SHTUM Project

The intervals of postings getting longer and longer and I´m very sorry for that. Since the last post I was involved in some projects which are not that exciting that they could me hold me from posting. But maybe it´s just a little shift in my life that change from actual shooting to more editing work. In the end the results havn´t any publishing rights or still not worth posting it.

To mention is the monthly videopodcast of Aquera´s MRGN Show, which is a monthly talk for mostly IT/Programmers people. It´s held in Berlin from 9-10 a.m. and it´s on twitter or you can find it here.

The other project was an no-budget shortfilm which starts very promising but unfortunatly got stucked in the lack of production failures. It was a dream-surrealistic story in which I was involved as cameraman and I was using slow-motion to the context of create a spheric and illusional reality. Here some pics of the shooting:

One of the sunniest days and a spontainous decision to go on a raft.

Hold on to the raft

Waves and stiletto shoes

Sony FS100 with Canon FD Lenses

cooling down... shooting was almost over...

Another day in paradise

In the end the shooting was quite funny, if you like to improvise on the same day with location and cast. I was expecting that these factors would be fixed by production begin, but unfortunately they weren´t. So in the end the director canceled the shooting and the project was put on hold until an unknown future. For me it was kind of disappointing to waste time for a lack of quality that couldn´t achieve any standard, not to mention a high standard,  in the first place by missing organisation. But these kind of experiences will happen if you are in no-budged film, and especially in Berlin it happens quite often.

After a few months I was able to take the Raw-Material and edit some kind of trailer out of it. I used some aged-film-filter on it and produced some filmburn-effects for transitions, which to be honest, was simple done by filming with an dslr without lens, torchlight and colored foils.

Upcoming Projects will be announced shortly, it´s about peoples restauration of an abandoned building to create a place for the community and my personal project which I will start to develop this year. Stay tuned.

HATZ Trailer released

Remember my post from the HATZ shooting? If not click here, if you do I can show you the trailer to that shooting that took place in November 2013.For me it was an experiment with FD-Lenses on a DSLR and the style of overexposure.  For marketing reasons the complete short will be shown on festivals only, that´s why just the trailer is in the net. So here it is:

Today I can present a short Emo-doku clip that I shot for the strategic communication agency Greenkern in Berlin. I´ve mentioned Greenkern before, but was never able to show some results in due of the internal usage of the projects. So here are some kind of emotional eventclip of cake & bakery workshop of Conditorei Coppenrath & Wiese.

The Fast Good Cheap Pattern - A Guide to Understand Film Production for your Client

From time to time as a freelancer I encounter a specific attitude by some special costumers. Mostly they don´t have a clue how exactly film production works. They come up with the idea of an Image-film for example, which contains voice overs, actors and spectacular camera movement and which is produced in less than four days and of course cheap as possible....

This is where you can either minimize your profit to almost zero and describe the project as no-budget and hire people for free, get on a blacklist of your crew and aim for bankrupt within a year or you explain your costumer why his idea of filmproduction won´t work...

This is leading you to the Fast-Good-Cheap-Pattern. In theory you have three options to produce a film, but only two options will work together. So you have to make a choice. You can adopt this model to any other creative product whether a book, a illustration or photography.

Produce fast and cheap the film won´t be good.

Produce cheap and good, the film won´t be fast in production.

Produce good and fast, the film won´t be cheap in production.

So what does that mean in detail?


Fast + Cheap = Crapy Movie

If you produce fast and cheap, you have make fast decisions in order of casting and rental equipment. Maybe you hire equipment at the low price rental, than you have to expect that the camera has damaged output jacks or the lenses have scratches, the tripod is broken or the lights are not in safe condition to work with. 

You can´t make proper decision for locations whether of the availability or if it´s suitable in production (industrial working noise, no electricity, no bathrooms, no shooting permissions). In other words, you get the hell of stress by shooting it, not to mention the editing part of camouflaging the mistakes of the shooting...

Good + Cheap = Long Time Project

If you want to make a good film and still want to make it cheap you have to spent time in this project. that means either you have to make a lot of preproduction to find people who are willing to work for free for the arts sake or you have to raise money for a long period of time ahead. This project are often Low-Budget Project or Independent Projects.

Commissioned Projects are rare to find in this category because nobody likes to work for free if they know you get all the money from the costumer. If you do, you will regret this as soon you realize that nobody in the film business wants to work with you anymore. 

Good + Fast = Professional Budget Movie

So if you are convincing the costumer wants a good film which is fast in production. Mostly TV-Commercials or Imagefilms or Eventclips make that category. Big budget movies are also on that list so here you have the stress of making things possible in a short space of time but in the end you know all participants will be well paid and the result got to be awesome.

