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.

PETA - test123
'Test 123' - Social Spot against animal test­ing (View on flickr)
Stadtlicht - Be quiet or die
'be quiet or die' - Music Video about dome­stic vio­lence (View on flickr)
'beautiful but dead' (Social Spot)
'Beau­tiful but dead' - Social Spot against Aids (View on flickr)

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

© Susann G. / PIXELIO
© Susann G. / PIXELIO
We have only this one...
We have only this one...

Sounds too theo­re­ti­cal? Check out our 'illus­tra­tive exam­ple'.

BRIDGES BETWEEN WORLDS

13 stages - singing a love song for money
'sin­ging a love song for money' by soda.film, on Flickr

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.

13 stages
'13 Stages' - Pro­to­type of the 'Stages Struc­ture' | © soda.film on flickr

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. :)

13 stages - title
'13 Stages' - Pro­to­type of the 'Stages Struc­ture' | © soda.film on flickr
7 Stufen  (cover)
'7 stages' - a web series with home­l­ess kids | © soda.film on flickr
7 Stufen - Comic
7 stages - comic (available in our shop)

An illus­tra­tive example

7 Stufen
7 Stufen (7 stages) - a movie with home­l­ess kids (View on flickr)

'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. :)

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