Archive for September, 2007

EFC: Beginning of courses

Posted 2094 days ago · 11 Comments

One week of introductions, two weeks of Shooting Games, and now we're finally at the real thing, the courses. We started prioritizing the different courses last week, these first two weeks I was able to choose between camera and lighting, documentary, acting and sound, I gave documentary the highest priority and that's also what I got. I'm able to choose one more course of the four I just mentioned, and I'm going for camera and lighting, because acting and sound don't really appeal to me.

Anyway, I had my three first hours of documentary lessons today, we talked about each other (we're 10 in the class) and tried to find some interesting stories. As I've understood it we're going to make small documentary-like clips, screen them in the small cinema and then talk about them. Our teacher, British documentary maker John Burgan, is very good, he's made a lot of documentaries and he's got a lot of interesting things to say.

Monday evening is also Doc Club, which means John screens a documentary in Big Bear, tonight we're going to watch Cinemania, which is about a group of movie freaks who watch at least five movies every day; they don't have any jobs, they just watch movies.

As you can see on the EFC-section of this site I've been watching a lot of movies, so far I think it's 1,3 movies every day, in average, and that's mostly what we do when we have spare time, and it's great! There are so many movies I've wanted to watch and now I'm at a school with 109 students who's got the same desire. It's also something completely different to watch movies with someone else, and especially when they're also interested in movies. For example, this weekend we had a multi-cultural film festival here called Salaam.dk, we watched two documentaries and a feature film about refugees, all made by Michael Winterbottom, and there was a lot of discussions afterwards.

EFC: Course-introductions

Posted 2099 days ago · 2 Comments

The Shooting Games are almost done, the last one is tomorrow, and from next week we'll start doing courses for two weeks at a time. Seems like I'm gonna be on 'Doc Eye 1: Visions', the course about documentaries. After those two weeks I'll hopefully be on the scriptwriting course.

As usual we've seen a lot of movies this and last week, but we've also been introduced more detailed to the courses, the presentations were more a chance for us to learn stuff about the teachers though. For instance, today we saw a documentary called Memory of Berlin, created by our documentary teacher, a Brit named John Burgan. The documentary is about his life in the UK and Berlin, and how specific things in his life fits into the social regime in East Berlin and eventually the fall of the wall. He's also adopted so there was a lot about his search for his birth parents. It was quite interesting to watch, and it was pretty cool that the creator was sitting next to us, he made the documentary in cooperation with ZDF, the German TV channel.

Earlier this week our direction teacher, Mikael Hylin, introduced his course, and he has an impressive resume. He had brought stuff from all the things he had done; he's made two feature films, opera shows, TV-shows etc. For instance he was the guy who directed and produced the first season of Expedition Robinson (Swedish) and then the first Danish season of it. For some reason he also had the storyboard for Alien: Resurrection, which was awesome! He screened one of his feature films, it's called Hassel, and it's a typical Swedish crime-story. The story was quite bad, and I was relieved to find out that he felt the same way, apparently there had been some problems with the script-writers, the movie was an adaption, and they changed a lot of things. The technical aspect of the movie was very impressive though, his budget was only about 7.000.000 DKK, but it looks like it's cost at least 50 millions, and he was also very proud of that part of the movie, ie. there are a lot of firefights, car chases and some explosions.

I also directed my first movie last Friday, it was the third installment of Shooting Games, and the first movie of all Shooting Games that I actually felt proud to show for the rest of the audience. I'll see if I can get it online. Tomorrow I'll be behind the camera, it'll be fun, I have some responsibility, but I can mostly relax and let the directors run the show.

EFC: Me in Big Bear

Posted 2101 days ago · 5 Comments

Just a short video of me in Big Bear, recorded with my cell phone. Oh, and I got my MacBook today, and it is awesome!

Link until I get Video tags working.

EFC: Pictures

Posted 2106 days ago · 3 Comments

One of the teacher's assistants on the school has uploaded a lot of beautiful pictures from these first 1,5 weeks. I'll post some here, and give a link to his flickr gallery at the bottom. Click pictures to see them in big size.

Some of the students' houses.

Principal Søren Høy (Left) and American scriptwriting teacher Jim Fernald at an introduction trip to some vikings' graves near Ebeltoft.

Our British documentary teacher John Burgan (right) interviews Sven, a German student, as part of a talkshow called 'Who Are You?'.

All the pictures can be seen here (page 1-6 at the moment).

EFC: Shooting Games

Posted 2108 days ago · 13 Comments

The second week at the EFC is upon me, and we're finally using the equipment! The following two weeks we will be divided into crews, two persons manning each position, ie. two writers, two camera men, two directors and so on. Every day we will have new positions and then we have two hours each day to make a 2-min movie. As it's called shooting games, we're not supposed to make anything of great quality, but just bond and learn how to use the equipment.

Today I was a script writer, so I got a logline saying "Money is the root of all evil" and then had to write a story about that with, another guy, in 45 mins. I actually liked the story we came up with, it had some slapstick comedy and ended up with the protagonist, who had been going through a lot of trouble to steal a small amount of money, losing the money and realizing he had to go through it all again. Unfortunately it got butchered by our director (only one, since we couldn't find the other person). Since we only had two hours to shoot it we were kinda in a hurry, but she decided to add new scenes that wasn't important to the story at all, so when we got around to shooting the main scenes we ran out of time and the ending was ruined. But, as mentioned, it's only a game, so I don't really care anymore at this point. We're going to watch all movies made by all crews today, at 19:30, so I'm really looking forward to that. I'll also see if I can upload our movie to YouTube, even though it's probably not worth viewing.

It was a lot of fun having a real DV camera and sound equipment though, makes you feel a bit professional. Anyway, the movies will hopefully be a lot better the following days, I'm looking forward to be the asshole-director. :P

I also ordered a Macbook today, so Kasper will probably whine in the comments.