About soda.film
Hi! We are soda.film - a film production company and social entrepreneurs from Berlin, Germany. While you learn about us you will encounter various interesting topics: Social Business, Transmedia, Crowdfundig, Internet Videos, our famous 'Stages Structure' - and at the end of this page you will know
Our definition of #social #transmedia #storytelling. :)
Soda -
basically a fusion of water and air, in a metaphorical sense the liaison of the (seeming) 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.
The video version of this text - our showreel:
Manifesto
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We want to dynamite some of the outdated standards of cinematics in a safe way and not at any cost.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.
BOTTOM LINE:
Transparence and hazard-free handling of explosive topics is what we aim for.
We FILM the (social) change
we want to see in the world! :)
We from soda.film make films about people, social issues or realize projects with social impact. As 'Social Enterprise' we don't focus on monetary profit (but are allowed to make some).
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 potential profits back into new social projects. OR support others (companies, NGOs, projects...) on their social mission.
We are convinced that Social Entrepreneurship is a very reasonable solution for many common social issues.
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.
Social Entrepreneurship?
→ Fundamentally a merge of two (seemingly irreconcilable) concepts - socially responsible action and entrepreneurship. Put together, the term implies:
applying business principles to
improve society
Sounds too theoretical? Check out our 'illustrative example'.
BRIDGES BETWEEN WORLDS
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 Tomorrow everything might be outdated, the corporate concept obsolete.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. Ever. 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!
Videos for the web
Videos optimized for use in the internet should be very short and straightforward.
For your audience the next - potentially better - online video is just one click away!
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. It's something between classical movie and web 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... etc.
We can use the 'Stages Structure' for any story - 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 storytelling. :)
An illustrative example
'7 stages' is a complex 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
- the comic book.
- etc...
The short film 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.
That's our definition of #social #transmedia #storytelling. :)