Wednesday, December 12, 2007

Week 11 & Final Thoughts

After my final weekend trip to Nuremburg and Rothenburg, it really sunk in that my time in Berlin was coming to an end and that finishing the project would be no small challenge.

In order to deal with the time constraint as a group we worked cronologically for the most part. Our film was one that really gained direction in the editing process. The entire quarter we spent experiencing and capturing what our film sought to depict, but the format for how we were to present it wasn't really clear from the beginning.

On Tuesday we dealt with our personal introductions in the film. Our idea with the closeup and text over were there from the beginning but actually deciding where and how it would be shot was still undecided.

We tackled these small problems one at a time throughout the week working to create transition scenes to bring together all of out collected footage. The largest task that we confronted in terms of shooting in the last week of production was deciding on the viewers' perspective. This was critical for us because we had to decide what type of feel the entire film would have. In the end we chose to shoot interviews instead of voice over so that we could impose our own personalities on the film and add an additional comedic element.

As we worked through the editing in the last week I found myself completely engaged with it, so it was no surprise that this time when I watched "Good bye, Lenin", I really focused on the stylistic elements that it used. I've seen the film quite a few times now but this last time, for the first time, I noticed the video accelerations in the film. Alex and Dennis arrive in the van in high speed in one scene, and Alex meets Laura in the same fashion on his scooter. We also tried to incorporate that effect into our film, so it was interesting to see a good example of it while we were still editing. It was important to us that the audience wasn't left to focus too long on any one shot, because we wanted to maintain a speed to the film that was only broken with our interviews.

Previously I had not known that this was a film created by film makers from west Berlin, and while I still don't consider the film a west Berlin film, some aspect of it now make more sense to me. I thought that it was curious the degree to which Ostalagie was incorporated