What is the film about?

A house, a garden, a stream. The beehive on the hillside, the shack, the wooden hut
and the shed. In between we find memories, stories and observations. The past, the
present and the future.

What influenced it?

Duerrenwaid 8 uses memories, stories and observations made by three generations (ourselves, our parents and our grandparents) in one garden. Still the film remaines timeless and also abstract. We‘re using this universe of memories to create a new one as well as new memories and stories.

We are both coming from fine arts, drawing, comics and print. To combine these two worlds, which are connected anyways, was just a logical step for us.

A little background information...

Like most films which are made: this is a very personal film as a lot of memories and emotions are connected to this garden and our family. It’s our way of saying thank you to a lot of things and people without being too concrete about it.
Subtlety is narrative in „Dürrenwaid 8“. In different extracts and insights, the nuances tell more than what is actually portrayed. We achieve this through unusual Situations and also unusual clippings of the shown. A letting go and collecting impressions, without the claim to a told story. An atmospheric interplay of different insights and impressions whose scene is always the garden.
Family history, childhood memories, stories and observations come together in a strange way; are visually challenging, innovative and memorable.

An experimental Heimatfilm.

How was the film made?

Analogue and digital drawings are reproduced with a special printing technique (riso print). The already imperfect line becomes even more fragile and broken. We use rasterization for surfaces and also old and new photographies and film material. Riso print is not an exact printing technique. Every print is an original.
We layouted all of this material in Indesign and made around 20 different flyers size A4 which are folded to a little booklet with a poster on the back. These flyers are riso printed in our home studios. We own two Risos from the GR series: a GR 3770 and a GR 2750. We also used flowers and gras from the garden for the backgrounds which we put directly on the scanner table of the Riso printer.

After printing we scanned every color in every print separately and did a lot of Photoshop editing and even more AfterEffects editing to achieve the final look of the film. This kind of complicated process was really important for us as the film is about the memories of a garden and the imperfect and broken lines and structures are transporting our intention of the film perfectly.

After finishing the film we took some of the animation back to the printed form and made two riso printed flip books which are published with ROTOPOL Kassel and are available for sale in their online shop:

rotopolpress.de/en/produkte/handstand
rotopolpress.de/en/produkte/the-dance