Right now, Tine is working on the animations for the film, Valesca is making the final edits and Johannes is already preparing for his work on mixing and editing the sound.
Also to come: composition of the musical score.

We hope to be screening im festivals from february 2012 onwards.
Wish us luck. We will keep you posted.

MMM

To give you an impression of some of the material we are occupied with, please read our
Interview statistics: (all the people we interviewed along the way)
number of interviews: 164
number of participants: 185 (women: 85/ men: 100/ dogs: 4)

Countries: Poland, Kroatia, Italy, Netherlands, Germany, Morocco, India
Languages: polish, kroatian, serbian, italian, tirolian, german, dutch, arabic, french, berber, english, hindi, kannada

Possible measures for our shooting in India could be:
chai’s/day: ~ 6 (which makes 42 a week, which makes 84 in total)
people stepping in front of the camera, asking to be portrayed/ day: ~ 15
km’s in a rikshaw/ day: ~ 20
honks/ day: ~ 317.000
being asked which country we are from/ day: ~ 25 times (reply in 99% of the cases: “ahh, good country”)
smiles per day: 250? 500?
attempts to put our experiences into a blogpost: at least 7

Instead of trying to find words for what we see, feel, hear in this place we decided to let the photos speak for us.
And while you will hopefully be enjoying the colors, we will continue diving.
Enjoying our last days of shooting, of the warmth and the friendliness.
We will be back home soon enough.

Take care everyone.

Additionally you can check out our picasa albums here:

Picasa Bengaluru
Picasa Traffic Jam

There we were, inside a very real office, speaking to very real people, who were telling us about their very real experiences as virtual assistants.
A virtual assistant ( by definition of GetFriday) is someone who is able to arrange (almost) everything you need help with – no matter where you are in the world – from his/ her desk in India.

The keyword is Life Outsourcing.
And this can mean outsourcing almost anyting which makes your every day life more efficient, more easy, more convenient. Handling your spreadsheets, booking your flights, optimizing your website, getting your car fixed while you’re on a business trip – you name it, they do it!

We have never spoken to employees that happy, and that much enthusiastic about their work. We have never even dreamt about the possibilities that are possible in India.
This Wednesday almost feels like Friday & like weekend to us.

India – our dream come true?
Possibly maybe. Our experiences while shooting in the streets of Bangalore are overwhelming. We have never been to a place where people are so curious, so enthusiastic about what we are doing. We feel great. And we will have another masala chai now.

Namaste
and see you soon.
<3

Come and see, get your hands sticky, get your heads turned!

6 pm – 8 pm
@ JAAGA Creative Common Ground
No. 16/1, Rhenius Street
Off Richmond Road
Opposite Hockey Stadium
Shanthinagar
Bangalore – 560025. INDIA

http://www.jaaga.in

diz•zy |ˈdizē|
adjective ( -zier , -ziest )
having or involving a sensation of spinning around and losing one’s balance

Losing one’s balance is an effect which happens when certain parameters suddenly increase to unexpected size. So now: We feel diz•zy. And there are definitely multiple reasons for that.

01. Significant lack of sleep: the amount of sleep the four of us had the past 2 nights would not be sufficient for 1 person/ 1 night.
02. Noise level: constantly overdriven. Due to extreme honking and the time spent on the road/ in the rikshaw.
03. Dust/ Dirt/ Emissions Level: constantly overdosed because of the same reason as mentioned above.
04. High concentration of green chili in some places, resulting in permanent urge to cough.
05. Extreme Color Explosion/ Visual input Overdrive. People, clothes, houses, animals, packaging, flowers.
06. Absurdity level reaches its peak.
07. This is India.

And we are so happy to be on this planet India now!

Have a good and refreshing night beloved Frida
Big love from MishMashMe!!!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

MishMashMe wants to thank all of you for a beautiful 2010!
We are amazed by all your support, good energies and the love we received.

We are happy about all the beautiful people we met along the way, the special conversations we had and the places we could see.
Have a great festive season and a beautiful start to 2011!!

Yours, with big love,
MMM

Thank you.

Those who were sitting in our Frida livingroom did not want to leave – new ideas evolved of transferring FRIDA to the HFF backyard for a second career as a student cinema and relaxation room. We will see what the winter brings.
Soon we will have to make her ready for her winter accomodation.
And get ourselves ready for our winter travels:
Morocco and India, we are almost there!

Salaam and Shanti and Peace!

Come along an have a hot chocolate or chai inside our living room. See how we have lived and worked. And try out the installation!

