POSTMORTEM: Pep oder Dinger [M-001]

This film took me way too long to complete. The story of making it is longer (and maybe even better) than what can be seen on screen.

It can be tough to follow through with a project like this. Balancing work, social stuff, health, AND your ambitions is not easy. Compared to other ventures this did not always seem sensible to pursue. "Pep oder Dinger" lived and died with me giving a shit about it. From 2017 to 2023, I kept chipping away at it one swing at a time.

The views I express here could very well change in the future. I mainly wanted to create this write-up for myself not to forget the hardship and learnings.

Enjoy the read! ;D

If you want to finish a big long-term project, you need to break it down into bite-sized chunks. You keep chewing one bite after another whenever you find the time to do so. Not losing oversight is hard. Discipline & purpose is worth more than temporary motivation.

My goal with “Pep oder Dinger” was to go through all steps of the process of filmmaking and explore as many disciplines as humanly possible. The structure of this “POSTMORTEM”-blog is based on the four production phases: Preproduction, Production, Postproduction, and Distribution.

It’s called “POSTMORTEM”, because I consider the completion of a project it's timely death. Out of sight, out of mind.

While I was working on this movie, a lot of other things were going on in my life. I finished my studies, then COVID happened. I was looking for a job and then I found a job. Don't worry, it wasn't a miserable time. I am just making excuses for taking so damn long to complete my film.

Let's be honest: there's no money in making the kind of movies I want to make, so I had to support myself in other ways. At least for now...

The obvious approach of profiting directly from my work does not really appeal to me anyways. I think it corrupts the final product. Creative minds tend to have trouble monetizing their work. As soon as work gets repetitive, you want to switch to another fresh idea and satisfy curiosity & ambition.

Now it was time to put my money (or lack thereof) where my mouth is. In total, I'm estimating this movie cost me about ~1,200€ (equipment, outfits, software, props). This does not include the cost of actual labor that went into it.

Imagine what I could do with 10,000€… 👀

Klaus Eichelberger is not my real name. I came up with the pseudonym even before buying my first DSLR camera. The main reason for this is to make it harder to pronounce my name in English. I want the announcers to struggle linguistically shall I ever earn an Oscar and walk the red carpet.

Organizing, filming, and cutting a movie all by yourself is a daunting task. You need to have a vision and then convey this vision to others. For me, to have a concrete vision I needed to think it through deeply from every angle and add as many stupid-good ideas and specific details as I possibly can. The story must appear justified in order for it to come into reality. It's almost like tricking your brain into thinking that it's necessary for this to exist. No doubts allowed.

If you want to skip ahead and read the final script, you can find it here. It's written in German (and I have NO INTENTION of translating it haha). Some aspects of the story may seem random, but they are indeed not. I'll try not to explain too much of the plot, because when did a joke ever get better when you explain why it's funny?

Film is like a language we all speak subconsciously. Using this language's tools in its full capacity is beautiful but rarely efficient. Think of it like writing a poem compared to writing instructions on how to use a washing machine. Totally different.

I never wanted to write a short film, since I never personally watch this form of media. There seems to be an emerging evolutionary reason to me why stories need 90 mins or more to truly unfold. With short-form content, you typically end up with punchy compressed comedy sketches.

The basic idea of writing this story was to work with what I had access to. This means no gigantic galaxy battle or what have you. Everything I included needed to be possible for me to execute. I purposely split the script into three parts as a backup plan. In the worst case, I'd only finish one of the three stories and call it a short film. The finished film ended up being only Bodo's point of view story (with a few tweaks to include more already shot footage, that I still wanted to use).

Coming up with a story (and its universe) is so much harder than creating a documentary. It's a blank page. You have nothing to start with. Also, every conceivable story has been told before. Clichés and patterns are part of life. But HOW you convey something show's your fingerprint as an author.

In addition, I feel like you should only write scenes you actually would want to shoot. If you have no intention of doing so, what's the point?

In terms of logistics, most of the screenplay was written in my hometown of Cologne, but to finish the final draft I took off a week and went to Prague. This was a really nice solo trip. My favorite cozy café for aspiring writers there is called "Cafedu". Highly recommend it! :)

"Pep oder Dinger?" is German and roughly translates to "Speed or MDMA?". It's the type of question me and my friends sometimes got asked when we were waiting in line to get into night clubs.

It's a hilarous coincidence how I only found out about the "Haben wir noch Pepps?" video after I finished the first draft of the script. I suppose there is such a thing as a collective hivemind. Initially, I thought about contacting the guys that created the video to collab with me, but then withdrew the idea as I didn't think I was proficient enough in my video skills.

