We all arrived on Sunday by plane or train and has the time to meet each other during a good Mexican diner. It was also the possibility to get to know the limits of our stomach since there was plenty of food 
Day 1
We met Tina Ohnmacht, the German coordinator of the Filmakademie. She just had the time to presents the school to us and to show some extracts of the students’ projects. I was very impressed by the fact that the students could ask for fundings. Therefore, they have the possibility to sell the project to professional broadcasters and ask for funding from public institutions. Graduation movie budget can reach between 30 000 to 40 000 € for a 90 min length film. I think it makes a big difference.
The Filmakademie curriculum is divided in two years of imposed exercise, in order to let the students discover the techniques and the tools, and two years of practice on personal projects in real conditions. That means that each student is holding a position as a professional.
The school gathers several study departments : animation, technical directing, directing (fiction/non-fiction), editing, camera, production design (e.g. fiction, series, international, creative, animation/VFX). Nearly every field of a modern production is covered
http://www.filmakademie.de/?L=1
Then we had a lecture of Moritz Mayerhoffer . He was a former student in animation in The Filmakademie and he took part to the second ASF programme. He is now living in Berlin and works as a professional. He shared his experience of promoting a project with us.
The main themes we discuss together were the difficulty to link art and funding. How to be convincing when you pitch a project in front of professional buyers and what are they looking for. Which kind of reaction could pop up and how to be prepared to it.
Among many other piece of advice, he emphasized to don’t make the mistake of underestimate the budget of a project. In fact, it is not ensuring the investors at all. And also be prepared to face what we called the country effect, a share of the production between several studios.
In the afternoon, we were invited to visit Gmbh Unexpected. A studio mainly aimed at advertisement and phone applications. They are today well known for their work on transformers characters.
http://www.unexpected.de/
Day 2 and Day 3
We had a lecture of Kim BjØrnqvist currently working as a Head of Development and acquisitions in Nordisk Film. He presented us a way of finding new ideas based on post its. We were all dispatched in groups and interesting stories came out. We also had a brief on how to pitch. It was an introduction for what will come next.
Day 4 and Day 5
On day 4 we had a lecture of the superviseur of the children TV serie “Jasper” Kay Delventhal. He shared with us his experience of how to produce a serie between several countries and set up a reliable production pipeline.
On day 5 we had an impro lesson with Dörthe Eickelberg. I think we all enjoyed it very much. (Pictures to come
Finally we had a nice week end discovering Ludwigsburg and Stuttgart.
