Week 10

Me Boss, You Sneaker was a very different perspective on Berlin, one from an outsider living in, just as we are. We luckily don’t have to face the difficulties that this character does though. The political side of contemporary Berlin was an interesting thing to gain a perspective on. Our film as of yet has dealt more with finding place and portraying our experience of Berlin, rather than objectively demonstrating a part of Berlin’s day-to-day life. Through the readings we learned about a more recent part of Berlin’s history that may be more influential on today’s life than the more common aspects of Berlin’s history that we learn about through classes and books. It is interesting though, from what I’ve heard concerning other groups’ films, that this is not addressed. There isn’t even anything that directly directs the Turkish subculture here. The topic may be a bit out of our ability though since it is new to us. Though, a film on the comparison between Germany’s Turkish population and the US Mexican population would be interesting.

Filming this week has been hectic, tiring, time-consuming, and a blast. It has been very exciting to film with no budget. We have been creative in capturing shots that would be easy to do given production studio equipment (that or we just dealt with the roughness and plan to attribute any fault in our film due to our attempt to portray the film as a picture of someone’s memory). Many of our shots have been all over the city and not necessarily where each other need to shoot. So on a given day we would plan to help out whoever had the best and most complete plan for what they wanted to do. In fact, some of my best shots happen to come from those days anyway. Helping young at Gorlitzer Park landed me a shot of some kids making funny faces into the camera. I hope to be able to use the shot in my film. On a trip to help Kelly film we stopped by the graffiti courtyard on Oranienburgertrasse. Here I filmed Josh on the whim playing a musical fence. This will probably be the most beautiful footage of my part in the film. It truly demonstrates our interaction with what we find striking in Berlin.
Some shots that we have taken have been useful for other parts as well. The shooting, though geared towards individual parts, has really proven to be a group project.