Dox Box Damascus 3
German cameraman Peter Badel is one of the mentors of the Campus – together with Dutch producer Joan Morselt, Danish colleague Mikael Opstrup and myself. The participants in the workshop are aspiring young filmmakers, who have been grouped according to their wish to be a producer or a director – or ”I don’t know where I want to go yet”.
Badel gave a very inspiring lecture, ”The Narrative and the Image”. He told us about his close collaboration with excellent German director Thomas Heise (read about his ”Material” on this blog) and how they, as close friends, understood how the images should be – you do your job, Heise says to Badel, and I will not interfere. Technical details were given by Badel, who started with 35mm in the times of the GDR, and now works with a small digi camera. And he showed some photos, he had taken and talked about how they were composed and he gave us the stories connected. Much time was dedicated to clips from Heise’s masterpiece ”Vaterland” and to ”Heinz und Fred”, a one hour wonderful film by Mario Schneider, a composer who went to filmmaking. Fred is a handicapped old man but lives a good life with his father and all the old machines that he wants to repair. Badel showed us a great crane tour from the end of the film saying that in this case the crane was a kind of cameraman – two takes they made. 800€ for hiring the crane.