The costumer need to understand, that everybody need to get their fridge filled and he as a good costumer got the opportunity to show his great generosity and make things happen for a good product. Otherwise he gets a crapy product. That´s something you don´t want, because you offer this product and the costumer don´t want this because obviously he wants a magical professional film.

So if you ever get in the situation to lower the expectations of your client, raise his generosity and his willing to participate on a professional project. If he´s still on the cheap prizing hunt let him go, he will return after he gets a crapy movie and see you doing the professional stuff!

Out of the Nexus

Almost a half year past by and I feel sorry to let my blog that much unattended as I have done. After returning from iceland I´ve shot some tiny projects for friends and in september it was a pleasure to work with the fine creative strategy agency from Berlin Greenkern on a brand transformation project for one of their costumers. So I was busy for three months in editing several clips for an ipad parcour application and shooting an imagefilm and an eventfilm. Unfortunatly these clips were for internal use only by greenkerns client so I can´t show any results by now.

Yap, it´s me with new haircut filming the event in Hannover

On other hand with Outside Onsite we filmed in Bonn for the DAAD (German Acadamic Exchange Service) to produce a little imagefilm which is in the final process of editing by now. Also in queue is the norway film and the Iceland project which will be necessary to spend on more time on concepting and financing the idea.

Shooting amazing norway nature impression ... and a blue plastik bucket

On the noncommercial perspective I was DoP for a shortfilm project of Sascha Weipert, a director from Berlin which is directing theater pieces in the Brotfabrik Theater. The shortfilm was about the unemployment system in germany and their traps of bureaucratical despotism. So far it is in the postproduction and by march it should be possible to see some results. I´ve shoot it on DSLR and old Canon FD Lenses, which allowed me to get an blurred surrealistic look with overexposed images.

The Team of "HATZ"(AT), Sound: Richard Lucchesi, DoP:Me, Actor: Vasco Esteves, Actress: Michaela Menda, Director: Sascha Weipert with Productiondog Wolke

Ah.. BTW I got a new haircut in september as you seen in the picture above. By now my hair is a littlebit longer and I´ve made a little timelapsclip of the growing. So at least it´s the only moving picture I can show you in this post.



That´s it so far. For the new year I hope to participate on some real exciting projects for commercials or fashionclips and more of narrative freaking costume style pictures. Let´s see what 2014 is all about!

Lost in Iceland?

That you could think if my blog ends up so dramatically with a crashed fan belt, but no. We made it even back home in good condition and everybody survived. The last weeks were amazing and there was a lot to film and to fly over fantastic places.

Quadrinchen flies at Landmanalauger

Filming in Jokullsarlon

We got some interviews with the manager of the Museum for Islandic Sourcery and Witchcraft Siguður Atlason about Trolls and with the representative of the INCA (Island Nature Conservation Association) Árni Finnson about the downside of reneweable energy in Iceland.

Árni Finnson of Island Nature Conservation Association

Siguður Atlason of the Museum for Islandic Sourcery and Witchcraft

Unfortunatly we weren´t able to get somebody from the industry in front of our camera, so we have to look for another specialist of the geothermal energy topic here in europe now.

Geothermal Power Plant in Ieeland

 

So for now I start the editing on the norway project which is waiting and then we present the results of iceland footage. Meanwhile I can link you some impressions on flickr for photographies here and keep on reading my Blog. ;)

Heading North

After a couple of days in the south and offroad to Landmannalauga, we filmed in the east the Water Power Plant at Austurland.
And then our car broke down ( fan belt) and got fixed by a friendly car mechanic which hardly spoke english. But after 4 hours we continued our journey.
Currently we are at the Myvatn Region and take a look at the Geothermal Power Plant at Krafla.

Hunting the Power Plant

Now we are some couple of days in the ice and fire. And currently we are looking out for power plants which are geothermal- or waterdriven plants. Also we interview some people for this topic and still looking for interviewees on the governmental site. Lets see if we get some in front of our camera.

Trolls - A Working Title for Iceland

As I said, june is very busy and we are off to Iceland to find some Trolls and the mystery of renewable energy. Three suitcases full of drone, tripod and chargers.

Stoned to the Moment - A School Project

This June becomes a very busy month. On the 10th to the 14th of june I was working as supervising producer for a school project. The school gives their students the opportunity to work on a project with the theme "Challenges". Some Teenager wanted to make a movie. So I was invited by the teachers to help the students to plan the project and shot it on schedule.

