of people in the States self-identify as vegetarian, and only about 5% of those self-identify as vegan. Of that 2% that self-identify as vegetarian, I would probably say that there is a sizable chunk of that percentage who some people would not at all consider vegetarian because they eat fish/seafood, or chicken when that's the only option available to them.

I actually had these thoughts in class...I dunno why. I'm probably crazy.

...Lola ran and ran until she hit the wall...

I have been a cinema studies major in some capacity or another since 2002, when I entered into the University of Oklahoma and decided to myself "You don't want to be an English major. Your passion is not here. Always remember the trash compactor."

And so, I undertook the course of study that is sending me careening headlong toward a Graduation Without a Clue of What To Do Next™.

This week's viewing of Lola Rennt has brought me somewhat full-circle in that the third film that I watched in my first film class was this particular film. It is only fitting that it is the second-from-last film that I watch as I close out my college career is the same.

Spirals. Circles. A vortex.
All of these things connote a certain idea of repetition. It is this repetition that gives the a movie life. Without repetitions with slight variations, there would be no movies. This is only one of several ways in which this film nods to the history of the pictures.

The spiral motif harkens back to one of the cinema's earliest predecessors, the zoetrope. This particular link also underscores the cinema's direct relationship to its cousin, animation. Whereas you have a succession of pictures flickering past to create motion and thus a movie, you have a succession of cells flickering past to create a cartoon.

And films are just as real as a cartoon.

I know that Jean Luc Godard once said that cinema is truth at 24 times a second. But he also said that every edit is a lie. I'm not trying to discredit one of the cinema's chief provocateurs, I'm just saying that there is no truth in the cinema, especially when the act of putting together a film is akin, at least according to the later of Godard's statements, to the act of compulsive lying.

Just something to think about, I suppose.

How does this affect our present work on our short films? Kelly, Sean, and I have had a couple of discussions based on our screening and the assigned reading regarding Tykwer's film, and skipping over the spiral motif, Sean has decided to use the idea of Tykwer's vision of Berlin in his film somewhat. It's true, we aren't really able to discern which part of Berlin is which. I suppose the idea is to show Berlin as one not necessarily homogenous whole. Thus we have shot quite a bit of footage at various places around the city in order to piece together a patchwork film that evokes place. The things we have shot span the spectrum of this city, from the subtle nooks to the mundane sites that all the tourists see. We hope that our film will evoke place quite clearly. That, however will be decided by our classmates.

This past Sunday, I played around with the idea of using The Wall at Mauerpark as a cinematic canvas, referencing Jürgen Böttcher's Die Mauer. I walked along the wall with my camera trying to capture as much color as I could, as much graffiti as I could, as much art as I could. I panned across the field, people running across the hill playing with their dog, the flea market down below. And then something quite unexpected happened.

I found a story.

I will hopefully be able to work this story into our film. I'm sure that we can make it work.

...Snow, Film, Film Talk, Coffee Talk (The peanut is neither a pea, nor a nut...discuss)...

And so this is the process of making films, huh? This weekend, I had planned on going out and shooting a lot in and around the city. I had been trusting the weather reports as accurate and so I naturally assumed that Saturday would be sunny and cold with a high of 38 degrees.

I was wrong.

As I set out with my camera and the tripod, the rain started. The rain quickly turned to freezing rain. So I turned around and put my camera back in my apartment before turning around to head back out into the weather. I eventually got to Alexanderplatz before the weather said "You shall go no further." I then took the really cool picture which I have posted here (and have subsequently set as my desktop wallpaper on Sputnik Bob, my laptop).

There were flashes of lightning and crashes of thunder. I was impressed.

But still, no more footage shot.

The following day I woke up and actually did shoot some of the snowfall from my bedroom and from the balcony of the apartment. If we'll be able to use it is anyone's guess really. I also went to CineStar and watched Stardust, which is an adaptation of a Neil Gaiman novel. It was okay. After the film, I snapped a photograph of the red carpet inside of the theater (upper left photo in this post). I hadn't noticed that they have bits of screenplay on it.