BTW: I'm already looking forward to smartasses telling me that I don't know anything about drugs haha. It's never been the point to portrait drug use accurately and honestly I've never even touched drugs besides alcohol and caffeine. The only reason I picked to write about it, since it seemed like fun. And it was.

Before I started shooting, I had to do some research into what kind of equipment I'd need to create my Oscar-worthy motion picture.

Let me start by saying this: The equipment alone is not what makes a movie great. Use what you have / what you can get your hands on. For my stupid project, I tried to maximize bang for buck on a super tiny budget. Gear can get expensive quickly. Practicing with suboptimal equipment can teach you alot. You will be forced to learn how to work around limitations.

Do as I say, don't do as I do. Never take advice from someone who does not know what they are talking about. My technical skills are still very subpar.

Here's an overview of what I used. This is certainly not advice. You should do your own research.

Looking back I have some buyer's remorse.

My camera has a small sensor (~1.6 crop-factor for lenses or something), bad audio jack (INSANE white noise doesn't matter the mic), and sucks in low light (wouldn't recommend going over ISO 200 honestly). It can't even record longer than like 12 minutes per video (and only 30mins at a time). Everything was shot at 1080p since thats the max recording resolution. Waahhh!

Using a shotgun mic on top of my camera, I pretty much was forced to use the kit lense at ~20mm to get close enough for the audio recordings but also far away enough to capture everything I wanted in frame (especially in in-door setups). The crop factor made the 50mm (aka "Nifty Fifty") only usable in close ups and night shots.

I'm pretty happy with the rest, I guess. I am completly hopeless in using a glidecam but thats my own fault. 👉👈😳

Every plan needs to be flexible. If you're too stiff in your approach, you will get dissapointed. Take it easy, but take it!

The struggle of the filmmaker is trying to bring imagination and reality together, but never being able to actually do it.

Despite everything, it's always most important for me that everyone has fun on set. Not in a cynical way, though! Getting the chance of actually having a shooting day come together is huge. This doesn't happen often, so you need to grab it by its neck. It's one of the few opportunities you get to practice. I like to give people the frame and leave room for experimentation. As long as it doesn't break the "frame" of a given scene entirely, it's fine to go berserk. Planning everything in advance and then sticking to it is boring.

Paved roads and beaten tracks exist for security reasons, to make people feel safe by avoiding risk. Some people may see it as a failure if you don't end up arriving where you set out to go. I disagree, mainly because it provides you opportunities to be original. The goal should be to find your own path and make it work. But this might just be my brain rationalizing away the terrible thing I made ;)

In the heat of the moment, the amount of stuff happening on set is too much for a single primate brain to keep track of. You can only focus on so many moving parts when shooting before you lose overview of the important stuff. 🐵

Big shout out to my friends! They took over aspects like continuity, making sure dialog lines got delivered correctly, came up with suggestions, and so much more. I would've been totally lost and the final movie would've turned out sooo much worse if it wasn't for their engagement with the stupid story I came up with. All collaborators forge the movie. It's never a one man show.

There are some things you only learn by doing. For example, batteries are a limiting factor. I remember thinking that I could just leave my camera "on record" my whole first day of shooting and then being surprised that my camera ran out after the first scene. As mentioned before, I also couldn't record longer than 30 mins at a time.

After the first day of shooting, I immediately knew I had a turd in my hands. 💩 My recordings weren't sharp at all! The sound sucked! Everything looked wonky. Reality hit me -- This might not be my ticket to Hollywood :D

In general, filming is frustratingly slow. I was not expecting there to be this many necessary shooting days. You get so much less done in a day than you think on paper. Especially when you like to experiment. Even things like lighting conditions aren't permanent. You have windows of time (e.g., the "golden hour"). If you didn't get what you wanted before it's dark, you will have to come back another day.

My biggest tip: Get all filming done as quickly as humanly possible!!! In the time between shooting days, hair grows and people/relationships change. At some point, it had been so long there was DUST building up on my equipment. Truly heartbreaking.

A lot of organizational effort is required to get a group of people to the same place and at the same time. With each additional person the chance of failure to meet up increases exponentially. This was quite mentally taxing for me. Not everyone cares as much as you do about your project. They have their own lives and priorities. Be understanding. It's only a movie… Next time, I should pay them, I guess… 🤷‍♂️

In total, there were seven shooting days plus some additional pick-ups & reference videos for the animation part. Not everything ended up in the final video but I tried my best to not let any efforts of my actors go to waste. This also meant making adjustments to the script and story. After each shooting day, I created an outtake video to send to my friends.

