This week we watched Good Bye Lenin! which is an excellent film. From the reading it seemed like Good Bye Lenin! gave the best representations of each character. The previous films on the topic of a reunited Germany seemed to paint West Germans as exploitative whereas with this movie a West German, Denis, goes far out of his way to help Alex make his mother believe the wall is still up. There still seems to be a bit of the stereotypical older characters seeing the reunification negatively as opposed to the younger generation like Alex's sister who see the Wall coming down as somewhat of a godsend. I say there's only a bit of that because Alex's mother finds out about the Wall falling and reunification but she seemed to care very little. She was much more concerned with something that actually mattered: her family (mainly her son).
It was interesting that Alex did most of what he did just to hang on to his childhood. It's interesting that you could associate your childhood with the ruling regime and to be nostalgic for that. I understand his nostalgia for the products and events in his childhood (East German food products, Sigmund Jahn, etc.) but to recreate an entire government through the television seems to be going a bit far. Maybe I'm just not fully understanding the concept of Ostalgie.
This last week was pretty much a complete blur. I was rarely out of the apartment because we were editing for the majority of the week. One great night was Tuesday when we went out to Zimt und Zunder again to try to get an interview with the owner of the bar. Unfortunately she wasn't interested in doing the interview that night because the front part of her bar got smashed up. Luckily there were several people in the bar that were already playing ping pong and invited us to join along. Not only that but they didn't mind us filming either. We got some great shots and an interview with a girl named Jana. The guy with the green shirt (I forget his name) was kind of a asshole to be honest. He kept slamming whoever he could while we were playing. Not only that but when we were interviewing Jana, he kept dicking with the camera. That would have been fine but his comments detracted from the interview which overall I think was the best one we got mostly because it was completely relaxed.
We realized that our shots of the various bars needed transitions so I figured we could shoot a fake group meeting that put out that we needed to do a project and what to do it on. Initially I was thinking that it would probably work better as just voice over but when it was put together it actually turned out pretty decent by itself. I forget who came up with the idea of interviews ala The Office but those really helped transition from one bar to the next and also help explain our thoughts on the project and just how that form of ping pong is played. Those made it so that our movie at least had a somewhat coherent storyline. For the group meeting I did say more than ended up in the movie but I kept getting talked over so it was cut out.
The editing process was long and tedious. I don't have too great of an eye for what makes an alright shot and what makes a great shot. There were some shots that were equally as good as others but because they were so similar one had to be cut. I guess I'm not great at deciding which one should be cut completely. The rest of the project was basically how much to cut off of a clip and lighting/volume normalizing. It was a crunch right up until the very end. We didn't even have time to put on a title or make better credits; just enough time to burn it onto a DVD (turned out to be a bad idea).
Watching the movies immediately made me realize that almost everyone else went for a slightly deeper approach with their ideas. It was great because every single movie had either some really cool shots or ideas that I had neither seen done like that nor thought of before. Some of the movies completely blew me away put together (Kelly's for instance). I now feel like I've barely scratched the surface of the editing software we're using and definitely feel like I should delve deeper into it. I just wish I could afford a camera.
I'm glad people liked ours. We were shooting for laughs and that's what we got. I learned that jokes (or funny lines) need to be timed because there were definitely a few instances where people were laughing too hard to hear the other funny parts of the clips. Oh well at least the idea came across and now people don't think our idea of a movie on ping pong is so odd.
One movie that really made me think about different perspectives of the audience was Ed's part of his group's film. I was left wondering if Jason's voice over was meant to narrate Ed's perspective on tattoos, Jason's, or just a general perspective. That would completely change if I didn't know Ed and was just some random viewer. It made me wonder if when I get home, people will find the humor in our film funny. I wonder if there are certain aspects of our film that are basically inside jokes that nobody else will get. That's not a bad thing, it just changes how broad the appeal of the film is.
I had an amazing time in Berlin and wish it could go for at least a little while longer. I'm glad I got an idea of the processes that go into to making movies and my analysis of movies will be a lot different from now on. I wish at the beginning of the quarter I possessed the editing skills I've acquired because things would have gone a lot smoother and we probably wouldn't have been so crunched for time. But I guess that's part of the process of coming into contact with problems and then figuring out just how the hell you're going to solve them.
Tschuss!
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