Today I bought lightbulbs for all of the lights in our apartment. If we are going to shoot talking heads confessionals indoors, then we must have decent enough lighting. And, we have no lighting rig. I wanna shoot some of my stuff outdoors, but weather may not be cooperative. But we do have to have contingency plans in place, thus the lightbulb purchases.

A couple of weeks ago, I was really struck by how difficult the undertaking of the original film idea would have been. I started thinking about this when we watched Eine Berliner Romanze, in which the two principal characters represent East and West Berlin. The film did a passable job of showing each of the characters flirting with the "other side." I realize the only reason why this film did a credible job of personifying the city is because it was made by people who actually knew the city. The four of us in the group do not know the city. We are slowly becoming acquainted with it, but that is all we are doing. Berlin will be our acquaintance.

This is probably the main reason why I feel that the direction our film has taken is so right. We, each of us, will be covering our experiences in different ways, all under the auspices of character development and understanding. Thus the book-end structure of the film will make sense.

I'm getting excited to see how this takes shape.

Berlin, thus far for me, has been about getting in touch with the somewhat dormant seeds of creativity within myself. I haven't been going out and being as sociable as I would have liked, but I have had a small outpouring of creative ideas that I just know that I will be able to use in some capacity. I've been daydreaming with a purpose. I have made and remade our film in my head 15 times a day it seems like.

While I haven't had the most successful time in Berlin in developing confidence in myself, I have been laying the ground work for my declaration to the world that "I WANT MY CRAYONS BACK!" I want to color outside the lines. I want to let the colors bleed out and go where they want to go.

Seriously, I am about (thisclose) to invoking The Muse in order to write a funny, thrilling, and tragic Good vs. Evil story in whatever genre fits my mood at the moment.

Perhaps I will mix and match my genres. Who knows?

In other news:

I got into a discussion with a couple of people about Der Himmel über Berlin. We were stating our likes and dislikes about the film, and I was delving into some of the structural elements of the film (use of the sky as unifier and its implication for angels, use of color and black and white to denote the presence of angels, etc). And then one of the people with whom I was speaking noted that she just didn't like all of the people only worrying about these great existential questions. Why isn't there someone on one of the trains worrying about whether or not they left the burners on, she asked.

I have been thinking about that. The angels hear all, which is sort of shown by the ambient score of the film (choir of whispers). But they choose the people to whom they would like to listen. This happens, of course, for a couple of reasons. First of all, they are angels - sentient spiritual beings who are concerned with the deeper workings of humankind. Secondly, judging by their own dialogue with each other, they are filled with a certain existential angst. They are fed up with their stations in eternity and want to experience life (thus Damiel orders his first cup of coffee black...bitter, bitter black). Finally, and some would say more importantly, they are German angels. They are philosophical German angels. Pair this with the angst that they have, and it is no wonder then that they only listen to the people with some deep and serious shit going on.

In Thorsten's class we went to Sachsenhausen. I broke down completely at one point and was not expecting that. I talked to my friend Matt about this and he was surprised at my reaction. He said he had a hopeful reaction when he went to Dachau. He then pointed out that I should probably not go to a camp in Poland where they "got shit done," in his words.

Regardless of the severity of the camp, it still wasn't right. And the fact that these things happened, and some things like that continue to happen, hurts me on a very deep, very basic level.

I have been a bit lax about posting in my production journal this past week (read: no posts at all). I'm not sure why that is. I'm no angel, but even so my own existential angst should have no bearing on my output.



More to come...

...Hey Walter, Long Time No See...

I find it interesting that we have come back to Walter Benjamin in Thorsten's class. I spent quite a while reading him in a film theory class I took several years ago at the University of Oklahoma. Now he's back. Caroline Wiedmer's article directly references the essay which I had to read.

Snazzy.

...hey...

Read this...

That article is like a hug for movies.