The Evolution of DER OSTWIND
BY JENIECE TORANZO, MESA, USA — Kohl Glass, is the director and creator of DER OSTWIND, a short film that will screen at this year's 2007 Sundance Festival. Kohl is a former student at Mesa Community College who then earned his film degree at Brigham Young University. Although, I never had a class with Kohl, we did have a teacher in common at MCC — Cyndi Greening. She often mentioned her former students especially those who went on to higher education or found successful jobs in the film and animation industries.
I do remember her mentioning Kohl's name and I saw him around campus a few times, but we were never properly introduced until a few weeks ago. Cyndi, Nick and I had dinner with Kohl and his wife, Chris, to discuss the selection of Kohl's film in the 2007 Sundance Film Festival. We had a family-style Italian dinner. They are very nice people and they both love film! Kohl is a writer, director, editor. Chris has worked as an Assistant Director and Casting Director on a number of films. During the meal, Kohl mentioned that the project started at Mesa Community College in 2000. Later the animation students at BYU took the film on as a class project. If that's not dedication and patience then I don't know what is. After our experience in Zambia, I have come to see that hard work does pay off.
After a discussion about how the first "person" in outer space was a monkey, Kohl had a silly thought, "What if the first fighter pilots had been monkeys, too?" So, DER OSTWIND started out as a humorous film about an ace German pilot who discovers he's been beaten by a monkey. When Kohl presented the idea, people were upset at the monkey subplot so he reworked the story and it became more serious. You can look at the early DER OSTWIND animatics and concept art to see how many of the elements remained even though "Wilber" disappeared.
We got to watch the film and I have to say that I loved his short film. There is some talk of expanding it into an animated feature. I think it has a lot of potential to be very successful. I love the crisp animation, creative shots and excellent compositing that was used in his final piece. I found out that Kohl also work on another short film, THE PROMETHEAN. We had watched that film in Cyndi's filmmaking class. I was impressed how well it was shot and liked the curiously circular story. People are always asking Kohl if he's going to expand THE PROMETHEAN into a feature as well. He says he just can't imagine it ... yet.
It's neat to see a person about the same age as me, who went to the same school, and was able to make it into the Sundance film festival. It motivates me to keep working on my craft and striving to tell interesting stories in visually creative ways.