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SOCIAL INDEPENDENT FILM

© Susann G. / PIXELIO

We from soda.film develop and pro­duce var­i­ous film for­mats* about social / soci­o­crit­i­cal sub­jects or with impact on social change. We love the inter­net and inno­v­a­tive for­mats and also clas­sic cin­ema. There­fore we focus on the liai­son between seem­ingly irrec­on­cil­able dif­fer­ences: inter­net and cin­ema, art and com­merce, emo­tion and rea­son...
We like and do crowd­fund­ing and crowd­sourc­ing because it deprives the 'cap­i­tal' of its power and democ­ra­tizes Art and Cul­ture. We want to know what YOU think, feel, dream of...! ;)

* VARIOUS FORMATS:

Fic­tion | Docu | Music Video
Social Spot | Web Series

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Social Entre­pre­neur­ship We FILM the (social) change we want to see in the world! :)		→ Fun­da­men­tally a merge of two (seem­ingly irrec­on­cil­able) con­cepts - socially respon­si­ble action and entre­pre­neur­ship. Put together, the term implies: 'apply­ing busi­ness prin­ci­ples to improve soci­ety'.
soda.film is a 'Social Enter­prise'. We want to act respon­si­bly and make our con­tri­bu­tion to the soci­ety. We don't want to get rich but ENRICH LIFE! So we decided to pro­duce social projects only and to put all the prof­its into new social projects. OR sup­port oth­ers (com­pa­nies, NGOs, projects...) on their social mission.:)		But we don't want to just tell about or report on social issues, we actu­ally want to real­ize projects with real impact on social change. Like '7 stages', a movie made with (with, not about) home­less kids work­ing behind the cam­era. Have a look at our ► ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE to find out more...

We are con­vinced that Social Entre­pre­neur­ship is a very rea­son­able solu­tion for many social issues.

'Test 123' - Social Spot against ani­mal testing	'be quiet or die' music video about domes­tic violence	'Beau­ti­ful but dead' - Social Spot against Aids

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Web 2.0, Social Media, Mobile Enter­tain­ment... new tech­nolo­gies rev­o­lu­tion­ize the media branch. Daily. Nobody knows on which band­wagon to hop on first. Tomor­row every­thing might be out­dated, the cor­po­rate con­cept obso­lete. And the one who has too many irons in the fire might eas­ily get burned. That's why we from soda.film DON'T hop on any band­wagon. Instead we run a stand at a junc­tion where all the band­wag­ons have to pass by.

Where dif­fer­ent direc­tions are cross­ing some­thing new may occur:

BRIDGES BETWEEN WORLDS

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'13 Stages' - Pro­to­type of the 'Stages Structure'

Videos opti­mized for use in the inter­net must be short. But if you have more than a short story to tell there's only one solu­tion: dev­ide your story into sev­eral short episodes.

Now you have 2 options: you can sim­ply cut the story apart or you can build a log­i­cal struc­ture to sort the huge amount of infor­ma­tion into smaller, eas­ily acces­si­ble top­ics. While the sec­ond one is pretty com­mon for books or any other writ­ten form... most film­mak­ers still just cut their works in pieces because the clas­si­cal dra­maturgy did not con­sider the inter­net as a fac­tor, i.e. needs an arc of sus­pense that spans the whole movie.

To deal with that we had to develop a new dra­matur­gi­cal structure.

The 'Stages Structure'

With our suc­cess­ful movie '13 stages' this new con­cept was born: the 'Stages Struc­ture'. It's some­thing in between clas­si­cal movie and tv series. You can still watch the whole movie con­tin­u­ously... OR watch one stage in the train on your mobile device, the next stage at work dur­ing a cof­fee break...

We can use it for any story, a clas­si­cal drama or non-chronological nar­ra­tion. Stages can be ordered (num­bered, con­sec­u­tive) so our audi­ence has to watch it in a cer­tain (intented) order... OR unordered so that any episode of our story can be picked in any order accord­ing to taste.

This con­cept opens worlds of pos­si­bil­i­ties for us. :)

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Sounds too the­o­ret­i­cal? Here's

AN illus­tra­tive example

'7 stages' is a social project for street kids - a short movie shot with street kids work­ing behind the cam­era + a set of work­shops to pre­pare them + a docu web series about the pro­duc­tion and the work­shops + comic book. the short fol­lows our Stages Struc­ture as the title implies. So this project is really a bridge between worlds. The project gets funded via crowd­fund­ing, by sell­ing the pre­vi­ous movie '13 stages' and the comic book on the streets.

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PHILOSOPHY		It’s our goal to make coura­geous philo­soph­i­cal and mov­ing emo­tional films that attract a rel­a­tively wide audi­ence. We want to dyna­mite some of the out­dated stan­dards of cin­e­mat­ics in a safe way but not at any cost. We want to widen hori­zons, not break the mold. We want to ques­tion rou­tines and tra­di­tion, but not rein­vent the wheel.
Soda - fusion of water and air, in a metaphor­i­cal sense the liai­son of the oppo­sites emo­tion and rea­son. Soda is brisk, soda is refresh­ing. As an impor­tant ingre­di­ent of both, soda makes glass trans­par­ent and ensures the hazard-free han­dling of highly explo­sive dynamite.		BOTTOM LINE: Hazard-free han­dling and trans­parence of explo­sive sub­jects is what we aim for.

 

soda.film is gonna freshen you up!

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daniel boehme (CEO):

At age 15, he founded his first band, being 16 he directed his own dance group as a chore­o­g­ra­pher and dur­ing his school­days he started work­ing as a graphic designer. After his years of travel he played in 4 more bands which even­tu­ally lead him to com­pos­ing film scores and writ­ing screen­plays. In the mean­time he earned his pocket money as a web designer and gained some act­ing expe­ri­ence in two drama groups. His first direct­ing he real­ized in 2002 with the short film 'paradogma'. Since then he has been work­ing as a free­lance direc­tor, edi­tor and pro­ducer of music videos, short films and social spots.