My good friend Arne Nostitz-Rieneck (check out his site here) has been working hard on his application for one of Germany’s most successful and popular film academies (they only pick around 5 people out of several hundreds of applications – yes, it is practically impossible to get in).

One of his the many daunting tasks was to create a narrative short film about a specific topic. I wasn’t part of the shooting team, but I assisted them by loaning them the incredible DitoGear OmniSlider that both Arne and I have already tested thoroughly for motion-control work a few months ago – check out the blog post and the resulting video here in case you missed it.

For Arne’s film “Rückfall ausgeschlossen” (“Relapse Impossible”) they used the OmniSlider for another motion control setup – in one of the scenes, Arne had the genius idea to show how a lot of time passes for the protagonist in a single shot. The camera (7D) was positioned on the OmniSlider, and they moved towards the couple. At the beginning of the shot, the two dated for the first time – at the end of it, a lot of time has passed and they have been together for quite a while.

Unfortunately, this film academy being a school, they had a strict time limit for the short film – in order to meet that, Arne had to shorten this shot down, because of course it would have taken much longer as a match-move motion control shot – currently, in the version he used as an application, he therefore had to fade between the several instances of the motion control shot.

I will work with Arne in the coming weeks to produce the real match-move motion control version of this shot in After Effects. Technically, the shots – traveling exactly the same distance on the OmniSlider, which was programmed to repeat a recorded movement – should match each other perfectly in terms of movement (apparently, the actors and the background decoration are the differences and demonstrate the passing of time).

The OmniSlider is a perfect match for stuff like this, and it has become my favourite application for it. I use the 1 meter version of the slider, but they got much longer ones too, which is great for motion control work – check them out on their site. I am still working on the full review of the slider, sorry for the delay – if you have been following my Twitter feed, work was overwhelming in the past months, and I’m trying my best to publish all the promised reviews of gear as soon as possible in my spare time.

Don’t forget you can get 5% off any OmniSlider purchase over at DitoGear.com using the discount code THENINO5.

I have already seen the finished short film that he applied with at the film academy and I have to say, I’m really blown away. Great images, incredible acting and just plain awesome storytelling, I was truly moved emotionally. Unfortunately, we will have to wait until the end of May, only then Arne is allowed to publish the short film (when he gets to know whether he is advancing to the next round of the application process or not). In the meantime, as already mentioned, we will work on the real match-move version of this particular shot. I wish Arne the only best of luck with his efforts to get into the film academy, he really deserves it – though I would see it with sorrow to see a great friend move away from Vienna!