HFF Open Day
Saturday, November 13th
10.00 – 16.00 h
Marlene-Dietrich-Allee 11
14482 Potsdam-Babelsberg

by train:
S-Bahn Griebnitzsee or
RE Medienstadt-Babelsberg

Dear people,
we’ve arrived back in hometown Berlin.
At the moment, we find ourselves sitting in the middle of a big nebulous cloud of impressions, stories, touching experiences, beautiful people that we met on the way.
We are preparing a huge bowl of tea, trying to get used to the comfort of our own apartments again (how big is this bed, how huge is this room now???).

We will spend a few days and weeks on scanning through the material, discussing with our editors and preparing for the next big shots:

We are planning two more trips. This time a bit further away…..

Details about to come soon.

For now: big thank yous to everyone for the interest so far, and stay in touch for news to arrive very soooon!

The ride back to Germany went fairly quickly until around 40 kilometers before Osnabrück, Frida got a heavy hickup and we had to stop on the emergency lane. Apparently our old tin lady swallowed more Diesel than we expected and she ran out of it without us noticing. Fortunately it happened next to a speedway-exit, so Dominic and Johannes took our foldable bikes and managed to buy enough gasoline that would take us to the next petrol-station.

Due to the delay we arrived in Buchholz late in the evening where we were kindly greeted by Tine’s parents who offered us warm soup and warm beds. The night was quite short because we had to get up around 6 the next morning in order to be on time at the weekly market where it would have been impossible to park Frida later when the market stands would be set up. Around 9:30 we started our video-installation, but it was a bit difficult to attract the locals at such an early time to take part in it – besides a class of primary school pupils who enjoyed it a lot!

We made some interviews with people on the market and met a funny elderly seafarer who also plays country-music. Around 14:00 we packed Frida up and drove to a small town next to Buchholz called Trelde where we visited an association of seniors who teach each other how to use the computer and internet. We attended one of their workshops and had a quite interesting talk-round with everyone.

After a quite long working-day we fell into our beds – for the first time without having to get up early the next day – what a relief. Unfortunately Flux had to leave us today, because he has important job-appointments he already postponed as far as possible – but we will reunite this upcoming monday when we’ll arrive back in Berlin.

Our installation yesterday afternoon was appreciated by the bypassing pedestrians, who were not many, but the ones who played with it enjoyed it a lot. Video-artist and disk-jockey Alex even recognised an old friend from Berlin whose face was in the installation – what a small world.

The weather up here is changing a lot, which forces us to be as flexible and spontaneous as possible to take advantages of the sunny hours for filming.

Yesterday we rented a ‘bakfiets’ – a transportation bicycle – and used it for shooting city impressions. In addition Johannes finally realised his idea of the ‘atmobil’ (patent pending) – his surround microphone-setup attached to a bike: maximum possible mobility for urban acoustic atmosphere recording.

We had a lot of fun and attention from many pedestrians cruising aorund the city and some people even thought we work for Google Street-View.

In the evening we visited Alex at his home and had tea and cookies, a very nice talk and interview with him about how he ended up in Amsterdam and how he lives.

Today we recorded more interviews on the street and met Sherwin again to follow him around and see how he manages his unvoluntary life here.

» see more photos in the slideshow

When we passed the border and hit the Autobahn, the cloudy sky cracked open and sun and blue sky was above our heads. Anna called her aunt and organised a place to stay for the night in Kirchentellinsfurt near Stuttgart, so we headed towards the Swabian capital.

We reached the small town in the evening and went to the ‘Real’ shopping-center before visiting Anna’s aunt. Flux – who had just flip-flops left as the only ‘shoes’ because his other pair drowned during an unplanned trip through muddy fields near Vukovar over a week ago – found 2 pairs of brand new shoes at the shop and was quite happy. Anna’s aunt and her family gave us a warm welcome and great dinner and after sitting in their living-room, showing photos of our trip and having nice talks, we all fell happily into our beds.

» see more photos in the slideshow

The next day was travel-day again, our goal was to reach the Ruhr-area near the Dutch border, which we made – over rainy speedways, through misty hills of Rheinland-Pfalz and crawling through traffic-jams around Krefeld – we finally reached a caravan-parking-space near a town with the funny name Winnekendonk near Kevelaer.

Unfortunately Frida’s engine didn’t spark up the next morning and after a hopeless discussion with a yuppie who was too afraid to give us a jump-start with his fancy Mercedes CLS sportscar one of the kind ladies from the nearby hotel helped us out and Frida started purring and puffing again.

We rolled into Amsterdam three hours later, following the cursed navigation system that led us right into the center where Frida almost got stuck in the narrow and bumpy roads and on the bridges over the beautiful grachten and locals where staring at the huge tin-monster coughing her way through the bicycle dominated city-center leaving blue smoke clouds on every corner.

We found our camping site in the early evening East of Amsterdam in Zeeburg, where free wi-fi and pasta with pesto dinner awaited us.

