molecules | moleküle

March 11, 2014

Molecules (German: Moleküle) is a short film that was produced to outline certain ideas that i was going to use in the film Atoms (German: Atome). Atome was going to be the joint diploma / tesis of cinematographer Thilo Schmidt and me. We had met some years before during an exchange we both did with the EICTV (International Film and Television Schoon) in Cuba.

Although we had quite a clear visual concept for Atome, there were several things we believed to work but had never tried ourselfs. We knew we were going to use long, static shots and the “choreography” of the actors had to be directed in a way to hold the audiences attention for quite a long time. Also we needed to explore how spaces, vanishing points in image composition & movement in spaces and especially the use of sound played together in the construction of tableau vivant type of scenes. We had seen this working in several movies, for example the Films by Roy Andersson or Tsai Ming-Liang, but we didn’t have hands-on experience how to control the effects of this type of shooting.

Additionally, there was the “financial” aspect:

We had applied once (and got rejected) for funding from the Filmstiftung NRW for our feature Atoms. The deadline for the second and last attempt to get funding from the Filmstiftung was getting closer, so we organized a couple of friends and produced this short to pass along with the application for Atome, as a Trailer.

We shot one day and edited one day.