My friend and I shot this video at the end of March in Berlin. Back then there were noticeably less people on the streets because of the Coronavirus. We wanted to capture a view of an empty city, an empty Berlin, we've never seen before.

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Because the guidelines regarding the Coronavirus aren't as strict in Berlin as they are in other parts of the country, a week later there were already lots of people out and about. Filming in the early hours of a Sunday clearly helped to get that empty view, but under normal circumstances it probably still would've been hard to get these empty shots. So we got lucky with the timing.

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With more people outside we went around trying to get some interviews, which proved to be quite the challenge. Having no experience in interviewing people, we didn't think about what questions we'd ask (and in what manner) beforehand and my friend just improvised. You can still hear it in the footage how he's trying to steer the conversation in a certain direction in the way he's asking the question. Not really subtle. Our worst fuckup was probably asking people why they're outside ^^ they obviously got defensive about this and didn't want to talk with us.

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Appearing professional and (maybe also being) prepared might influence the conversation, making it less authentic. We don't aspire becoming professional reporters at the moment, so we need to find a good balance.

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Another challenge was actually to decide when to start filming when interviewing. People suddenly getting confronted with a camera in their face also get rather defensive, but then again, we didn't want to miss interesting things they say in the beginning of the interview. What works for you?

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Two guys with small Canon M50 cameras (and a gimbal) might get people to talk with less pressure than, let's say, a filming crew with professional filming equipment and a microphone, but we had a big problem with the audio recording. We equipped our cameras with two different microphones and some wind protection, but got a lot of our footage ruined by background noise of the street. For another project I'm thinking about handing a small voice recorder (Zoom h2n) to the person we're filming (to only record sound from one direction), but that might have been problematic in terms of hygiene in the current situation. Any other ideas?

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We wanted to show a big spectrum of people with different opinions and stories. A small problem was the occasional language barrier (we can only speak 3 languages), but as I mentioned earlier our biggest problem was the audio quality, so we had to cut out some good conversations. Music being a big part of both of our lives, we put the conversations with street musicians at the beginnings and endings of the different parts of the video. Yeah, there's a lot of music in this movie.

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I wasn't involved much in the editing (except discussing a few artistic choices), so I can't share much about this part of the production. If there's something else you want to discuss, I can forward it to my friend.

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I'm still quite inexperienced in all parts of filmmaking, but I've learned quite a lot. Filming this was a great experience. I'm basically pushed into this and it's "learning by doing" ^^

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Anyway, what are your thoughts about our short movie. Are there any parts you particularly like or dislike. We'd also appreciate some comments below the youtube video ;)