Marcus Mattsson

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.