Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg Campus Magazin 23/24

WELCOME TO THE ANIMATIONSINSTITUT!
DO YOU REMEMBER WHEN YOU WERE
A KID AND YOUR MOTHER READ YOU
A STORYBOOK, WITH PICTURES,
AND YOU THOUGHT IT WAS ALL
TRUE AND MAYBE THE MOST IMPORTANT
THING IN THE WORLD? OR WHEN YOUR DAD
TOOK YOU TO SEE A MOVIE AND SOME-
HOW YOU FELL IN LOVE WITH IT, SO THAT
EVEN NOW THERE ARE SCENES FROM THE
FILM THAT YOU CAN’T FORGET AND IF YOU
SEE THEM AGAIN YOU CAN STILL FEEL THE
EXCITEMENT, TENSION, FEAR, JOY, RELIEF?
OR THAT TV SHOW THAT YOU THOUGHT
HAD BEEN MADE JUST FOR YOU AND YOU
HAD A SPECIAL INSIDER UNDERSTANDING
THAT YOU WANTED TO SHARE WITH YOUR
FRIENDS? OR MAYBE THAT GAME THAT
SOMEHOW PULLED YOU INTO ITS WORLD
AND LEFT YOU WONDERING HOW YOU HAD
BEEN SO BLISSFULLY OBLIVIOUS TO TIME
PASSING WHILE YOU LOST YOURSELF EX-
PLORING?
These thoughts kept coming to me as I sat through the
students’ presentations in Diploma Week. I had just arrived
as the new head of the Animationsinstitut and
found myself watching the graduating class present their
work and tell their stories of ambition and friendship,
doing and learning, disappointment and success. I was
impressed by the technical skill, the artistic talent, but
most of all by the gratitude the students felt for their experience
here. And I was moved by their stories.
It’s easy to think that as you get older, those constructed
works of art don’t affect you as much, don’t mean as
much as they once did to the sensitive child. We might
think we are too wise to feel unalloyed delight in something
we know to be made up! Perhaps we think our armored
shells protect us from the “arrows of outrageous
fortune”, and we want the Truth!
It turns out that, as we accumulate life experience, as we
recognize more patterns and echoes in the world, as we
raise children and say goodbye to our loved ones, it can
all come back stronger than ever.
If you’re anything like me, and you pause for a moment
to be honest with yourself, you might agree that at least
some of those experiences are inseparable from who you
are. You are made not only of flesh and bone and the genetic
heritage that affects even the way you gesture and
turn your head, but you also carry in yourself layers and
layers of transferred experience - of what we blandly call
‘media’ or ‘recorded culture’ - that have shaped you intellectually,
emotionally, morally. These things somehow
belong to you, like your own skin.
We all love that story or that show which says, with authority,
with humor, “that’s how life really is!” So true. So
true. We are all glad to glimpse the lives of others, made
more vivid and accessible through caricature, metaphor,
heightened contrast, compressed time, and all the methods
of the storyteller’s art.
The ability of storytellers to transport us to another
world is like magic. And like every other kind of magic,
it is something you can learn. That’s one reason to go
to film school.
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