Director: Cristian Straub
DoP: Jakob Suess
Featuring: Inga Busch, Michelle Malter
Make-Up & Hair: Giovanni Rivas (Close Up Agency)
Sound Design & Mixing: Pablo Paolo Kilian
Color Grading: Mike Friedland (NHB)
Production: Riese Farbaute

Since I’m setting up the production for my next big fashion film project, I guess it’s a good time to showcase my last major production, a film for German high fashion designer Anna Fuchs.
“Journey to the other side” was a very ambitious thing, loosely based on Cassavetes’ “Opening Night” and citing in part 80s commercials and music vids (visually speaking). Together with designer Anna Fuchs, who’s very into film noir, DoP Jakob Suess and myself, we wanted to broaden the idea of what a fashion film can be. We wanted it to be more narrative, more cinematographic, with a better mise-en-scene, but also daring/experimental… Like I said, quite ambitious.
Therefore, and despite our moderate budget, it was the only logical choice to shoot on film stock (Kodak 16mm Vision2 and Vision3) and in the “dated” 4:3 format. We had some nice locations in Hamburg and a great team to begin with. Maybe not the most obvious choice was casting famous German actress Inga Busch for the leading role. Inga worked with the greats of German film and stage directors and it was quite a risk putting her in an “superficial” fashion environment. That as well as pairing a top notch actress like her with Michelle, a model, who had never acted before. In the end, both of them delivered some very convincing performances and I was very happy with the overall outcome.

But decide for yourself…

If you like to see more of my work, check out my homepage.

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Witchery Fall/Winter 2010. Beautiful girl, handsome boy, nice melancholic score, shot on film stock, black&white… It’s no witchery at all. Still, it impressingly captures that nouvelle vague feeling. Director is Kiku Ohe.

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