Crossing Europe is Austria’s second-biggest international filmfestival, presenting the works of 150 different filmmakers from all over Europe. The festival, aiming for divers-contemporary filmcreation, has its main focus on socio-political questions as well as music- and youthculture.

This year we had the honor to co-produce the official festivaltrailer for its 17. edition in a cooperation with Karol Kensy, a Linz-based director and friend.

The project was fun to work on, although the realisation could have been easier during another season of the year. As the single-shot clip was recorded outside in winter, cold temperatures turned out to be challenging for both the team and equipment. The concept was to capture the night-time scene in a tracking shot on a crane, taking place on an urban pump track. However, thankfully our 10 skaters did not loose their patience and ultimately the protagonist returned to her real bed. Here’s a insight of the trailer which will be published on 3rd of March:

https://www.crossingeurope.at/xe-presse/festivaltrailer.html

Karol describes the idea behind the story as following:

In Zeiten wo das globale Klima immer schneller aus dem Gleichgewicht gerät, scheint künstliches Licht nur ein weiterer Störfaktor für die Natur zu sein. Durch unsere Telefone erscheinen wir selbst in der Unschärfe wie kleine Glühwürmchen und spiegeln dabei auf bizarre Weise diese Natur wieder. Eine Natur in welcher wir wie Nachtfalter vom Licht angezogen werden, sei es durch Bildschirme, Beleuchtung oder das Kino. Es stellt sich die Frage: Wie lange können wir uns in dieser aus Licht erzeugten Traumwelt wohlfühlen bevor wir merken dass uns der Boden unter den Füßen zu heiß wird?

Globalisation of economies more often causes the need to go on long disctance- intercontinental travels to work on remote places in the world. So for us, as a green, sustainable company it is also not possible to entirely avoid using planes.

Once again we were instructed to do shootings overseas this time for a customer in New Zealand. As for the reason that we constantly try keeping our ecological footprint low, we were looking for a way to compensate the caused damage to nature of which we are co-responsible when booking our seat in the plane. There exists a huge variety of organisations who offer compensation services in terms of climate protection projects.

Finally we decided to trust www.atmosfair.de

Critics say it is just a way to calm down ones conscience by paying a kind of remission while continue doing the wrong thing by excessively flying around the world without thinking about the consequences.. We think, as long as there aren´t any alternative and green technologies to reach other continents, its the better choice to at least try to keep your wastage of greenhouse gas balanced with this option. For sure it´d be always the better way if we could completely deal without it…

Not only in your living room it is nice to have plants caring for a comfortable indoor climate to feel good. Also at work its better to not resign from the green life, as long as there is enough space.

If, like in our case, there are already many desktops and spaces reserved for computers and office stuff, it was the more neccessary to find a creative solution to both finding a place for plants and creating a decorative arty room installation object.

Here is how we´ve done it:

For making our latest video, an extensive industrial video for Austrian marketleader Ebner Industrieofenbau, we had to travel a lot, even on other continents. For example just in the USA we travelled at least 3.500 kilometers through eight different federal states. We did some scenes in Russia, Switzerland, Germany and the Czech Republic.

Pictures by Roland Froschauer

During this journey we made many new experiences and got to know lots of people from different countries  and of course we filmed some great scenes! The whole production which includes also 3D animations was filmed in full 4K resolution and is in total over 4 TB big. All in all we can say that all the stress and effort that brings such a journey with it, was totally worth it.

For our documentary „7 Mountains to Glory“, we needed a helicopter shot to be modified to look like it takes place at night, due to the film’s story. The shot is approximately 25 seconds long and has been captured among sunny but slighly diffuse conditions. To get the feeling of that wet and cloudy early morning (4:00 am) of the race day, when the athletes were heading toward the Traunstein’s plateau, we added some clouds, a dark sky, colours and lights using After Effects. The challenge was to apply the effects over the whole sequence, in which the perspective, foreground etc. is going through a lot of changes. Rotoscopying had to be done by hand as well.

For more information about the movie/ screening dates etc. stay tuned and please visit www.bergmarathon.at