Filmmaking Focus

Oslo, Norway filmmaker Ola Brattås has been making films professionally since 1999. He has made a number of commercials and music videos as well as two short films, titled Bus Stop and Spending Time. Ola believes his greatest strength as a filmmaker lies in his technical understanding of the filmmaking process.

Ola can’t pinpoint an exact time when he first got interested in filmmaking but says that “during my late teens I saw several films that grabbed me and made my thoughts drift for hours after the movie ended. This made me wonder whether I could ever do something like that for others.”

The most important thing that film school taught him was “that the making of a film is a team work, and that you have to have talented people in all of the different jobs to make a great film, and that you have to have a great story to make a good film.”

“I believe in the hands-on approach to learning the art of film making,” says Ola, “There is no easy way to get there by reading a book or watching a video. That being said, I have learnt some tricks from McGee’s book Story and the workshop. But I still believe strongly that you have to put it into practice to be able to understand things fully.”

Ola has made two short films, besides numerous commercials and music videos. Bus Stop is a 7 minute short, “a bizarre comedy shot on 35mm,” according to Ola. “An urban young man is waiting for the bus in a remote location on the countryside,” explains Ola, “Two road workers start removing the bus stop little by little until they in the end take the sign. The bewildered urban man can only watch as they drive off and at the same time the bus passes without stopping.”

The second short was called Spending Time and is about “two friends who have known each other since high school and lived together for some time,” explains Ola, and they “discover that they have grown apart when their TV breaks down for a week during the summer holiday. With a lot more time on their hands they drift into apathy as they can’t agree on what to do with the days. They finally get the TV back but the friendship has taken a beating.”

These shorts are “both comedies even though they are very different when it comes to style and story,” says Ola, “One film is more bizarre whilst the other is more of a relationship, dialogue driven story.”

If you would like to know more about Ola’s films you can visit his website at http://brattas.org/Ola/