Location: Humboldtbrücke - the Introducing Scene

 
In the end they got a satisfying result if you consider the circumstances. It was a film which contained guns and drugs and the plot was about two guys which fights the drug scene in town. These kids was very euphoria about guns and action and I discovered that the universe of 14 and 15 years old boys is all about ego shooters and american action movies. So they played a lot of "cowboy and indian" game with the airsoft guns during the shooting. But also they was very willing to shot this film and everybody in the group was about to motivate each other to get finish by the end of the day.

Location: Industry Area - The Showdown

The plan was to make them feel that filmmaking is hard work and it´s not about "we get it done in the post". It should be preparation and organisation. So the preparation was a quite tricky but the organisation was good. They got the equipment and I had to shorten the script from twenty pages down to nine. We shot it in three days and the edit was done by one student who got the editing software.

Airsoft guns - easily to get in the internet. But careful in public. Nobody can see the difference between airsoft and real guns in the distance. So if don´t want to pay for a SWAT operation please handle it in secure environment.

The premiere on monday was awesome. The audience, also teenager in that age, was very excited and the whole film was very funny for them. Especially the outtakes shows that these kids took it as a game to handle with weapons. They still don´t realize what it means to shot somebody. I think if you give these kids the opportunity to release the desire of combat and war in this kind of project it´s even better as if they are bottle up their feelings and bring it out in a bad way later on. On Location they worked as a team and being creative in directing the film but also in the pauses they took their toyweapons and hunt themself as playing game through the location. There it was, the kid and the adult in one body. This is a fascinating age.

I would like to shot a film with the same students in one or two years again, just to watch how they working out then a theme like "Challenges".

Supervising is fun!

Entonces y Ahora - Then and Now

Latest release from our new start up Outside Onsite Company. It´s an documentary short about people of the city Almeria, Spain. They take the whole range from young to old and from happy to poor. It´s quite interesting what people can tell you about their life on camera...

Hope you enjoy it and let´s say one more will follow the next months. One from Norway and one from Iceland. But more information come up soon.

Holá Quadrinchen!

After four months of rumbling and tumbling it´s close to the final step. We are going in the air with our multicopter under the name Outside Onsite. Additionally we offer conventional camerawork and underwater camera as well to make our films very unique.
In february we were in spain and test our Quadrinchen which actually now is a Hexacopter and is shown on facebook and our website with six propellers. The results of shooting in the windiest regions of spain can see in the video below!

End of the Years Results

So here we are on the egde of doomsday and the final revilation of John and I will just make a quick note about the last announcements on my youtube channel and current status. First I want to mention a book written by Alexander Altmann (Blog click here). It´s a german book so sorry for the foreign audience we have to exclude you. It´s about filming with DSLR and it´s quite detailed in the content of shooting with DSLR. Alexander wrote about preproduction, production and postproduction of his movie "The Green Fairy" ( Die Grüne Fee) which is still in the process of scoring. We still looking forward to see the clip in the internet soon. The reason why I mention this book is of course the little selffish motivation of being mentioned and quoted in some chapters of his book. My little advices and helping hand in his project, which you can find here, makes me little smile that I am now mentioned in a book, thank you alexander. ;) You can find it on Amazon by clicking the picture below.

The second thing I want to mention is the new perspective which I discover in the upcoming year. It´s about working with Remote Controled Multirotors to get some areal shots or even some crane-like shots from above. Together with Josefin Kuschela, the new years project will involve multirotors, underwater cameras and of course conventional cameras. So enjoy the teaser for next years project "Evolutraceurs"which includes parcour action and areal shots!

"Genesis" - Winner of the Lensbaby Competition at the Photokina 2012

People at the Lensbaby booth getting the hype of the Lens-Babies...

Great News - "Genesis" won the first prize of the Lensbaby Competition, organized by the german filmmaker magazine "zoom" and was screened at the Photokina 2012 in Cologne, Germany. I was invited for an interview at the booth of Lensbaby and met Lensbaby Founder Craig Strong, who  introduced the lensbaby "Spark"to me, which is actually a nice toy for filmmakers.

Additionally I got a look-a-round at the Photokina and realized a big amount of DSLR Filming equipment, starting with scuba cameras, cranes and even air drones.

With the honor to be the winner of this competition I have to thank Dirk Erik Schulz for his talent and his enthusiasm to go with me thru this film and I hope this film will make people curious about what great stuff he´s actually doing!

