The "found footage" horror movie "Walking in the Doomed Forest of Hamburg" was released a while ago. It's centered about dark / hard Techno music, by the way.
This time I want to talk a bit about my inspiration, and the mindverse behind the movie production.
The first, scarce origins to the movie date back to the 90s and early Millennium years.
We were some kind of techno-art-punk anarchists in Hamburg... well, we looked and dressed more like nerds, actually.
But we meant it!
The idea was to create some sort of counter-media against the mainstream, and the more the merrier.
Songs, parties, radio shows (on a real radio, with frequencies passing through the earth!), CDs, vinyl records, artworks.
All of that - was not easy. Resources were limited, money was limited, tech was limited.
But we got along well and thrived.
The world of movies / moving pictures / music clips seemed like a gate we could not walk through, though!
Even the DIY aspect of it. Shooting a real "music video" or "short movie" felt like it would involve humanpower and resources that we just did not have, or could not afford.
Eventually, we arrived at the idea: why not cut it down to the basics. Why not just do a clip, music, video thing, whatever, which is just us walking around, cycling on a bike, or standing somewhere...
Seemed easy enough! We never got round to doing it, though.
2.
Fast forward, around ~10 years later.
I felt drawn to this area around the above-mentioned "doomed forest". I spent hours and hours walking there, riding my bike to it, taking the bus, car, whatever. Swimming in its lake. Watching the stars on countless nights. Watching meteors, transit of planets, blue moons, super moons, blood red moons... you name it.
I always thought: I should make a recording of this. Record these "roads" (well, pathways in the dirt, more or less), these trees, the stars.... no, I *should* not do it - I *must* do it.
But I never got round doing it.
3. Let's do the timewarp again. ~10 year later once more.
It's yellow. No, not the moon. Well, that's sometimes yellow, too. Also not the color. It's music. The title of a song. The first big hit by Coldplay. One of my favorites by them.
And they did what we, what I wanted to do, around the same time that we wanted to do it. Shot a video that - more or less - merely shows them walking (and, more precisely: only the singer is visible). On a beach. Under the stars. During the night - no, during dawn.
I never seen the video, though. Even though I adored the song. But one day I decided to look it up on Youtube.
And it's almost as good as the song! Emotionally moving.
As I was stunned by it, I looked it up on wikipedia, to read more about it.
I learned that they did *not* shoot it at nighttime. The whole dark-to-blue light sequence was an effect they added later.
In this moment, I felt like a mirror burst into pieces somewhere with a loud clang (in my imagination!). I thought: "This is possible? To change a simple recording in a fairly simple way, to create a version of reality that did not exist before?".
Because this "simple" effect felt more convincing than most CGI in trillion dollar hollywood movies. I really believed Chris Martin had walked this beach at night.
...And then...
So these were three of the main inspirations. Or ingredients.
I wanted to do a movie that simply showed something walking, or moving around. I wanted to put a spotlight on this very area in and around the forest that I loved.
And I wanted to do effects and post-production that were not super-expensive or super-fancy, but that would (hopefully!) enable me to create glimpses into parallel reality versions of the footage used for the final movie.
Et voila! That's my story.
You can check the movie here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EOsPRnXbNc
