For pre production work please look at the physical copy of the Berlin Folder.
Berlin Evaluation
Side Streets is a documentary about the side of Berlin that a tourist won’t necessarily see. It features interviews ranging from a DJ who had worked in the industry for 40 years to the founder of an underground experimental radio station. These interviews will give an insight to how Berlin’s underground music/art scene is evolving and where it is at currently. It will also reflect on how Berlin has influenced its artist and in turn, how the artist has influenced the capitol of Germany.
When we first knew that this film was going to be chosen the first thing that was to be decided was the division of roles. I put myself forward as Camera Operator, Editor and to work with someone else on Director of Photography. I had chosen to go for these roles as I felt it gave me the opportunity to not only learn about these areas through practical work, but I also felt that I already possessed enough of ability in these areas that I would be comfortable in the previously stated roles and believed that I could do a good job here. As the we had quite a small group, our group contained 5 people including myself, so people had to take up several roles, but we also had the possibility to work together on some aspects of the roles to make the work load a bit lighter. Working in small groups had its advantages and disadvantages. Briefly, the positives included that everyone knows what they are doing as it is less people to try and man-manage. This would result in it being clear to each member what they had to do before leaving for Berlin. A disadvantage of a smaller group is that these roles could have been spread out more evenly. At some points it also felt that more people would have helped cover more area when we were in Berlin. For example, on one of the days we had to split up our group into two smaller groups. These groups had three and two members. If there were more people, we could of padded these groups out a bit more and even have an extra group go out in Berlin to film B-roll around the city. This could have positively impacted the final edit of our film. The week before leaving the role of producer had been passed onto me as the person who originally had the role thought I would be better suited at the role.
Before going to Berlin to film our documentary we had to do a fair bit of research so our experience in Berlin would be as smooth as possible. I started off by looking into potential places that looked like they would fit well within what we wanted from our documentary. An example of places we looked at was ‘Design Panoptikum’ a very small museum featuring abstract art made from unusual material such as mannequins and film reels. Another place I looked at was ‘The Bierpinsel’ as I thought we could take the documentary in the direction that involved looking at the fall of the Berlin Wall and its influence on architecture and art around the city. The Bierpinsel would have been good as it was originally a piece of Brutalist architecture but also had recently been taken in a different direction with a piece of commissioned graffiti around the exterior of the building. However, our research was taken in a different direction when we were put into contact with an English born DJ in residing in Berlin. ED2000 or Corin Arnold had moved to Berlin in 1989 and had been doing gigs over there ever since. Through Corin we were then put into contact with Nika Radic, a Croatian visual artist and Cashmere Radio Station, an underground experimental radio station who Corin had featured on a few times prior and was going to be performing there on the week we were in Berlin. I had then tried to research more information about these people so when we were to meet them, we didn’t appear completely clueless. Also, I felt that if we had shown interest in their work, this could be shown be doing research in past projects etc, they would open up a bit more to us interviewing them as it is coming from someone who has a general interest in their work.
Once we got over to Berlin, our shooting was dictated by where and when our arranged interviews were to take place. As a group we had all been there to interview one of the founders of Cashmere Radio with me and the other Camera Operator taking turns using the camera, we could only bring one to the radio stations as per their request, to give the other a break. While we were there, we also managed to get an interview with an experimental artist ‘Acid’ who had recycled old VHS movie tapes and, using magnets, altered the picture while also putting lo-fi beats over the imagery to create an almost psychedelic feeling. When the other camera operator was filming the first interview, I was recording the backup audio for it through a microphone off screen. All this was great experience in both learning about each role and learning about properly setting up a documentary interview which I will take forward next time I have to do something similar. We all worked well when doing the recording at Cashmere Radio and was probably the most enjoyable part of the actual filming process. I would say the only difficulties we ran into was for the second to final interview where we had misplaced the audio equipment as our group had split up to get another interview that was taken place at the same time but in a different part of Berlin. However, I thought we had recovered well from this tiny setback and had worked out a suitable alternate. I thought we had shown moments of working well to certain time constraints as getting across Berlin could be seen as an obstacle for film students who have never visited the country before, but it all ended up working smoothly and we arrived at all our interviews with plenty of time. I would class this as evidence that, as a group, we were good at time management. For the post production part of this documentary me and the other camera operator had also decided to work together on the editing side of the documentary to split the work load with each person doing half the interviews plus me doing the introduction and the other person doing the other half and the credits.
The editing side wasn’t particularly hard as it most of it [the editing time] was sifting through the footage we had collected in our time and cutting it down to make it fit a documentary style format. We had aimed to cut the interviews down to around four minutes. This raised some problems as the interviews we had recorded were roughly 18-22 minutes long. The decision was made to not have a presenter type character for the film, so the interviews really must have flow to them so it seems, to the audience, that each interview makes sense where it is positioned within the documentary. While looking through the interviews we had found that most of the interviewee’s had referenced or hinted at that Berlin has and is going through gentrification, so we tried to communicate that topic to the audience.
I thought a particularly strong point to the documentary is the editing side to it. The way we had managed to ‘streamline’ the interviews down to much smaller lengths while still retaining the bulk of the information the interviewee had given to us. Even though we had cut away so much there are still interesting parts in which we have put together and hopefully the audience will see. A crucial part of a documentary is to teach the audience and hence we must put it [the film] in a certain format for so that the viewer can learn something from it. This must mean that the way we edit our film together it must seem coherent and easy to follow. To hide where we cut, we use the b-roll that we had filmed over in Berlin to cover the cuts and we had edited the audio to make the transition from one clip to the next as seamless as possible. If this transition had not flowed well, the quality of the documentary would have decreased as it would be extremely obvious to the audience that the clips we had were just a small extract from a much larger clip. Which you don’t want, you are looking for the interview segments to look like one solid chunk of speech rather than loads of little clips put together.
A point that could be classed as a drawback to our film was a lack of communication. As this was some of our first time, me included, working all together on a project there was a few problems however, this could have been different if we had, for example, made a short film before going to Berlin where we would all be in the same roles that we were in for our actual Berlin documentary. This would have given us more knowledge on each role and prepared us more thoroughly for the bigger project.This would have also helped with knowledge within the group of where everybody's strengths lie. For example, someone who wanted to do sound, with some practice, could’ve found out that they were pretty good at being a camera operator. But as we had not done this, we might have missed out on someone adding quality to the film that we weren’t even aware we could have accessed.
Another point that could have been seen that it was a negative, was the lack of people in our group. I had briefly covered this before, but I'll expand a bit on this. As the groups were already quite small breaking them up to even smaller groups was not beneficial as we were losing the qualities that the other group had offered when we were all together. I would like to argue that if we had a bigger group the quality of our final product could have been improved. The increased members would have allowed us to be able to break down our group to smaller groups, to cover a larger area in Berlin, while still retaining the quality of the members. However, a counter argument could be made that we would still lose other members qualities when we split up as we would still be losing members. In a counter-counter argument if we had more members to begin with we could have done what I said in the last paragraph about making a short film before leaving to Berlin to learn where the qualities are with each member. This means we could break the groups down into who would well together, so pairing up people where one person's strength is another person's weakness and vice versa. This would help with the actual filming process.
To conclude, the whole process was a great learning experience that taught me a lot about the areas in which I hadn't learned about before. This was a great starting place to work in a team, with different roles, as we all knew each other very well, learning from each other was made easy because of it. The only issues were minor ones and things we can amend for similar-future projects.