„The less money I burn for bad organization, the more remains for the screen.“
That's why director Florian Froschmayer has programmed his own software to make filmmaking easier.
Original text: Alexander Krex
Photography: Robert Rieger
"Tatort": Episode 954, Location: Lucerne, Inspector: Reto Flückiger, Minute 19: The murderer sits at the dining table, the camera approaches the kitchen, focuses on his girlfriend. She seems unconcerned, stares into nothingness. Focus shifts to his face: shoulder-length hair, chubby cheeks, full beard. He looks at the daily newspaper wide-eyed. Reverse shot: The newspaper reports about a sniper in Lucerne, the printed photo shows the investigators at the crime scene.
The "Tatort" entitled "You will be judged", which ran on ARD in November 2019, was directed by Florian Froschmayer. Weeks before the shoot, Froschmayer sits down to prepare, flipping through the script page by page. For the scene described above, he notes, "Crime scene must be shot before kitchen scene. Don't forget press photo!" The note affects the shooting schedule, in other words, when to shoot what, who is needed. Because a movie is the work of many hands, many people must take note of this memo. And because there are many of such memos, the director would have to write hundreds of e-mails and make phone calls every time he prepares to shoot a film.
To minimize the communication effort, Florian Froschmayer has developed "Script to Movie", a program used to prepare for filming, which was also used for the Lucerne "Tatort". It's a project-related database that you feed with all the relevant information, which is then linked together - a costume with an actor with a location with a shooting day. Or even an equipment detail like the newspaper with the scene in the kitchen. If a variable changes - because the script is adapted or the shooting schedule is modified - the dependent variables synchronize automatically. This keeps the director, cameraman, assistant director, production designer, and costume supervisor up to date. In addition, each department has individual access and modification rights.
Above all, making a movie means mastering complexity. With his program, Froschmayer says he has succeeded in digitizing the analog process of filmmaking. "All the lists are always up to date. Before, preparing for a shoot cost me sleepless nights every time.“ For the shoot, a story is broken down into its individual pieces and puzzled back together again. The better you can keep track of the puzzle, the more money you can save. "I only have X amount of money available to execute my vision of a material", he says. "And the less money I burn on bad organization, the more remains for the image.“
His program has been online since November 2015; he put a year and a half of work into its development, plus thousands of hours of programming. For a fee, any filmmaker can use the program. However, the number of users has been manageable so far. To make it big, Froschmayer says, he would have had to quit his job as a director to adapt Script to Movie to local markets. It would have required a call center, available 24 hours, staffed by people who knew the program inside and out - and knew something about filmmaking. "It got insanely complicated very quickly," he says.
His hope is that a big company will take over his software. The German Crew United, for example, a kind of Linkedin for the film industry, or its American counterpart IMDb Pro. The media professionals who are brought together there could then also be given a tool for preparing the shoot.
The fact that Florian Froschmayer came to filmmaking via editing determines his approach as a director to this day. He learned how to put a story together before it could be done digitally, before programs like Avid could be used to try out everything and discard every step. In the early nineties, he had to string together the scenes for a TV report in exactly the right order to end up with 1 minute 30. If he left an image too long at the beginning, it got too epic in the middle and too concise at the end. Then he had to start over from the moment of the wrong decision. To make that happen as rarely as possible, he says, he had to learn to think ahead. To make a plan, not roughly, but frame by frame, scene by scene, preferably down to the second.
This obsession with thinking things through still characterizes him. An advantage, he believes, because what applies to a news report applies even more to a 90-minute movie: "You control costs through good preparation. If you make spontaneous cuts on the fly, the quality of the final product usually suffers." However, the fact that he wants to keep every step under control can also put a strain on the team, he says. For example, he makes sure to minimize the days an actor has to be on set. Or that the team spends as little time as possible in an expensive city like Zurich, where ARD's Zurich crime series are set, but whose backdrop is only needed for the exterior shots, while the interior scenes are filmed in Prague.
And even if all this sounds very pragmatic: Florian Froschmayer is not a technocrat. Ultimately, he says, it's about creating creative scope through meticulous planning. "The better prepared I am," he explains, "the more flexible I can be on the day of the shoot." The fact that he's not shooting at the moment isn't because of the Corona forced break. It's a long-planned hiatus that he actually wanted to spend in Los Angeles. Now he's just finishing his script in Berlin, a cinematic biography of Swiss ski racer and sports commentator Bernhard Russi. He also wants to think about what's next for him. "I like working on commissions, but I also want to find my own voice again," he says. "I burn for filmmaking as I did on the first day.“ ---
Florian Froschmayer was born in Zurich in 1972 and has lived in Berlin for many years. He is best known for his television movies. His professional life began with an apprenticeship as an office clerk, because an apprenticeship was a prerequisite for studying at the University of Film and Television in Munich - which rejected him anyway. He wanted to get into filmmaking anyway. He ended up working for Swiss television, where he learned to be an editor, and in 1999 he and a friend wrote the screenplay for the feature film "Exklusiv," which the two of them financed with the help of product placement. In 2001, he began directing numerous series ("Coast Guards", "On behalf of the law") and TV movies in Germany. He made his "Tatort" debut in 2008.