> Berlin 1945

It proved too dangerous to shoot on real Berlin streets during day and night air-raids. The bizarre solution was to reconstruct bomb damaged streets on sound stages at the Ufa studios in Babelsberg at a time when there was a short supply of building materials, petrol for production cars, film stock, and even the paper to print scripts. In the course of the shooting the boundary between fiction and reality became increasingly blurred.

Those working on the film soon realized that their own survival depended on how long they worked on the production, for once filming stopped they would undoubtedly be sent to the front in a suicidal bid to stop the Soviet advance. So filming was prolonged for as long as possible in the hope that the war would end first.

> Wolfgang Liebeneiner – the director of the original film 1944/45

Our film, although more concerned with the "making of" story, does uncover evidence of what became of the footage shot just before Nazi Germany fell. The film itself with its failed megalomaniac dream is in a way a parallel of the Third Reich itself.

Our aim was not to simply present a list of facts intercut with interviews and archive material. Our "Life Goes On" is not only a film about lies and propaganda but also a film about film making and film makers.

We made the decision early on to emulate the visual style of British documentaries in the use of historical reconstructions as well as an on screen narrator – to hold the threads of the story together and lead the audience back to wartime Berlin.
Apart from the book by Hans Christoph Blumenberg, on which our film is based, we researched the federal archive in Berlin (Bundesarchiv) unearthing many relevant documents. We also continued the search for witnesses with information about the film. In the hope of finding a forgotten piece of footage, we scoured the archives of the former GDR and America‘s Library of Congress in Washington.

> The usual madness in wartime Germany

Parallel to our research, we began to lock down the style and tone of our film and develop the script. Mark Cairns, the director, produced many pieces of concept art and storyboards. Then in March 2001, Angelica Boehm joined us as production designer which increased our team to three!
As the script went into its second draft, Angelica made sketches of individual sets and began assembling her design team. The project was taking shape, but the main figure was still missing – the narrator. An actor, a presenter? And in which language should we shoot? English would prepare us for the international market but this is a German film and a German subject. Should we risk our international sales by shooting in the language best suited to the project?

> original still of Goebbels office - underneath a design sketch by Angelica Boehm

One evening on the television, one of the third programs of the ARD showed a re-run of the successful show "EX!" and there he was: Dieter Moor – our narrator.

We e-mailed a treatment to Dieter the next day and he answered within a few hours. "Great project, I‘m your man!"
In the meantime the first budget was prepared. To make our film the way we'd hoped, it would cost between 600,000 and 750,000 Euro. It's obvious that nowadays no television station in Germany would put this amount of money in a single documentary. We were forced to look for alternative finance.

In June 2001 the producer Carl Schmitt, the visual make-up artist Birger Laube, and the post production company Magna Mana Production set up the StarCrest Media GmbH in Frankfurt, giving the project the professional backing it needed.

We also found a way to produce the film without the help of public film funds - the college of film and television in Potsdam (HFF).
Through the college notice board we met the production student Christin Meyer. Christin was after a project for her diploma film and "Life Goes On" was after a line producer. In a matter of weeks Christin put together a young creative team and laid the foundations of the production. Meanwhile Angelica and her team collected endless period props in a bid to give "Life Goes On" as realistic a look as possible.

Assistant director, location manager, and production assistants joined our crew in addition to an enthusiastic crowd of trainees and volunteers. Without their hard work, such a production would never have been possible.

At the beginning of August Stefan Grandinetti agreed to be our lighting cameraman and began immediately with camera tests.

> StarCrest Media GmbH

Nowadays few television documentaries are shot on film. Digi beta or DVC Pro is the preferred medium. But this video "look" was rejected by the director. Our film was to be about film and film making. We wanted to use many of the old film effects techniques and so we needed an image which looked more like film than video but was still achievable on our modest budget.

Research in this area led us to the company P+S Technik in Munich, who had developed an adapter allowing the use of 35mm standard lenses from ARRI cameras on mini dv cameras.
Mini DV? Was this possible? We were skeptical, we tested and were convinced. The look of the mini DV 35 adapter when used with the Canon XL1s camera exceeded all expectations. The results surprised even the industry diehard advocates of film.

> MiniDV with adapter

technical infos about the Mini DV 35 Adapter

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