Personal Voice / Pictorial Language

Arne Bro and Lotte Mik-Meyer lead a challenging and inspiring workshop about revealing each participant’s pictorial language.

Through short and intense visual assignments with small cameras and subsequent evaluations, the team focuses on identifying and strengthening the personal visual language of each participant. The workshop offers insights in and knowledge about visual capacities and constitutive visual elements of each participant’s specific pictorial language.

The camera is used as an investigative tool to identify the filmmaker’s personal relation to aesthetics & methods and to character(s), space, movement etc. in their stories. The camera will identify in physical form personal motifs and basic film language deeply rooted in each storyteller. This identification is of importance to the ways in which each storyteller approaches the development process of a film.

The core interest is to further identify, challenge and develop the filmmaker’s personal voice. Visual methods and concepts of the workshop are based on the training and development methods related to fiction, documentary and TV production under the limited conditions of smaller European societies, as film artists in Europe are very often confronted with extremely small budgets, limited access to a crew, shooting and editing time, as well as salaries.

The working methods of this workshop is therefore both aiming at research and development methods, as it is aiming at possible production methods to be used by the director in between funding or when there is no funding at all.

The workshop invites a maximum of 8 visual artists, documentary or fictional filmmakers, producers, who aim at developing their visual and conceptual storytelling skills and their individual pictorial language.

Participants have to be prepared to work from 9 am to 5 pm every day and can’t hold other working relation during the 5-day workshop. Each participant will be provided with a DV Cam which requires little or no technical skills.

ARNE BRO (b. 1953) Head of Documentary & TV Dept. and Former Vice Director of The National Film School of Denmark (NFSD). Educated as Director and Script Writer, NFSD. Has directed and produced documentary films and TV programs. Has founded and developed the documentary education and tradition at The National Film School of Denmark.

LOTTE MIK-MEYER (b. 1968) Professor, Head of Conceptual Documentary (MFA), The Norwegian Film School. Independent documentary filmmaker. Developing, shooting and directing documentaries. Director and cinematographer of ”What We See” (2006), ”Drawing” (a non-linear Structure) (2006), ”The Arab Initiative” (2008) and ”Return of a President” (2017).

Internationally the workshop has been offered to media professionals since 2001 at places like: SUNDANCE Institute, BINGER FilmLab – Netherlands (Director’s and Documentary Director’s program), SABC (National Broadcaster) – South Africa (Director’s & Documentary Director’s program) etc.

The seminar is offered in English.