Not so Talented with a Camera?
By Malwina Grochowska

It's not easy being a Talent. Sometimes it means starting your duty at 9 am, although you left the Campus opening party just a couple of hours earlier. Let's put aside those tough circumstances without even mentioning that the temperature in Berlin has fallen below freezing, and just state that eight Talents managed to arrive at Sony Center yesterday morning to take part in "Stop By, Shoot Film".

Soon the sacrifice they made proved to be worth it. The workshop led by Bart Durkin and Matthias Schulze, both experienced camera instructors from Kodak, consisted not only in the theoretical part, but also a real shooting experience in the frozen city's landscape.

There are various workshops making part of an educational program for cinematographers supported by Kodak. This one, subtitled "Demystifying Celluloid", showed the advantages of Super 16mm camera. As young filmmakers often face budget limits, but are not satisfied with the video image, Super 16 can be a nice alternative to poor quality video cameras from one side, and more expensive 35mm from the other. It offers such possibilities as optical image through the viewfinder or easy and low-loss transfer from the positive into a High Definition picture.

After Bart Durkin explained the most important of the camera's features, each one of Talents got 25 minutes to shoot his movie at Potsdamer Platz. For some advanced users it was just an every day task and a nice possibility to try the Arriflex 416 camera. Like for Michal Stajniak from Poland, who just finished at the famous Lodz Film School and has already worked as camera assistant in a professional full-length feature. But other participants, me for instance, were pretty stressed to look for the first time in their life through a viewfinder of a Super 16mm camera.

It was not only about looking, but also shooting my own scene. Well, every film critic should feel at least once like a director and cinematographer, I suppose. Maybe that helps to judge others' fairly.

Everybody, even me, thanks to Matthias' great patience for inexact knowledge of camera technique, directed his short scene. We were supposed to try different depth focuses (which is an advantage of Super 16mm compared to the video camera) and avoid zooming. That way even a film journalist shot about 15 seconds of her probably badly focused scene.

As I already said, it's not easy to be a Talent. Luckily after this unique shooting experience I could fall into a warm and cozy cinema chair again and from this nice position get angry about the grainy picture in "Lagerfeld Confidential".

Malwina Grochowska

top