» see more photos in the slideshow

We got incredibly delicious free pizza with cheese, rucola and fresh tomatos at the nice caffe near the Piazza del Popolo where we had stopped by almost everyday for our emergency snack- and caffeine dosage and shot a portrait of the shop-owner. Also we finally managed to convince our favorite gelateria’s ice-cream girl with the irresistible smile to give us an interview – of course not without having another one or two balls of Fondante and Camilla.

In the evening, Dominic and Flux prepared Frida for her next trip, cleaning up the small bungalow we had on the camping-site, packing everything into the caravan and the rest of the crew spent a quite interesting evening organised by the slow-food-movement with great food and a workshop on how to make bread with tomato and olive oil the right way.

After a great week in San Miniato, we finally hit the road yesterday morning after the usual delay of 30min past schedule.

The Italian superstradas with all their bumps and holes were not very good to our old tin-lady and somewhere between Firenze and Bologna Frida’s gas-pedal got stuck on full throttle and we had to pull over. Apparently the accelerator spring broke and Captain Dominic started to fix it. We met a very nice truck driver who additionally provided us with some rubber, in case the spring would break again. But Dominic managed to fix it! Yay!

We drove past Verona into the Alps – Frida managed the 9% incline very well, after all the training she had in San Miniato. Later we dropped our temporary 6th crew-member Irene off at her hometown Merano and had to wave her goodbye.

Our ride continued through beautiful mountain panorama and the higher we crawled, the colder it got. We arrived a our destination in the early evening: a camping site in a beautiful valley of Vinschgau, where the world-famous alpinist Reinhold Messner is from.

The night was freezing cold – around 3°C – but sun greeted us in the morning, so on our day-off we decided to do some proper hiking into the mountains.

» see more photos in our slideshow

Flux: First of all, please introduce yourself.

Irene: I am Irene. I come from South Tyrol. Somehow I slid into this project to try out to be an interpreter for the Italian language.

Flux: Okay. But how did you happen to become part of this project in the first place?

Irene: Hmm. Well. A friend of me… uhm. The flatmate of… the sister… No. Okay… (laughs) The sister of the flatmate of my friend in Berlin told me about it. She wrote me about the project on the internet…via email.

Flux: What did she write you? That there’s a film-project which is looking for an interpreter and translator?

Irene: Exactly. And what you’re doing, what places you have been to so far.

Flux: Ah, Okay. But what are you doing when you’re not joining a group of crazy people on a bus-trip and playing interpreter?

Irene: (laughs) At the moment I am unemployed and I’ll probably stay like this for a while – but actually I would like to sew dresses. I studied fashion design.

Flux: Nice. Do you already have experience in interpreting or translating and such things?

Irene: Well, not really. When It was eventually clear that you’d take me as translator in Italy I actually started to prepare myself effectively for this role two hours per day. First of all mentally, one hour per day – and then I solved crossword-puzzles – which helps a lot switching between languages.

Flux: Great! So you mean switching back to the Italian language?

Irene: Yeah, but also to High-German (laughs)

Flux: (laughs) Have you ever worked in film-making before?

Irene: Hmm. No. Not really. Back in school we have tried to shoot a horror-movie once. But it didn’t really work out that well.

Flux: What was your role in that film?

Irene: Yeah, well, I was the second person who got killed… but we didn’t manage to get the whole blood thing to work, so all violent scenes are without blood. Oh well…

Flux: Today the part of our journey together with you is about to end. Do you think you learned anything during the last week with us that you take as an experience with you?

Irene: Hmm. Yes. How it works to start such a project and wanting to shoot a documentary film – and I met many very nice people…

Flux: Was it stressful for you? Did you reach your limits sometimes?

Irene: Yes. For sure. Mainly language-wise. Because normally I am not the kind of person who easily approaches unknown people – and sometimes switching between the languages was difficult – especially during long conversations.

Flux: If you could switch tasks or roles with one of the crew members, which part would you choose?

Irene: (laughs) I would love to drive Frida (laughs) No – I would like to take the part of Anna – camera. That would be interesting.

Flux: Since you haven’t been part of this chaos since the beginning, since you don’t have the ‘tunnel-view’ we have, is there anything you would suggest us to improve in the way we work?

Irene: (laughs) maybe take a day off more often! But besides that – no. Actually I imagined the project to be much more chaotic. Everything seems planned quite well.

Flux: Would you do such a thing again?

Irene: Yes, definetly!

Flux: Okay, now I ran out of questions (laughs). Is there anything else you would like to say?

Irene: Yes. Thanks to everyone! It was a lot of fun for me!

Flux: Well, thank you! Without you it wouldn’t have worked out. Interpreter is such an important role in the whole project!

Irene: I feel honoured! (laughs)