A collection of Doodles from my sketchbook – Germany
doodle collection
My experiences in the ASF team (during the 2 weeks in Ludwigsburg)
Now I’m gonna write down some of my experiences and stories, because I draw some illustrations. Well I was so inspired in this atmosphere.
We had an improvisation workshop with Dörthe Eickelberg, as Joe wrote about it before. After warming in, we had to improvise many kind of stories that Dörthe mentiond to us. For acting we didn’t use any object, just our body to express our feelings and show the situation as believable as we could, and if it was necessary we spoke to each other. We took it very serious, and sometimes – I think – the group act on a very high level, and we could feel deep emotions such as sadness, surprise, force, love, poorness and fun ect. It was a great fun, and I hope I’ll feel, and live this again in my life more.
There are three pictures which were inspired from these stories. One about a poor servant boy in a restaurant called Mećek, who wants to step on a higher level to be cook, but the cruel old woman chief and the cook are against him, and he has to do pokey job, clean the toilet. But the Queen arrives into the restaurant. She likes the boy, and want him to eat together… the chief doesn’t like this and wants to poison the boy, but it ends badly for her and the cook. And in the end the Queen bet Mećek as her son : )
The other story was on a Submarine, with an ignorant Captain who even don’t know where to go and what to attack, but solider Broznik can help and make the decision, if the captain wants…
There is a king on the third illustration. We had to bring him some present…
The other three pictures for you guys, some memory of how we learnt to use post it notes for idea developing, and of our weekend journey to spa and Stuttgart to drink hot chocolate after a tiring day : )
Sketches of lecturers 2
There are three different people, who we could learn a lot from. (everyone in a different way : ) but Respect!
The man behind this Blog!
Lucas-Ellenshaw: A Love and Hate Relationship.
“Peter playing in the bed”
Pre-production, post’its and pitching
One of the highlights of the past few days was an improvisation workshop with Dörthe Eickelberg. We looked at theatrical improvisation, creating characters, walks, physicalities and how these can be used for storytellers. It was really interesting to relate it to filmmaking and creating characters and stories for animation. It’s a very free, creative way of working and also really helped the group to bond. I think these techniques are also useful for bringing together a team, a group of people working on a film, discovering a common language and perhaps, more importantly establishing a sense of humour.
We had a really interesting session with Kim Bjørnqvist who’s background lies in the cut-throat world of advertising and he had lots of entertaining stories to tell us. We had him for two days and the time was really spent looking at models for effectively developing and realising ideas aswell as pitching and presentation. We looked at structures from Disney and other companies and various methods of thinking, target audiences and research before consuming plenty of post it notes for huge ideas generation sessions.
Another interesting presentation was about stereoscopic 3d, existing and emergent technologies, what this means for cinema and how it can be harnessed and used effectively within animation. This session was taken by François Garnier, a leader in this field who joined us after a shoot with Wim Wenders in another part of Germany. He talked a lot about the science and technicalities of how stereoscopy works and it’s interesting history. It turns out that the basic 3d image has been around since photography began and that filmmakers such as Méliès, Eisenstein and Hitchcock all made stereoscopic films.
He had a lot of interesting ideas on the future of the technology saying “3d is sometimes not the best way to tell a story but rather to experience the story”. He did not seem to think that 3d is the way forward for all cinema. He said that the craze we are currently experiencing is transitory and that the technique will find its place more in augmented reality, instalation and other forms as well as cinema.
The day really got me thinking about the various uses for this technology and he actually gave us a relatively simple demonstration of how to make a stereoscopic film using the old red and blue glasses method as opposed to the new polarized 3d which he also took us through.
The last workshop was with Alex Mayhew. He was talking to us about media strategies and ways of thinking about content travelling across various platforms and how these inform each other. We had a workshop in the afternoon where we generated ideas on these grounds and then pitched them as projects.
From Joseph’s blog
(most of) the asf team
at a castle somwhere in Germany
Filmakademie : pictures of day 5
Finding stories throught improvisation !
En / The fifth day was very cool to end the first week, with Dörthe Eickelberg from Arte (an old Filmakademie student), we have practice improvisation scenes all the day.
Fr / Le cinquième jour, pour bien cloturer la semaine, nous avons eu droit à un atelier d’improvisation avec Dörthe Eickelberg d’Arte (ancienne étudiante de la filmakademie). A cette occasion nous avons participé à de nombreuses scenettes et jeux, une très bonne journée pour le groupe qui à beaucoup rigolé.
