The Final Week

The group is working hard to get the movie almost up to standards. We have been filming and editing like crazy. This week my group when to the bar Zimit und Zunder. Here we came across a gold mine. There were about 4 Germans sitting around and playing ping pong. They invited us to play and eventually at the end of the night we got our last interview with Jana. The interview was so helpful because it was in the last week and a half of the due date. It gave us some more really good material and answered the question of why people play Ping pong in Berlin. We got the answer that Germans play ping pong mostly in the East because there is nothing else to do in the east. This definitely makes sense now that we think about it. There really was nothing for kids to do, so people started picking up ping pong and playing it in basements and with friends. One of the main ideas in Goodbye Lenin was that the son would make some of his own movies to fool his mom. The movies would be about the GDR and how they have allowed more open regulations in their country. The boy got so into making the movies about the GDR that he said he started recreating the GDR in his movies, to his ideals of what he wanted to GDR to be. I think that is interesting because he makes movies that reflect how he sees Berlin. We have been making movies to describe Berlin through a camera lens. It’s similar because he also captures and shows his interpretation of what Berlin is to him.

The final week was so intense, with late night hours of editing every night. I feel so far that our movie has a lot more editing techniques in it than most people. We spent most of our time on our movie working on editing fine things in the movie. On the downfall, so much time was spent on editing the small things in the video. Since we didn’t have long segments of filming, we had to do so much cutting and pasting in the movie to create many clips of playing ping pong in clubs and bars. I generally provided many idea’s and opinions on my movie, to direct it into what I saw. It turned out beautify, with humor, ridiculousness, and information. The overall hardest part of the movie was thinking about how we can create a structure for the middle of the movie. We had an idea for the beginning, but didn’t come up with how we were to structure the mass of the movie until about two weeks ago. When we started putting things together and seeing what it looked like, it started to be clearer in everybody’s minds. I gave the idea to put in the single one man interviews as an excellent way to both provide our point of view, and to transitions all the scenes from ping pong to us. IT was a pivotal point in designing our movie because it allowed us to do much more than what we originally thought.