There are angels all over Berlin. For this video I concentrated only on ones found in cemeteries.
The inspiration for this video comes from three places:
The first inspiration is the song featured: “The Same Way – Part 2”. Roberta Orlando, one member of the Italian band Spleenveil, wrote this and two other songs specifically for the “In A Berlin Minute” videos. How amazing is that?! When I heard this song, I knew that I wanted it to inspire the images instead of making a video and seeing if the song would fit.
One is my favorite film Der Himmel Über Berlin (Wings of Desire) by Wim Wenders. The film certainly deserves its own post one day – so for now I’ll only say that it’s about angels in Berlin and features beautiful black and white (and color) imagery.
Last but not least, I’ve always been very fond of photographing angel statues.
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| Another Berlin Angel |
Something different about this video: I used a little tripod for most of the shots. I wanted to match the stillness of the statues. However with going black and white and that very stillness a lot of the images look like photos, which is a bit disappointing since taking pictures would be a lot easier.
To capture the last two angels in the video I snuck into a cemetery after it was already supposed to be closed. However the door was still open and I just absolutely had to get footage of those two beauties. The inevitable happened: while the birds around me in the cemetery kept getting louder and louder (they must have known that his was supposed to be human-free time), I accidentally got locked into the cemetery.
After about an hour of walking around to find a way out and live-tweeting my little adventure, the security company I eventually called, sent a very kind security guard to let me out. By that time it was dark and well below freezing – so I didn’t complain about not being “rescued” by a hot vampire.
Beautiful.
We've seen some stunning things in Berlin cemeteries, and mean to go back and capture some more after getting this shot in the snow:
uberlin.co.uk/graveyard-mehringdamm/
Love the rest of the blog too!
Thank you so much, James – for commenting, for sharing on Twitter and sending link to your photo. It's also beautiful.
I meant to head down to Kreuzberg and Wilmersdorf for more cemetery angel footage – but I already got too much material just in Mitte.
Really glad we found each others blogs via Sandy's tweet! I added yours to my list and am looking forward to reading and seeing more from you and Zoe.
– Luci