Daniel's blog

I participated in the 48 hour film making session last weekend at my filmschool. I shot a 2 minute B-zombie homage with two classmates (Timo and Alexi) and a few folks who played the zombies. The film is online at vimeo, so I embedded it here in SD quality (but you can see it in HD directly on vimeo).

Spur des Verderbens from Daniel Bachler on Vimeo.

As I wrote above, it is a short film that was entirely done in 48 hours (that includes coming up with the idea, writing/planning, shooting, editing, effects), so it is pretty short and has some rough edges, but I'm quite happy with the result.

We shot the whole thing with my new Panasonic Lumix LX-3 Photocamera in HD Movie mode. The LX 3 lacks some important controls (shutter time, full manual control in movie mode, no focusing and zooming while shooting) but it did a pretty decent job nonetheless. I was especially surprised by the quality of the sound (of course it is not nearly good enough for anything serious, but it is interesting how usable it still is). We shot everything with available light only, and the camera handled it rather well (the 2.0 max aperture at the wide end is a great thing - go Leica!). The sound you hear is all from the camera, except for the music and a few Foley sounds.

The noise is pretty strong and we softened it a bit by processing the entire film in after effects with a slight glow (by adding a blurred version of the edit on top of the original and adding it with screen mode and about 40% transparency), but for render-time reasons we did not use any degraining solutions. If anyone is interested in the original material send me an e-mail and I will upload some of the original material to vimeo.

The music we used is Cellule from the Band Silence who were kind enough to put their song on Jamendo under a very liberal license (Thanks for the nice song)

We also used some sounds from freesound.org (see the credits for details)

The film is released under a creative commons license:

After an update of this website to the most recent Drupal version and some minor changes to the website design I have now opened a soup.io account to pull all the various web services I use together. So if anybody out there cares to browse through the links I come across, the youtube videos I liked, the things I bookmark on delicious and the stuff I post here in one place, my soup.io account is the place to check out.

I also hope to go through all the photos I took during this summer/spring as soon as the wedding seasons dies down in october and post some of them here.

I arrived in New York yesterday to visit my good friend Tom. Because of some stupid passport regulations Teresa couldn't come along and is getting another passport now - I really hope that she can come along on friday.

Meanwhile, I try to enjoy New York, which is pretty easy because the weather is magnificent. I'm pretty tired from walking around all day, but here are a few first photos from this beautiful city:

The first recipe in this series, while quite nice, was not much of an invention. This postings “Moreish Mooncake” a.k.a. the “Buster Keaton cake” is the result of a few attempts to bring together, in one cake, the two great worlds of the carrot cake and the poppy seed cake. It was baptized recently at a splendid dinner hosted by my good friends Roman and Ulf, when Ulf told us about how his Scottish step-aunt would call great food “moreish” because you always wanted to eat more of them. I first came up with the original recipe for Teresa’s Birthday. So, Teresa, this one is for you:

Ingredients: 150g butter, 150g sugar, 5 eggs, 50 finely ground breadcrumbs, 120g poppy seeds, 300g carrots, 100g ground almonds (walnuts or hazelnuts might also be nice but Teresa is allergic to those), 1 organic lemon (you need the zest and the juice), 200g sour crème. For the icing: 1 lemon, 250g icing sugar, red currant jam.

Whip the butter and the sugar until it is a homogenous crème, slowly add the 5 egg yolks. Add the breadcrumbs and the poppy seeds, the carrots, the almonds and finally the lemon juice, zest and the sour cream. Add the beaten white of egg (this is what the leo online dictionary gives me for “Eischnee” – literally egg-snow. Sometimes I really like German…). Bake at medium temperature for about one hour.

While the cake is still hot, spread a thin layer of the jam on the cake. For the icing, whip the icing sugar with the juice of one lemon and, if needed, small amounts of warm water. When you think it has the right consistency, pour it over the cake.

Buster Keaton, also known as “the great stone face”, made some brilliant silent film sketches in the 1920ies. Today the term slapstick has a pretty negative connotation, but this genius's perfect timing and his sublime body control just blow me away. Just like, hopefully, this cake will blow you away :)

As always, this cake is released under a creative commons license.

I recently had the idea to use my blog to write down recipes that I come up with. I love cooking, and sometimes I make up nice dishes that I think could be worth sharing. And, as I also love films, I thought it was only natural to name all my recipes after great films or directors. So, here goes my first one: "Duck a la Antonioni".

Michelangelo Antonioni was an Italian director whose films were often very precisely composed and had a simple elegance. This recipe hopes to capture some of the same spirit (I recommend "La Notte" to go with it):
 

Ingredients for 2 persons: approx 400g Duck filet with skin, 1/2 Fennel, 3 Carrots, Potatoes, Parsley.

Heat up a pan (use no fat as the duck has plenty of its own) and fry the duck filet. Cut the fennel to small pieces and fry it in some olive oil until it starts to caramelise, then add the cut carrots and just before everything is done salt & freshly ground pepper. Cook the Potatoes in water, then fry them in a little butter and add the parsley. Voilà!

(A little note: usually I use onions with all vegetables, but for this dish I think it's a good idea to put some faith in the fennel and carrots and let them stand by themselves)

This recipe is licensed under a creative commons license ;)