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MillimeterEditor's Notes
May 1, 2008 12:00 PM
Glückspilz. It’s a German expression — lucky mushroom. The mushroom part is literal, but the meaning is closer to lucky bastard.
German filmmaker Pierre Kuhl says it's his nickname, and that seems about right. As we go to press, he has won two industry contests in the last 12 days — one judged by DP Michael Balhaus, the other, Perfect Pitch, sponsored by Avid and millimeter's sister publication Digital Content Producer.
The public judged the Perfect Pitch finalists; the winner was selected by a panel of industry professionals, including producer Jake Abraham (Lovely by Surprise, Flakes, Starting Out in the Evening); cinematographer Jon Fauer, ASC; Stacey Parks (founder of Film Specific and author of The Insider's Guide to Independent Film Distribution); editor Kevin Tent, ACE (About Schmidt, Blow, Election, The Golden Compass, Sideways); and director Gary Winick (Bride Wars, Charlotte's Web, 13 Going on 30).
Kuhl, who is a self-proclaimed autodidact, has had a long career in marketing and advertising as product manager, concept writer (and ghostwriter), creative director, and production hybrid. His first tools were audio (he writes and produces his own music), and he subsequently taught himself Adobe After Effects, Photoshop, Flash and the open-source 3D program Blender 3. Most recently, he's taken up the videocamera.
He started his career at Digidesign Pro Tools competitor CreamWare; his first tool was a Commodore 64. Now he's a MacBook guy. He uses Flash inside the open-source Typo3 CMS. You get the idea.
Kuhl's first win came at the United Nations on the occasion of its recent biodiversity conference in Bonn, Germany. The call to action was for independent and studio filmmakers to produce short films on the theme of biodiversity in a 40-hour span during the conference. “When Michael Ballhaus gave us our prize [for the independent division], he said that the best film of the contest had not come from the professional category,” Kuhl says. He took it as a call to action for professionals to do more to break the mold.
His winning entry to Avid's Perfect Pitch contest was a 1-minute description of his proposed film Manual For Becoming Famous, which highlights the life of an average student who attempts to find fame through manipulating the media.
For his Perfect Pitch win, Kuhl receives a trip to the Sundance Independent Producers Conference; his film trailer cut by Hollywood Trailer House, Secret Headquarters Incorporated; consulting time with distribution expert Stacey Parks; consulting time with cinematographer Jon Fauer, ASC; Red Giant Software Magic Bullet software for color and visual effects; an HP Compaq 8710w mobile workstation; Avid editing software and hardware; and a membership to filmspecific.com.
To see his winning pitch, go to digitalcontentproducer.com/perfectpitch.
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.
