yearbook 2004/05 - The European Film College

SUMMER 2003
Chr. Brand Thomsen & Holger Bech Nielsen
For the first time ever we had no new faces in
the faculty. In many ways it was a relief to know
that everybody on board knew exactly what was
expected of them. That fact did not, however,
exclude the arrival of many outsiders during
term.
During the first course period producer MADS
EGMONT CHRISTENSEN taught production
and also gave a common lecture on ‘Vertical
integration’ within European film production.
Teaching directing, ESBEN HØJLUND-
CARLSEN’s courses are often complemented
by outside talent in order to accommodate ‘the
real thing’ as best as possible. Actress SARAH
BOBERG participated during the workshop
before Christmas as a ‘victim’ for the students’
personal directing skills. This model was developed
in January with the assistance from veteran
director GERD FREDHOLM and eight
professional actors from Copenhagen. Monologues,
dialogues and quartets from famous
plays were understudied and interpreted and
put on tape for everybody to enjoy afterwards.
Also during the Christmas workshop we were
visited by stunt coordinator JACOB RIEWE
(former student) who threw around students in
the old library during the stunt course and editor
LARS BO KIMERGAARD did an extensive
course in creative editing. The workshop
concept was continued right after Christmas
during which veteran editor and a dear friend
of the college MAMOUN HASSAN did a editing
based course on Kurosawa combined with
more private consultations with students and
their projects and scripts. Parallel to this MARK
LE FANU lectured on a string of Ingmar Bergman’s
films while HENRIK KOLIND (former
student) managed a multi camera crash course
in the studio resulting in a full fletched music
video with a live band.
SIGRID BENNIKE, freelance set designer,
taught a full course in set design. Building
models and finding the proper artistic/aesthetic
expression was the order of the day. Also we
wanted people trained for the upcoming TVproject
in February. Vocal therapist SABINE
BECK-BARNTH gave a weekend workshop
on vocal training in March.
A new structure within the curriculum was
chosen this year for two projects. Usually TV-
and documentaryprojects have been executed
in two separate periods consisting of four weeks
each. Taking into account that only half the
students are interested in documentary and television
respectively we decided to run these two
projects in parallel thus increasing the motivation
and workload for the really keen ones. As a
bonus we saved four weeks that could be spent
otherwise.
We could now offer two weeks for ‘individual
studies’ and an extra two-week course period in
March. ‘Individual studies’ could be finishing
extra curriculars, writing for the finals, research
in relation to life after Ebeltoft, watching films
that students never found time to watch, read
that damned book that had been lying on the
bedside-table for months etc.
The TV-project was launched in February (and
aired on DR4 in March) and it was decided to
do a satirical sit.com concentrating on a family
sucked into TV-watching with additional
sketches, commercials and music. MOGENS