A New Normal - 3D

"A NEW NORMAL" is a short 3D essay film that deals with the topic of trauma. It focusses on fragments and experiences of a life crisis and the following attempt to create a new normality again. The question this stereoscopic film deals with associatively is: How can one continue to live after everything has changed?

Project start:
2018
Project completion:
2019

3D film has an image of being a technical rafinesse only invented to bolster the bottom line of Hollywood action films at the box office. But as a cinematic means its utterly displaced there: high editing pace and fast camera movements are opposed to the cinematic language of stereoscopic filmmaking. Hence not only Godard, Noé and Wenders have started to discover stereoscopy outside of mainstream cinema and are exploring completely new forms of narration. Fundamentally, 3D opens up an additional means of cinematic expression: depth perception, which can only be experienced indirectly in 2D film. This adds up to much more than just a wow-factor. Stereoscopic filmmaking creates a fundamentally different reception of film. "A NEW NORMAL" is extremely abstract in its narration, however the world through which the protagonist moves is always concrete. Here stereoscopy also goes a step further and puts the viewer in a concrete distance to the images he/she sees. The spectator becomes a real part of the filmic equation. So the film takes on another pecularity of 3D: The glasses isolate the viewer fundamentally while watching and turn the collective viewing experience into an individual one. Each viewer evaluates the experience of the protagonist at first on his/her own.

Throughout the story the camera accompanies the protagonist, a young man called Feder. He leaves his apartment in an old high-rise and starts walking through deserted fields and forests. There he comes across the beast Katanka. Their gazes meet, but a confrontation is averted. In a voice-over, a second-person narrator recounts fragments and experiences of a post-traumatic everyday life. What the narrator describes bears no resemblance with the images shown, but it cannot be clearly seperated from them either. His stories start out as banal episodes about grocery shopping or commuting to work but develop into his attempt to develop a new sense of normality. The different fragments also reveal different strategies how to cope with a post-traumatic identity crisis. The traumatic experience itself is not part of the narration, rather the specatator is confronted only with its consequences. As a result the narrative structure becomes a shadow play, in which the experience itself remains vague. Instead, life after the fact gains its own, independent importance.

"With stereoscopic images, we can express that thoughts, sensations or memories do not take place one after the other, but simultaneously, on several levels - precisely in depth," says the team. The film celebrated its world premiere at a special screening, accompanied by the symposium "Thoughts on the Future of Film", at the Munich Film Festival. It can be shown as a 3D short film in the cinema as well as a video installation.

Production lead: Paul Nungeßer

cooperation partners:

  • Jugendstiftung Baden-Württemberg
  • Co-production of the Film University Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF & Filmakademie Ludwigsburg

Team:

  • Actor: Daniel Sträßer 
  • Narrator: James Faulkner 
  • Director of photography & script: Paul Nungeßer 
  • director: Luzie Loose 
  • Producers: Ludwig Meck, Markus Krojer, Chantal Witzmann 
  • Cinematography: David Simon Groß 
  • Stereoscopic matching: Zsolt Magyari 
  • Art director: Max Schönborn 
  • Editor: Quirin Grimm 
  • VFX: Mario Bertsch 
  • Sound designer: Jan Brett 
  • costume design: Johanna Ballweg 
  • Hair & make-up: Sarah Heidelberger