Youth Film

I am sitting under a sun umbrella on top of a slide in the playground. It is raining. I am capturing timelapse footage of a stage setup for a heavy metal music festival. Tomorrow is the big day, and I am only here in an advisory role, but Luca - whose project this is - is still in school taking a Latin test. He is 14 and my nephew and ever since we made a 2 minute short thriller 5 years ago (written, shot and edited in 2 days) he has been making films. So far he mostly completed the trilogy that was conceived following the success of the first film, which won 1st prize in a youth film festival. But as with most serial films quality deteriorated. But word got around that he is a filmmaker and now he has been commissioned to make a documentary of the local free music festival, now in its 3 rd year, after making a short doc about a Battle of the Bands contest. After filming the preparations including meetings with the police, setup and interviews he is now planning the big day and has me asked to help out. He is a pleasure to work with as he's extremely professional - something he probably learnt from his graphic designer father. We will have a crew of 3 more students from his school, some of whom have not done any filming before, so I will be doing a bit of a workshop to introduce them to basic filmmaking principles, too. As the festival takes place in one of the sleepiest parts of Germany his idea is to interpose footage - still to be shot - of sheep, cows in fields and general scenes of tranquility with shots of headbanging. Additionally he wants to make music videos for the bands. We have three cameras to play with - ah, bless the digital age where a 14 year old can command multiple camera setups- so should have no problem capturing sufficient footage. Now we just have to hope it stops raining.