This week we didn't get too much done seeing as it was the week of Thanksgiving. The previous Friday, Jesse went out to Dr. Pongs to shoot. I stayed in to work on the project for Thorsten's class. I looked at a couple of the clips and it looks like he got a casual interview with at least one girl. I'm not sure how good most of the footage is though.
I traveled down to Munich on Thursday so there wasn't much filming I could do. Jessica and Jesse went to the ping pong tournament at Zimt und Zunder. I was really hoping there would be a lot of people there and some good action shots. Unfortunately from what Jesse and Jessica tell me, that wasn't the case.
For the coming two weeks...well we need to finish our project completely. We still need a few more iconic Berlin shots and definitely some more interviews. I'd love to get shots of people actually training but the person that Jessica contacted never replied. Somehow we're going to have to put together a film with what we have and what we can get within the next couple weeks. We're all going to have to kick it into overdrive to get that done. We plan on going to Sez because Chris McCarter told us there is some really intense ping pong there. I'm hoping he's right because what we've seen so far has been kind of lacking. It might just be that ping pong is more of a summer sport and we just came at the wrong time.
For week 10 we stepped it up a notch. Jessica went and filmed the Reichstag, Brandenburger Tor and Potsdamer Platz for iconic shots in the movie. Afterward, Nathan and I went to the construction site on Friedrichstrasse to attempt to shoot a time lapse scene. We got about 20 minutes of footage before the battery crapped out. All of us tried to go to Sez where Chris said there is some really good ping pong but when we got there we realized it was a fitness gym that you had to pay to even get into. The next day Nathan and I went out to shoot Oberbaumbrucke, the East Side Gallery, and some more stills of ping pong tables. By the time we got the first two shot we were freezing and it was getting close to class time so we decided against trying to find the three or four ping pong tables within that area.
While we were editing we realized that it took an extremely long time to export. I gave Joel a ring to figure out what was wrong. He told us it would go faster if we shrunk it down to widescreen NTSC. That sucks we can't use HD but I'd rather have a movie that makes sense and looks mediocre than a movie that looks amazing but isn't coherent. We started editing the intro and it looks pretty cool. My main part in the intro besides helping place where things go is the shot of the stills of the ping pong table and the music that is accompanying the intro. I wished we would have gotten more stills because they only fill up a couple seconds but I like the effect it has. Before we put in the music we couldn't figure out exactly how to put the intro together because there didn't seem to be anything decent to transition between each scene. I think the music makes a great transition for each of the shots. I hope it's not too intense for the scenes though. The editing software seems pretty straightforward so far and I would actually enjoy working on it more if it didn't cause Jessica's computer to crash every hour or so.
The next day we spent going to the Eberswalder U-Bahn stop and shooting character intro, training shots, and action shots. We haven't worked with these in the editing software yet so I'm not exactly sure how they'll turn out.
Ich Chef, Du Turnschuh was quite an entertaining movie for how small the budget was for it. I really enjoyed recognizing a lot of the places where it was filmed. The discussion in class was pretty interesting as well. In our group discussion, I brought up that it was interesting that Kutlucan played an Armenian instead of a Turk. Someone's point about making fun of yourself makes it more okay to make fun of others doesn't really apply that much here. Yes, he is making fun of immigrants which he is one of but he doesn't even play a character that is from his country of origin. I wonder if the perception of his character would have been different had he been a Turk. This was played to a German audience which seem to have a lot of reservations about the Turkish population. Kutlucan may have made the main character Armenian so he could be more relateable to the viewing audience. It's pretty well known that there are tensions between Armenians and Turks so maybe Kutlucan played on the German population reservations about the Turkish population by making his main character have an ethnicity that also has problems with the Turkish population.
I think the movie overall though is a commentary about the ridiculousness of the immigration policies in Germany. I think the Marx Brothers played on the ridiculousness of immigration policies as well but in the US instead of Germany obviously. I'm not sure how comparable the immigration policies of the US in the 1930s and Germany in the 1990s are but I'd imagine they aren't horribly far off. I recall looking at the numbers of immigrants arriving during each year and it drops off in the 1930s. That may be because the economic chaos created a much lower incentive to travel to the US.
The anarchy of the immigrants almost seems to mock the immigration policies by attempting to one up them on how silly they are. How can you expect immigrants to come to a country to work and live for several years and then send them home while expecting no complaints? That seems like politicians were trying to compete with who could come up with the most dysfunctional immigration policy.
The stereotyping in the film was kind of mixed for me. While the immigrants did use it to their advantage, they also seemed extremely naive. I'm not sure the German characters were portrayed the best either. For the most part they all seemed to be trying to take advantage of the immigrants with the exception of Frau Dutschke. That seems just as bad as portraying the immigrants as naive.
The views on Seattle with regards to diversity were pretty interesting. Seattle to me seems fairly diverse. Obviously places like LA that are close to the Mexican border are going to have a much larger foreign born population. It's proximity to the Asian eastern coast is similar to ours and so I would expect the Asian populations to be similar.
Berlin, in terms of foreign nationalities, seems to put most US cities to shame. Almost every day I here somebody speaking a language other than German or English. When the question was asked how Berlin compares diversity-wise with what we've experienced, I started wondering what was considered diversity. Is it only different nationalities that count or do different races count too? Germany definitely has a large amount of different nationalities but that's because their immigration policy is still pretty rigid even after the liberalization. I guess German ideas of citizenship seem completely foreign to me due to the US having the 14th Amendment for so long in our history. It seems odd to me that you can be born in a country and still not be part of that nation. Maybe
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