16mm And Loving the Splat

Art shall be fun. This is a rule I keep forgetting and then remembering, usually at the worst possible moment.

When Berlin winter hit peak dreadful (that specific grey where the sky and the pavement agree to stop pretending they're different things) three fellow cycling aficionados and I hauled my 16mm Bolex out to the Grunewald and filmed Lukasz giving it the absolute beans through the trees of west Berlin. Cold hands, hot lungs, the forest doing its best Werner Herzog impression. If you've never carried a heavy analogue camera and tripod up a mountain while a man in Lycra disappears into fog, you haven't really lived.

Meanwhile I'd been falling deeper and deeper down the gaussian splatting rabbit hole — capturing reality itself, turning the world into something you can fly a virtual camera through in post.

Can you bottle a place and then move through the bottle?

Turns out you can. Turns out the experience I gained on this little film is exactly what walked me into the Vanmoof campaign a couple of months later.

The experience I gained on this film here led into the that followed a couple months later.

Fun, it turns out, is a business strategy. Who knew.