At the end all of you should know my really cute and awesome video by now. No? Then maybe you will see it after this few little impressions from our shoot. For all other people I thought it would be interessting to see, how this video evolved.
 
– Got ya! no little making-of video. Sorry. I don’t have the time to make it right. And we don’t have that funny parts. We put the camera off before… –
 

The idea

After I knew that I want apply for the deomographic scholarship I knew that the “thing” has be creative, cool or just awesome. So that not only my friends and family have a good reason to vote for me. Also other people who don’t know me shall think that I’m or my application is the vote worth it. Then I thought about the medium which I want to use. Make a little presentation, shoot photos, writing a text or making a video.
My decision for video are simple: moving images are in these days most interessting for people and with a real movie it’s more personal. Luckily that my friend Lorenz loves film area. He never shoot a movie like this before, but he was starfing to do it.
 
When I finally had my basic idea – me, how I’m trying to reach Australia in different travell opertunities – I got some little but helpful aprovements from my friends. So I/we could begin with the work:

• Writing the last ideas down
• Figuring out where we can shoot and if it’s allowed (like in train stations you need usually a permission)
• Where we can get the requisits
• Finding helping hands for the shoots
• Finding the perfect man for the tourist office scene
• And finally scribbeling the storyboard (which the big cameraman Lorenz did)

The shooting

“Kamera läuft! – Szene 1, die erste” – “Roll it! – secene one, the first”

We decided to shoot in two days round about 35 scenes. Everbody talks about the weather. So we did that also. Sure, a sunny day was necassery for our takes outside. Otherwise it would be a hard shooting. But the weather fairy was friendly and gave us two sunny days 🙂

At the first day, it was Friday, we went to the university and shot the tourist office scenes. Very helpful was our travel agent Patrick. Thanks to him and nice fake tourist office, everybody is thinking now that we really shot in a tourist office. You also heard at the end of the movie an off-speaker. This part is also spoken by Patrick. Patrick is a professional actor, so his parts were after one or two shots finished. While shoots with me took a lot longer. But it was mostly fun 🙂

After a half day we packed our stuff and moved to Freudenberg, a little bit outside of Wiesbaden. At this place we had a wonderful view down to the river Rhein and up to Mainz. But we decided not to distract the audience with this wonderful view and give them only me in nowhere.

But we weren’t finished for this day. The beginning of the movie needed to be done: packing my stuff for my big trip. This little scene was shot in my gorgeous room. As you can hear in the video I have a squeaky wooden floor. Which was totally annoying sometimes.

At the second shooting day on Saturday we had also three places. But it took us hours! At our first places, train station Wiesbaden and Mainz, we had curious people around asking “can we get fotos later?” or hurrying up that we can shoot in front of a train. It’s like all trains are at the station at the same time and they get off at the same time, too. So we run from one plattform to the other. Very good that Tina helped us with the seperate audio recording. In some places we forgot the number of a scene or figured out a new one we just make a new name up. Sometimes we forgot the name for our second take and we made again a new up. Like “scene 3 the 166” ot later “new scene climb in boat, the first”. Really funny and helpful for the postproduction.

Then we were ready for one very nice part: me sitting in a rowboat and paddling to Australia, hopefully. The little harbour in Schierstein gave us the perfect places. Lorenz girlfriend Johanna helped us for those shootings, too. Everything has to be perfect. When we as future media manager can’t do this, who can? For saving money reasons we borrowed the boat for only one hour. So everything with the boat needed to be done in this time. This wasn’t that easy, because we wanted to shoot different positions at different places at the harbour.

The soloution: Lorenz run from place to place while I was paddling or just waiting for him in the boat somewhere in the river. I was a little bit too fast for him 😉 But I also paddled only in a circle or like a snake. Other people had fun by watching me paddling. For Lorenz was it a bit difficult to get the right position so fast. But we were connected trough our mobiles, so it worked out in some way. During some of those takes Johanna and Tina had some time off and enjoyed the sun. But Lorenz and me knew: a delicious ice cream is waiting for us!

yea.. after hours of shooting we had “alles im Kasten” (didn’t find a good translation..) and we were so proud of us!

In only two days we shoot over 100 takes with hours of matrial. So nothing should be that complicated during the cut.
 

The postproduction

What does postproduction mean? That is the part after the shooting with sorting, cutting, music integration, effects integration and so on. For this very important part was responsible: me. Yea. I had a little bit knowledge how to cut in Adobe Premiere and so I just did it for myself. My other friends like Lorenz had anough other things to do. But he helped me allot before and he also did effects where the lines are moving from one place to the other and the km are counting down. This part wasn’t that easy.

After my frist rough cut I had round about 6min. That was too much. I wanted to go under 5 min, so that the people can watch it during a lunch break. Here began the difficult part: Choosing where to cut. The first view seconds were deleated very quickly. But afterwards it was like try & error. Shortening one scene and then checking if it is still okay. In the end I was at 4:50min and with the credits I have now 4:57min. But still under 5min 😉

Next to my cutting stuff I checked out which type of music I could use. Kurt, our lab man for postproduction, helped me finding the right one, which is also GEMA-free (no paying for licence). I knew that other people would use every kind of music and give a shit on this. But I didn’t want go in any kind of risk.
Thanks to uncoordinated Absolventa which thought “one more month as a application time is wonderful” I had my movie earlier finished and I got stuck waiting until the voting phase got started.
 

The final product

I think you already saw my final product. If not, you can watch it now.

As a conclusion for myself and my first film shooting (after the ones in the uni): If I would have had more time without unistress and stuff, the movie would have been better. Today I would never shoot that much scenes only in two days. And always with a lot more positions for the same scene. Then there would be more time to rethink about the shoots and just shoot a new one. And it could be still a bit faster. At least, more trying around with different music styles. At least: let the camera on, so you will get funny making-of clips.
Don’t get it wrong: I still love my movie!
 

The voting

Sure, you can still vote trough:
http://bit.ly/love-australia

I wrote also a little english tutorial, so everbody can do it without any trouble 😉
http://chresse.de/scholarship_howto.jpg

The voting ends in the middle of Oktober. If you have already voted for me, I would be happy if you share the link with your friends.
 

BIG CREDITs to:

Lorenz
Patrick
Tina
Johanna
Kurt

– I couldn’t have done it without you and it was a lot of fun!