Porsche Awards 2013 Winners: Andreas Roth

Andreas Roth

Third prize, Traditional category

Herbaria Fears

After my first internship at a production company, I shot a cinema commercial for a local newspaper. Together with a good friend, I developed the idea and also directed the piece. I was 21 years old and it was an incredible experience. That’s when I knew that I wanted to tell stories myself.

The idea for Fears was actually a print concept at first. My good friend and creative Norman Scholl came up with the basic idea, and we both developed the concept and this film was the final result.

The pre-production took a really long time and at some stages we weren’t sure about shooting the film at all. The preparation to shoot underwater was really intense and shooting underwater isn’t that easy. We were very lucky to find a partner at Pinewood, Valentine Films, who had the experience and the infrastructure to create this unique world.

In the end, we had two shooting days and a couple of long nights in the edit room. The actual shoot involved filming the live action with our dummy tea bags, which had been made in a monster size. In addition, we also shot some miniatures of the teabag liquid that we composited into the final footage at the end.

The original idea was to show just one character that gets pulled down by a teabag, but during the process we realised that the idea would be stronger if we showed more fears. We wanted to show the most well-known fears but also give them some kind of freakiness, more like nightmares, figures you know from movies. The whole visual appearance is really special and the idea is full of horror.

I get my inspiration mostly from photographs. Stills often show stimulations and light situations that one can transport into moving images. Of course, there are also a handful of directors that I admire. I really love the work of David Fincher. He also started in commercials and music videos, and then made his way into features. All of his movies have his own signature.

Winning this Porsche Award is really great as it’s one of the most well-known student advertising festivals in the world. It’s an honour, and somehow a confirmation of the struggle you experience during a project.

German, aged 26

Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg

Representation Tempomedia (Germany); Riff Raff Films (UK)