Here´s a documentary shot of the ceremony:

And of course the Winnerfilm itself:

Ole M. Werner INSIDE: Project Genesis

The Last months was full of changes and now I´m back in line. First of all I introduce a new OMW INSIDE Video which explains our last Super Low Budget Shoot for a competition. Thanks to Dirk Erik Schulz for taking part in this special project and check this blog out in future for further results!

SKATUTU - A Fashionfilm on Slow Motion

The last week I was producing a short film for the Berlin Fashion Filmfestival and had to organize serveral thing during a week. After the confirmation of my favourite camera rental shop Camelot Broadcast Services in Berlin of sponsoring the equipment, I sat down with Nora Fritz for the idea of getting her fashion into the film. 

No budget, that´s why we wasting money

 I also wanted to shoot it on slow motion that´s why I had to wait for the confirmation of Camelot, because without their help the whole project wouldn't come to life. The thing with the SloMo is that only certain cameras can do this in Full HD in these days. So we end up shooting with the RED One MX which was very kindly of Camelot to use the cinema camera for this project.

 

The story of the plot is easy. It´s about a skater girl is looking for something in her life and takes a journey thru the world and pass three phenomena which symbolise individual stations in life. In the end she finds what she´s looking for.  All was shot in SloMo in serveral places in Potsdam and an abandoned military training area in Brandenburg, Germany.

rarely moments of having the camera on shoulder

 Normally I would prefer smaller and lighter cameras to shoot sport action but as I said the 120 fps you can get only by special cameras like the RED cameras, ARRI Alexa or the Sony F35. Maybe in future I will have the opportunity to shoot with the C500 from Canon, but they haven´t released it yet.

In order of the heavy weight of the camera with all the stuff like Lenses, Mattebox, Follow Focus, Rods, Quickplate, LED Monitor, REDDrive, Cradle and Battery on it, it comes down to approx. 10 kg, it was obviously that it wouldn´t become a dynamic handcamera. We have lot of tripod shots ( a 10kg o´conner C2575 head with short stands or normal stands) and we improvised some kind of dolly shots with a trolley which was okay in order to shot SloMo. 

The SloMo effect on the RED One has also a little sideeffect on the lenses you have to choose, because the camera use the "lower" resolution of 2K instead of their normal resolution of 4K. So the camera doesn´t read out the whole sensor and it come to the well known crop-effect, which means the focal length of the lenses don´t match anymore. So if you want to shot with an 50mm lense on a 35mm frame like the DSLR Full format, on the RED with 2K  it become a 162mm lense impression. With this crop factor of 3.24, we mostly shot with the Zeiss Ultra 14mm which becomes in the end a 45mm lens.

After shooting I had 4 days for editing and compose the music for it and had deliver it on the 15th of June, which I did in time and now we waiting for the jury to the end of the month to tell us if we are in the ranking of the 10 films which will be shown at the Berlin Fashion Week 2012. Let´s keep the fingers crossed!

Nora and I would like to thank all involved tomake this project happen. Franzi for performing the Skatergirl and Alina for performing the three phenomena. Alexander Altmann for giving me hand on the camera and taking still photographies of the shoot and Josefin for giving me the inspiration for the end shot of the story. If you would  like to see more impressions check out my album on flickr here or have some german blog impressions on Alexanders Blog here. Also Franzi posted some stuff in tumbler here To watch the film, look down below or go to my Youtube Channel here.

OFF FLOOR - That´s how Science should be

Two weeks ago I joint Mathias and Anne, booth scientist at the German Research Centre for Geoscience in Potsdam, on their mission to collect data down from a 40 meter heigh crane. That´s something a cameraman ever dreams of to be the " extreme cameraman from above!"

From Russia with Love - Filming with Kiev88 Lenses on DSLR

This time I tried out some of my Kiev88 analog lenses on my Canon 5D MII for filming. Just to figure it out how they work out in the idea of style and colours.

First you have to find an converter that takes your thread mounted Kiev88 lenses to the EOS mount. There are some sources on the Internet but it´s kindly hard to get the right one, because the most of the providers of adapters will delivery the Kiev88C/M mount that´s actually like an pentacon-six-mount and this is not what you want for your thread-like lenses as such as the Kiev88. At last it takes me several trys and time to get nearly the right adapter. Here it is a Kiev88 to nikon adapter that I have to match with a additional adapter for Nikon to EOS. Once this work I could start filming with these lenses.

As you will surely regognize, this lenses don´t have any auto-capabilities at all. No autofocus, no autoaperture or image stabilizer... Pure manual working on this lenses. If you want to take pictures with that it could be a littlebit to soft in the focus and the colors are also very flat. The meter in the camera will also give you some strange settings that maybe caused by the badly coated lenses that reflect the light onto the meter... So, there are no reasons for photographers why they should try that kind of lenses. But... for filmers it could be a stylish tool to get some special kind of look.

