Submarine Channel
The Berlinale Talent Campus devoted no less than three of their panel discussions to help initiate young filmmakers into the still murky waters of producing a cross-media project. One of Submarine‘s chiefs, Bruno Felix, exec producer of Collapsus was invited to speak in the first session of the panel about cross-media storytelling. Having a sublime cross-media idea is not enough, so the second panel was devoted to finding partnerships and funds for interactive projects, and featured guests such as Ben Grass (Pure Grass mastermind and producer of two online series: Beyond the Rave and Kirill, Wendy Bernfeld (founder of Rights Stuff, a company that specializes in licensing advice for traditional and new media) and Inga von Staden (initiator of Germany’s first European MEDIA program, and director of the Interactive Media department at the Ludwigsburg Film Academy).The last meeting dealt with ways of engaging the audience by a close-reading of two cross media projects: The Truth about Marika and Farwell Comrades. Martin Ericsson, one of the bright minds behind Marika’s story, discussed the impressive level of spectator involvement they managed to achieve with their immersive transmedia story. Users took part in clue-hunts in both the real and the online world where they had to figure out the ‘truth’ behind Marika’s (fictive) disappearance. And ever since Ericsson mentioned a video submission featuring a man actually travelling by plane from Riga to Russia, just to follow one of his targets assigned in the game, we became very curious about what Ericsson and his Company P will come up with next.
Lena Thiele, the newest addition of Gebrüder Beetz Filmproduktion, presented us her ambitious Farewell Comrades, a documentary project in production. In Farewell Comrades, the communist era is portrayed through the testimonies of artists, dissidents or even the simple folk that lived through communism. The website, i-media applications, TV series and books are meant to engage the users in the thousands of stories taking place in different times and spaces, which -once combined- give an extensive view about what this ideology really meant, and how it affected the societies involved. This ambitious project could actually change the way people experience history.
