Category: On location

The regional elections in North Rhine-Westphalia are over and here in Kaarst, one of the two candidates, for whom I made a cinematic portrait, was elected mayor. Subsequently, I made another short film for the newly elected mayor, in which she gives a short speech.

Once again, the film is available in 4k in a 19:9 format with German and English subtitles – and with English voiceover. This time I’m not testing my equipment, but a voiceover in English, which is placed on top of the German audio track.

Here the film in German:

And here in English:

After a long, long time there is a blog post on this page again, after I was able to take care of only games.film webwise. space.games.film is now in good hands in the games.film shop and on YouTube, and since we are currently not making any new films with games.film, I have a little bit more time for this page again.

Just at the beginning of the year I bought new equipment – which subsequently was, of course, unused most of the time. So what else can you do? Buy more equipment! Recently I invested in a new camera, among other things. As a test project I wanted to make a film that had a certain relevance to it and would give me the proper motivation.

Since at that time the mayoral elections were only about two months away and one might be more likely to get heard to in a relatively small municipality, I made it my task to write to the (by then) four candidates for the mayor’s office and make the same offer of a short cinematic portrait to all of them. My conditions for this were: complete creative freedom and no election advertising or mention of political parties allowed in the films, as I wanted to show an exclusively private picture of the individuals, who applied for this position. With these films I would like to give an insight into their personalities, because after all, the election for mayor is an election of an individual. Ursula Baum and Nina Lennhof responded quickly and I could literally feel their enthusiasm for my offer, which was of course a great precondition for the films. The other two candidates responded with rejections and a fifth candidate entered the race much later.

The tight schedules of the two combined with extremely inconsistent weather made planning the shoots difficult, but thanks to their flexibility we were able to find suitable times for filming. After we waited for rain-free days at the beginning and also chased after sunsets that quickly disappeared behind clouds, our patience was rewarded with beautiful images. Afterwards I color corrected and color graded the footage in the desired direction. Unfortunately, after the compression by YouTube, some of the sharpness and quality of the 4K image falls behind, but this should not be too noticeable.

Thank you very much to Ursula Baum and Nina Lennhof, it has been a real pleasure to work with you! And here are the two films:

Yesterday I shot pictures for a making of for a feature film. “Styx” is the name of the production, which is partly shot in Malta and North Rhine-Westphalia.

The funny thing about the shoot was that there was a stunt at a location in Cologne, where I have done stunts with action concept many times before, with parts of the crew from back then, because that company was hired for the stunt. So there was a little reunion with good colleagues and the realization: actually nothing has changed.

Not been built for a long time, but not forgotten either. It’s almost like riding a bicycle, especially if you’ve worked on such things almost every day for a while. So on the weekend I was asked to build a frontmount, as small as possible and of course stable. Afterwards the shots will be used as plates (i.e. driving scenes in the background) for a commercial of a big German car manufacturer from Southern Germany. The fact that the car used for the shots was Japanese didn’t matter, because the height of the camera was the deciding factor. So we drove through the beautiful countryside of and also through Cologne and were really lucky with the weather, because the originally planned film shoot on Monday would have been too rainy.

As part of a film shoot for a documentary, which I’m producing and realizing with Patrick Jäschke (partly with the support of av22), we teamed up with Michael Graf ( vice editor-in-chief of GameStar) at this year’s Gamescom and filmed an interview with Chris Roberts. Chris Roberts is known to gamers as one of the most important and influential game developers for space games. In the interview he talks about the state of his latest project Star Citizen, which is the most successful crowdfunding project of all times with its current amount of almost 124 million dollars. You can watch the interview on the website of GameStar: Click

The parts relevant for the documentary cannot be seen, but I can already say: they give a nice insight into the big world of space games. By the way, the development studio is shooting their own reports to keep crowdfunding supporters up to date and in their piece about Gamescom you can also see us at work for a few seconds: Click