So I tried two different lenses on a weekend joining three members of the famous Fotoclub Potsdam (Katja Gragert, Michael Schulze and Ralph Gräf )  in which Im also a member. For me it´s just fun and I was filming this guys as they´re looking for a motive in the southern Brandenburg County.

First lens is a  45mm/3.5 MIR - 26B wideangle (mediumformat 6x6 related). It has a six blade aperture and the nearest focus distance is 0,5 m. It is quite heavy and the stops are some kind of ridiculus. You have an open aperture, then it goes from 5,6 to 8 as the same light intesity and then the 22 f-stop is like a 11 f-stop, so you´re actually working with three f-stops... well... it old and it´s russian... what did you expect after all this time...

Second lens is a 80mm/2.8 MC VOLNA-3 normal lens (mediumformat 6x6 related). It has also six blade aperture and the nearest focus is 0,6 m. It´s quite similar manufactured as the 45mm and the f-Stop problem is not as much as at the 45mm. 

With the Adapter KI-88/N you got an adapter without lenses and you can take the 45mm and the 80mm as "real" 45mm and 80mm for smallframe kameras. On the Kiev88 the focal length is similar to 35mm and 50 mm but here it´s like a 45mm and an 80mm.

up: 45mm Lens,  Adapter KI-88/N, Nikon to Eos Adapter and DSLR on the edge the 80 mm lens. Down: 45mm with adapters attached to the DSLR

So, I take it down to a test on a very sunny and bright day. Open aperture on these lenses are a littlebit tricky. The lenses colors got flat and the focus could be a littlebit too soft. But it´s a matter of taste and could be like an old 60ties lens. If you got lensflare you could get a six-edged figure or some kind of strange lightrays by the 45mm in your picture. As you working without matebox or lens hood you got a nice orange coloration in your picture that really reminds to the 70ties or 60ties pictures. As you can see in the film.

On this test I didn´t use a follow focus but it should be no problem to attach some gear rings to the lenses and make it work. 

In matter of Image quality I can say that it´s quite good, although the lenses got blurry to the edge of the frame as you use the medium format 6x6. On a DSLR you got a crop effect and it takes the middle of the frame, so you got the best part of the circularforming. It´s also good in matter of sharpness while you using motion pictures. On still pictures I didn´t test it, but I don´t expect great results.

On the day of testing I got also the possibility to test a lensbaby and an old Diana lens on the DSLR. the Diana Lens is an old plastik lens  that actually make some saturated colors and light fisheye effect. It is the first colorshot after the black and white lensbaby effect, which I will test in a later project during this summer. 

In the end I could say that I have some lenses for old style filming  that´s quite good working in matter of focus and colors. They got nice lensflare effect but it´s not for people which prefer high-fashion-super-sharp-true-color-shots. Also the limitation to the focal length is a unfortunate thing, cause in this lens class you can just get an 30mm (ARSAT/ZODIAK 30mm/3.5 ). I also got an  250mm/3.5 JUPITER 36B which I don´t tested while I got no tripod with me on that day. It´s become quite heavy! So you got to figure out on yourself if you want to shoot like the sixties without a big wideangle and f-stops like 1.8 or similiar. I enjoyed it in the end and shurly give them a try in future.

To the Sun & the Moon - a Super8 Film

For the first time I had an experience in filming with super 8 material during my trip from Vancouver, Canada to South Dakota, USA. One of the reasons for this trip was to fullfill my selfpromis to my deceased Dad, in which I continued the procedure of spreading a little piece of ashes to the favourite place of the deceased one. He did it for my mom as she died in October 2000 and after his death in 2008 I felt that I had to do the same thing for him. At this time he was quite enthusiastic about the history of the indians in north america. But unfortunatly his health and his enormous fear of flying prevented him from getting to this places like the battlefield of Little Bighorn or the holy place of the Black Mountains with the Crazy Horse Memorial.
So as the opportunity appeared to me and my girlfriend, who is currently studying abroad in Canada, we drove all the way from Vancouver via Little Bighorn to the Black Hills.
As a result, here you can see that though all the years, 8mm films have still the talent to change a trip that actually took place in 2012 into a 1970´s look. . Have fun!

P.S. - Hairstylist Clip is out

Before I forget, I was not only in vacation the last months, one of the things I did was also a little clip for a hairstylist in Berlin/ Beelitz. So enjoy this as well and we will see what other things will coming up!