A four-day workshop on Creative Writing & Editing with Jonas Rothlaender and Jerem Tonteri took place on the 6th, 10th, 13th, 14th, and 28th of February at Cultural Center Caisa and Finnish Film Foundation.
Creative Writing by Jonas Rothlaender
The goal of the workshop is to deepen the craft of making films by relying on intuition and rather react spontaneously rather than planning and thinking too thoroughly (and therefore censoring ideas) about it in advance. By that, adapting and adjusting on the fly will be enhanced.
In this short but intense workshop which is for a maximum of 5 people, the participants will come up with ideas in a creative writing workshop, which they then will transfer to a script and shoot as a short fiction film of a maximum of 5 minutes*.
***Participants have to self-organize everything e.g. actors, crew, and location if needed themselves. It’s not so much about shooting the perfect-looking film but seeing it more as an exercise to practice.
After that, the editing of the film begins with Jerem Tonteri.
Creative Editing by Jerem Tonteri
During the creative editing process we will mainly focus on fiction filmmaking, the fiction script is “rewritten” using the existing audiovisual materials. Some decisions have already been made during the scriptwriting while the participants attended the creative writing workshop and during the shootings. Now it is the final stage!
The question is what do you have in the material – not what you should have had? Our goal is to find “the best” from the material, put it together, and create something whole with some kind of a beginning, middle, and end. The most important things are the rhythm and the actors’ work, what we need to do is keep going in a solid way and stay connected with the materials, which sometimes means we take overacting away or underacting to find the right rhythm.
Jonas Rothlaender (b. 1982 in Lübeck, Germany), studied directing at the German Film and Television Academy Berlin (DFFB). His first feature-length documentary Familiar Circles, premiered during Max-Ophüls-Preis in 2015, and had its theatrical release at the beginning of 2016. His feature film debut Fado, an international co-production, premiered in Rotterdam and at Max-Ophüls-Preis in 2016, where he won the prize for best directing. It subsequently toured around many international festivals, where it won several awards. During the Berlinale 2017, Fado received the prize for the best debut from the German Film Critics’ Association.
Jerem Tonteri is an experienced film editor and has been editing both drama and documentaries as a freelancer. He holds a Master of Arts from Aalto University. He co-directed the documentary film The Blackouts (53 mins, 2018) which won the Grand Prix at Emigra Film Festival, Warsaw 2019.
Participants:
Teresa Siltanen, Sam Boateng, Vishnu Rajan, Roxana Sadvokassova, Mariangela Pluchino
Link to documentation by Surabhi Nadig https://www.flickr.com/photos/academyofmovingpeopleandimages/albums/72177720306537753