I always laugh a lot while editing 😁

This might be the part I enjoy most. It's just me and the movie for hours on end. I tend to enter the "flow" and completely lose track of time in front of the computer screen. No joke, I even forget to eat.

Of course there were challenges in cutting this film. My friends are not professional actors, so I wasn't expecting to have long usable takes. The plan was to use quick cuts to hide all the slips of character which might occur.

On top of that, I am really incompetent in terms of video and audio technique lol. The main chunk of the final product were the recordings of the first day of shooting. In the edit, it felt a lot like cutting around problem after problem to be honest. This is something I have to improve in my directing skill.

My initial plan was to create a short stop-motion animation, but then I found Joel Haver's revolutionary video. Using EbSynth, I drew the minimal necessary amout of frames and mapped it to real-life recordings of myself.

This really cut down the time I spent creating the animation. Traditionally, you would animate every second frame (so 24fps/2 = 12 drawn frames per second of film). With this new method I would maybe draw a new frame every ~12 frames (so 24fps/12 = ~2 drawn frames a second).

The whole process was fun and tedious.

As a side note, I think the sound track and general style of the beach scene really works well in terms of atmosphere. I'm quite proud of this.

The intro song is a "Terrorcore"-esque song, as I thought it to be the genre most likely for me to be able produce myself. The inspiration of doing such an abrupt cut in the beginning came from "Funny Games".

What really motivated me during this process at multiple lows was the though of "When will I ever get the chance to do this again?". Having a project at this stage is simply amazing.

While writing, I always create a Spotify playlist with mood inspirations for each project im working on.

I also continuously collect sound samples from various sources. Germany is a bit strict with copyright laws, so I'm only going to share a few random ones below. All three can be found somewhere in the soundtrack. Feel free to message me if you find them :P

Good luck color grading an image, which was shot on a camera with low dynamic range... Good luck fixing poorly recorded sound with loads of noise. Once you realize that you'll need to compress the sound even more to make it loud enough for YouTube (meaning: flattening the peaks), you'll be left with a noisy, unintelligible mess.

At some point, I just applied a quick grade + compression and called it a day. Maybe I will improve this skill in future projects...

Another thing you will learn is that no two displays are the same. Nor are speakers or headphones. It can be really discouraging to color grade & sound-mix for hours only to have it played back on a crappy laptop with awful speakers. I really wonder how real filmmakers solve this issue? Like how do you find the sweet spot that looks & sounds ok on every setup?

I know it's almost redundant to mention it again, but learning about more about audio has been "ear opening" for me. I really, really need to upgrade my sound recording equipment.

Furthermore, worrying about image resolution while editing is (almost) pointless, since your editing software compresses everything and then YouTube will compress it again. The loss of quality is really shocking, but nobody notices, since this is the only way they experience your video.

Here we are. The final phase. Please start the video below before reading on.

The deeper you get into a project, the more you lose sight of the end. You gotta like the process, not the goal, to continue. It's a struggle. You gotta have fun. But the process has to end at some point, otherwise there's no reason to do it...

I would've been fine with never publishing my work. BUT: the people deserve to see it. You never know who this reaches.

Regardless, I uploaded the film to YouTube. I was really hoping not to get an immediate copyright strike haha. Everything went fine (at least so far). Writing the German subtitles and translating them to English was a blast (suprisingly). This was mostly down to Angelo's dialogs. I had to get creative on how to translate broken German into broken English.

I hope you enjoy this beautiful website. It's still a work in progress, but I took the opportunity to teach myself about webdesign. Besides purchasing cheap hosting, SSL, and the domain, I use Wordpress + Oxygen Builder for everything. There are tonnes of tutorials out there, so I won't get into detail here.

This project has been in the back of my mind since 2017. It's 2023 and I feel old.

Is it a success? Not really. I always think my work sucks but I'm not bummed out about it. In the end, I finished something. This one little story got mainfested and I went through all the steps of the process. I did not give up and have something to show.

I feel confident in saying that NOBODY ELSE on this planet would have made this. Can you think of a more meaningful way to spend your time than creating things, executing ideas?

Not sure if my brain allows me to, but ideally I'd like to pivot my approach for following projects a bit:

1. Smaller scope, more frequent output.
2. Film may not be only medium to tell my stories.
3. Use projects to improve my weaknesses & explore.

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If you made it this far, you are my new favorite person. Thank you for reading!

AN EVEN BIGGER 'THANK YOU' to everyone that supported me while creating "Pep oder Dinger".

Sincerely yours,
Klaus Eichelberger