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“Dirty Shorts” are short films and experimental movies that I produced in the last years. They mostly mirror my attempts to try out a new technique. There are also spontaneous works that developed without any script. And finally you can see results of movie projects with my students. The longest film in this collection is “The Work Of My Hands” (34 minutes, no English subtitles), a bizarre horror comedy from 2009, which I would do totally different today but which I am also proud of.
A lot of creative thinking and work were put into all of these films, more than a casual viewer might deem possible. Those are movies I look back upon crying with one eye and laughing with the other.
IRREgular!
This movie was an attempt to drum the three forms of English irregular verbs into my students’ brains.
“IRREgular!” was shot on a single school day shortly before the summer holidays. My students were about 13 years old and provided most of the ideas you can see in the film themselves.
Rain
“Rain” is a music video that talks about the victory of hope over depression. The song was written by Kai Dehmelt and Max Lorenz, two of my ex-students, who often write melodic and melancholic songs. When they asked me, if we could do a music video, I was sceptic at first – until I heard the song.
There are two levels of action in this film. On the one hand there are the musicians, as is typical of music videos. On the other hand there is the narrative element of a depressed boy who walks through town. A girl representing hope is putting her hands on a wall and ornaments are growing out of them, reaching out to the boy and drawing him towards her.
We shot this movie on a grey November day in 2012 in an old monastery and in the city of Meissen, Saxony. It was the first time I ever used a dolly to have a smooth camera move. That dolly was my car. I put the camera on its roof and we pushed it along the road – probably one of the most heavy dollies of amateur film history.
Quick Trick Chick Flick
Five days of planning. Six hours of photo shooting. 2500 images. Dresden in the summertime…
Juli 2011. Initially, I had planned a six-kilometer non-stop camera move through the inner city of Dresden, starting at Albertplatz and ending at the world-famous Church of Our Lady. Unfortunately it started raining after 45 minutes, so we had to cancel our ambitious project.
Frustrated we sat in a café. Since the rain didn’t stop, we had the idea to make the movie in one of Dresden’s biggest malls and improvise. At the end of the movie there is still the first scene we had already shot outside before the rain stopped us.
Little Red Riding Hood
What sickening sight is waiting for Little Red Riding Hood inside the house of her grandmother?
Making that clip has taken a whole week. I had been thinking a long time about how to make the girl look as stupid as possible and still be cute. Eventually I decided on an egg-shaped head.