Production Value

Production Value 2011 – Making-Of

What the Juniors Say About It

Andrius Brazas, Lithuania
The amazing thing for me was that all the projects in the workshop were 100% real. That had a real feel to the scripts we worked on. I was able to exercise my profession the best way there is. Rewarding, amazing, incredible, fantastic, superb, unprecedented – these are just words that fail to describe the commotion of the event.

Viola Fuegen, Germany
I think for me the biggest experience was to understand how creative you have to be to make a good budget. In fact half way through I didn’t think I could do it. When I was ready to present to the producers and actually felt ready it was a very good feeling.

Monique Marnette, Belgium
The atmosphere was outstanding, full of respect for the work of the others. The inputs of our Seniors were also respectful. I never felt as a student receiving lessons but more as a young colleague who needed advises to achieve the budget correctly.

Roger Schweizer, Switzerland Netherlands
The only sad thing about the workshop is that we only can go once. I would love to have the opportunity to go through this experience at least every second year. I am not a writer. I am a junior AD and we break things down: A GREAT JOURNEY. SADLY TOO SHORT. EVERY TIME AGAIN. AMAZING.

Malini Ahlberg, Sweden
I cannot express enough how fantastic this week has been to me. A total energy boost to meet all these fantastic people! It broadens your mind outside of your own country. And the Seniors – what a line-up! So inspiring to meet them and to listen to their fantastic stories and how they think and work. The creativeness of gathering this mix of people for intense work one week is just brilliant.

Igor Godina, Slovenia
When I applied for this workshop I made one very wrong assumption. I imagined that it was a workshop where young A.Ds’ from different European countries take long sightseeing walks and leisurely exchange ideas while working on fictional projects. Wrong. This was a 1. A.D. boot camp. Still when it was over we all wished that it would have lasted longer, there was so much left to learn and do.

Sebastian Schelenz, Belgium
My key learning’s from the workshop have been in understanding how to avoid to just throw numbers at a spreadsheet but how to link every line in a budget to parameters from the script. Doing this in an intelligent and scalable way is making your budget a real cost-saving tool, which can not only preserve, but enhance the artistic vision of a script.

Karolina Koltun, Poland
Within a few hours of arriving in Sweden, I already knew I was learning much. At the time, I had no idea that was only the beginning. Looking back at the experience today, I see it as an incredible eye-opener that helped me understand not only that key elements of scheduling and budgeting are done differently than in my home country, but that they are even understood differently - which brings the differences down to a most fundamental level.

Daniel Màlmen, Sweden
The whole idea to schedule a film out from the script and try to find out how many days a film needs to be shot properly, is the complete opposite of how I worked before, trying to squeeze the schedule down into the number of days I got from the producer.

Malcolm Scerri Ferrante, Malta
The design of the workshop is excellent and the organization was simply outstanding. I have learnt things that I have always wanted to discuss and explore. And when I was not learning something, at the very least I was affirming myself on issues which are very debatable in the ‘real world’

Olaf Westra, Netherlands
Thanks to Production Value 2011, I have gained a higher level of understanding the processes of making an (international) movie. I believe that I and all my colleagues back home will benefit from this experience.

Essi Suomela, Finland
Throughout this whole process my every day mantra has been to ”think big”, not only in terms of the big film I was making but I also had to picture myself of being more experienced, stronger and a lot smarter. It was absolutely necessary to become much more that I really was. There were no way out of it and no excuses. You just had to reach inside and discover that these things actually can be found from within. Without the workshop all of that raw talent would have been undiscovered.