Cristiano
Filmakademie : pictures from day 4
sketches of the lecturers
Hi guys I upload some of my sketces of the lecturers…I was listening to them all the time : )
Filmakademie Day 4 : from real life to plot
Today’s session was led by Jörg Bochow who is head dramaturg at Staatstheater Stuttgart. His background is in collaborative theatre and literature also having taught in Germany and Canada and published books on German and Russian theatre. Bochow took us through a process he had recently used to create a piece of theatre where he used interviews with real people to translate into a fictional piece of performance. He took us on a rapid tour of the history of theatre from Aristotle to Stanislavsky – taking us through various approaches to performance and storytelling and highlighted the way these methods have been appropriated in film and animation.
He explained techniques of interviewing and ways to deal with, and be sensitive to the interviewee, whilst at the same time asking questions that should get the desired response. Towards the end of the day the conversation turned to politics and the role of the artist in relation to their political context and how the artist is not dissimiliar to, or rather, is arguably in danger of becoming a politician, or a dictator. The ideas raised were useful to think about for motion picture artists and encouraged a blurring of approaches towards different mediums.
He showed a book which they had made for the show which contains some transcriptions of the interviews made and also acts as a sort of socio-political scrapbook.
- the book of transcriptions
Filmakademie day 3 : 360° productions and Interactive Drama
En / Mike Dicks´conference is on the new private (social blogs, phones …) or public (TV, Internet, consoles …) multi platforms.
Multi platform is not only about broadcasting a program in different ways but it is also about adapting it to a public and to a platform. Mike Dicks showed us some programs where the viewers participate to an Internet program as Wannabes on BBC channel, by voting for the next happening.
For this kind of project, we also talk about ranking money. Web productions are more expensive than a TV production. But, when you spend a lot of money, you will have to recover it and be sure the program will work. Let’s ask about the content of this kind of program … Multi platforms are growing up, hopefully, it won’t be only a matter of money !
PARTY TIME!
Happy hours guys. Thanks to welcome us into your room girlies 
We spent a nice night having a great diner and fun all together …
It’s really nice discovering you day after day !
Fr / L’intervention de Mike Dicks (Digital consultant and managing director) porte sur les nouveaux supports de diffusion qu’ils soient publics (TV, Internet, consoles…) ou privés (Réseaux sociaux, téléphone …).
Le « multi plateform » n ‘est pas seulement un ensemble de supports permettant de diffuser un même programme ; Il s’agit d’adapter un programme à un support de diffusion ainsi qu’à sa cible. Certains programmes présentés par Mike Davis font même participer le spectateur qui par exemple, en votant, décide de la tournure narrative d’un programme diffusé sur Internet (« Wannabes » BBC). En parlant de ce genre de projet, on parle également de profit. Produire un projet web coûte aussi cher, et peut être même plus, qu´un projet TV. Mais pour couvrir ces dépenses, il faut être sur que le projet fonctionne. Dès lors se pose la question du contenu. De nos jours les divers supports de production ne cessent d’être développés … espérons que la question de la qualité soit elle aussi explorée.
About quotes
En / As we are going to have a lot of interesting quotes from the lectures (Joseph has already put some good ones from H. Ellenshaw), I’ve added a “random quote viewer” at the bottom of the right sidebar.
Give me all the quotes you want, and I’ll add them to the quote base. I’ll try to find soon a better solution to give you the hability to add them by your self.
Bests
Filmakademie : pictures from day 3
En / Pictures of day 3 at the Filmakademie is online. I’m far from the 10 per day goal (18 today). To compose a selection is not so easy 
Today we where with Mike Dicks and the lecture what about MultiPlatform projects. Some very interesting points goes out. Wait for the thoughts from the others about the conference. Meanwhile, enjoy the picts
Fr / La sélection des photos du jour 3 à la Filmakademie est en ligne sur Flickr. J’ai pour objectif de mettre 10 photos par jour, mais j’en suis loin (18 aujourd’hui). Faire une sélection pertinente, essayant de montrer quelques moments vécus dans la journée, n’est pas chose facile
Aujourd’hui Mike Dicks était notre conférencier. Producteur Anglais, il nous a parlé de projet Multi Platformes. Des choses très intéressantes sont à retenir, et nous aurons l’occasion de remonter tout ça avec les notes qui arriveront sur le blog. En attendant, je vous propose les images…
Ellenshaw quotes
On Michael Bay’s camera-work “I wan’t to know the frickin’ story not go on a ride!”
“You’re in an industry fraught with personalities, politics and egos”
“We’ve already begun another golden age of animation”
“It’s like my father used to say, if it’s not hard, it’s not worth doing”
“Show it, don’t say it”
Harrison Ellenshaw 2009