Finn Keyes | Current Affairs Editor
Thursday and Friday of last week saw the Science Gallery on Pearse Street play host to ‘Digital Biscuit’. The conference was an absorbing array of talks and exhibitions on the process of creative filmmaking, with a focus on providing new and innovative technology to assist up and coming and established film-makers alike. Aside from the technology aspect of things, the main draw for students was the talk given by Camilla Hammereich, the producer of the unlikely hit series from Denmark, Borgen.
Outside the theatre stood a dizzying multitude of stands and demonstrations bearing their neat technological wares. This included the ‘Hexicam’, essentially a big remote control helicopter with cameras fastened on, which drew many onlookers and a 3D printer demonstration designed with the prop department in mind. This allowed props to be “printed off” rather than sent for.
The National Youth Film School were in attendance as well, seeking out students interested in pursuing film-making as a hobby or career, while representatives from DCU’s MA in Film & TV programme offered an academic avenue to pursue such an interest.
There were further exhibits on sound, camera and production technology which all looked terribly impressive, but were somewhat lost on this writer for want of any expertise or insider knowledge of film-making technology.
Moving into the theatre, Ms. Hammereich delivered a notably frank and refreshingly open discussion on the labour of love that was the extraordinary television of Borgen. Cognisant of the eyes of budding young film producers gazing up at here, Hammereich went into considerable detail as to the logistics and ground work that went into every episode, revealing that casting alone for the series took eight months. Interestingly, the heroine and heart of the show, Sidse Babett- Knudsen was a very late find, no less than thirty actresses were auditioned before Knudsen was approached. They were initially reticent as Knudsen was a film actress, with her only television experience an Irish drama from the mid-noughties called ‘Proof’.
Knudsen has proved immensely popular in the role and key to the show’s success with her display of sympathetic steeliness winning her much critical praise and acclaim. She featured in almost every second of the first two seasons as the show charted the rise of her political life and the concurrent unraveling of her personal life to the finest detail. To accommodate other projects, Hammereich revealed, Knudsen agreed only to work three days a week during the third season and hence the greater development of characters such as Katrine and Torben in the final installments.
Hammereich’s primary advice for young filmmakers in the audience was to spend as much time, money and dedication as possible in the writing stage. She spoke of the enormous amount of research that was engaged in before episodes tackling divisive issues such as prostitution and animal welfare and an exhausting writing process which took two writers a minimum of two months per episode.
Ms. Hammereich was inevitably subjected to the question as to why Scandinavian drama has developed such a formidable following in the past number of years and while stumped as to the general phenomenon she offered an interesting analysis of Borgen’s individual success. She mused that liberal- minded, BBC 4 watching types were drawn to the paradise of Danish liberal-democracy as an escapism from the relentlessly realist and conservative dynamics of their own political landscape. This bears a striking resemblance to the reasons behind the success of the other great political drama of our time, the West Wing, which attracted disaffected Democrats seeking to escape the reality of the Bush-era.
Whatever the reasons behind its success, the Danish television phenomenon gives great hope to small filmmakers in small countries like our own that they too can make internationally acclaimed productions and Ms. Hammereich’s talk may well have inspired some such filmmakers in the audience.
