Long term projects have a lot going for them, but I have to admit I also have quite a sweet spot for those quick and effective jobs where it's just you, a camera, a laptop and a badass deadline.
For example, in May I shot at the Karneval der Kulturen in Berlin. It's a multicultural celebration where a lot of ethnic minorities have the opportunity to introduce themselves to the general population. The highlight of it is a parade through the city. I did a portrait about the Circassian group for german local TV station RBB. It was shot around noon, edited until 6 p.m. and broadcast at 11 p.m.
In the end of July I spent a weekend at Greenville Festival on the outskirts of Berlin. Together with my colleagues Suse Bruha and Patrick Westphal I was hired to shoot interviews backstage with some of the artists. Since we always shot with more than one camera, never wanted to use the same location twice and usually had to be really fast, we mostly worked together on the little bits.
Gentleman was super relaxed, but Katzenjammer almost got led into a horsefly death trap by us.
Gemma Ray contemplated festival life, Razz surprised us with quite some teen maturity and Alex Clare came across super funny. It felt like had the time allowed it, we all would have continued our talk over a drink at the bar.
All of these clips were to be edited and uploaded asap to the homepage of arte television - so between shooting the first frame to seeing the finished piece online were sometimes merely a couple of hours.
Extremely stressy, also because of an outside temperature of close to 40°C, but also quite rewarding in seeing so much work done in a short amount of time.
Considering the urgency of the arte job, shooting the Radio Fritz tram concert of Berlin fun rapper MC Fitti proved to be a walk in the park. Set up in an association with the Berlin transport authority BVG, Fitti performed for an hour in a crowded tram going through Berlin to 70 fans who were giddy with the excitement of being part of this exclusive event. Who can blame them...
This one was not done in much of a rush, since my colleague Justus Hütter and I shot about 3 hours of footage and the piece itself is only 5 minutes. Sound engineer Kevin Castens took his time polishing the sound and I edited this over the course of a weekend.
But really: try shooting a gig when it happens in a tram at 30°C outside, 120 pounds of confetti flying around you and a gang of very devoted fans following every instruction Fitti and his crew would think of. Speaking of which... If you haven't heard: head spins are so yesterday, we do the ROFLcopter. Duh...
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