A Spectacular Car Journey

This film dares to do something still rarely attempted in feature filmmaking: it is shot throughout with a 360-degree camera. Such cameras are increasingly on the rise and are popular for advertising, music videos and documentaries, but not yet as the sole recording medium in a feature film. Director Sebastian Robra, however, did exactly that for his graduation film at the Bauhaus University Weimar. The film tells the story of a car journey on which five strangers gradually grow closer in the most confined of spaces. While the driver Benno, the pregnant Kathi, the musician Aludra and the unemployed magician Matthias get to know one another on the ride-share, the fifth passenger remains silent. What on earth does he have in his case? Carsten Faseler plays Benno, the driver. An exciting shoot for the actors. "I was rather nervous, because I had to do three things at once: drive the car, act and speak in a Berlin dialect. Even so it was great fun, because we could play the scenes through as in the theatre. Since the camera allows a 360-degree view, you don't have to stop and reposition it. The only downside was when, for instance, we fumbled our lines. Then we had to drive the car back to the starting point of the scene and pick it up again from there," Carsten Faseler recounts. The camera was hidden in the middle of the car. From there it had the whole goings-on inside the car in view. Director Sebastian Robra, however, could see nothing. He sat hidden behind a wall of cases in the boot. He could follow the actors' performance only through headphones. A monitor for this special camera was beyond the production budget, which was raised through crowdfunding. So he had to rely on what he heard and on what he had seen during rehearsals in the living room. There they had recreated the scene inside the car using chairs and rehearsed the shoot that way. After the film's planned premiere at the end of July, Sebastian Robra wants to show it not only on YouTube and Vimeo, but also in planetariums across Germany. There the elaborately recorded sound can complete the 360-degree visual experience acoustically via the Dolby Surround system.