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| Movie producer and screen writer Dawid Zalewski, left, holds the central prop used in the movie, `Bianca B. and the Wooden Ibis,' next to director Stefan Schlautmann. The half-hour promotion movie was filmed on location in Enschede. Photo: Gijs van Ouwerkerk |
`It is so cool,' says Beusink, `to see your colleagues performing in a movie. The many hidden jokes made me laugh and also realize that being a PhD is more than just being in the lab.'
Aside from the academic rigors of conducting research to develop miniaturized systems for biomedical and environmental applications, the BIOS Lab-on-a-Chip group has been working outside the laboratory, producing professional-quality `promotion movies' for PhD students who are about to defend their thesis.
One of the directors, Stefan Schlautmann, a cleanroom technician at the university, says the tradition and concept to make movies originally started in the TST group. `Ten years ago, instead of having members of the group perform humorous skits or `stukjes,' Remco Sanders decided to show a funny, short movie about a PhD student. Years later, the tradition has spread to the BIOS and MCS groups.'
Schlautmann's latest collaboration, an action-thriller, tells the story of secret agent Bianca B. whose propensity towards saving the world leads her on a series of dangerous escapades from Germany to downtown Seoul, Korea. She needs to complete her mission to save the wooden ibis from the hands of the diabolical Mr. B.I. Core, and in doing so, she can save the world.
The movie makers filmed the opening scene on the rooftop of the Hogekamp building, using a stunt double, Ada Drost, to perform the acrobatic flips of the main character Bianca. The lead role was played by master's student Verena Stimberg. `I haven't done anything like this before,' she says, `it was definitely interesting to see the complete movie, and I was surprised how good it turned out.'
The producer-cum-story writer, Dawid Zalewski, says the standard promotion movie usually illustrates a typical day in the life of a PhD, condensing the four-year period into roughly a ten minute story. `We wanted the movie to have a Bond-like quality and also had a few ideas about the storyline, but very quickly we discovered that this was not enough to build an interesting plot and consistent narration. So, we needed to write a full-blown screenplay. The writing itself took maybe eight hours, but thinking about characters and how to connect the scenes took much longer. Preparing the script, props and scouting for the right locations took us about two weeks and almost another two weeks were needed for shooting and editing,' he says.
A researcher at Nikos, Kasia Zalewska-Kurek, performed the title song `Wooden Ibis,' which according to the film's directors, needed special echoing effects and took a couple of hours to record using Dolby digital sound while the entire movie was made with the program Final Cut Pro editing software, a product developed by Apple.
When putting the final touches in the movie, Schlautmann says he only took a two hour nap on the night before Beusink's promotion. He had encountered several unexpected obstacles while directing the movie. `It is very difficult to make people “act” and not just let them read a script. If we'd had more time for filming then everyone would have been better prepared. Most of the time, we just showed up at the office of an individual and shot everything in 20 minutes. The second, most obvious problem that we encountered was poor recordings of the audio in some scenes. This is something difficult to correct afterwards. Lastly, our greatest challenge was to finish in time for the promotion party. We only started filming eight days before the promotion. In total, we spent maybe 12 hours filming and an additional 50 to 60 hours editing, searching for music and fine-tuning the sound effects.'
Arguably, one of the greatest assets was the film's abundance of human capital, represented in the twenty-two member international cast and crew. And on April 2 in the Spiegel building, Wouter Sparreboom, an avid cyclist and pet owner of ferrets, will defend his thesis on the topic of `AC electroosmosis in nanochannels.' Afterwards at his promotion party, amid the congratulatory wishes of his new status of `Dr.,' his friends and colleagues in the BIOS Lab-on-a-Chip group will dim the lights and show the fruits of their film-making labors as his promotion movie has its premiere.
Watch the full version of the movie: http://vimeo.com/3392441
Guest contributor Ganesh Krishnamoorthy conducted the interviews for the article and played a small role, as one of the Indian dispatchers who worked at the Secret Agencies help line. In his daily life, he is a PhD candidate in the BIOS Lab-on-a-Chip group and finished his master's degree at the Technical University Hamburg-Harburg, in Germany. While in his home city of Chennai, India, he worked for ten months as a shift engineer in the Naptha Cracking Unit of a hydrogen plant, specializing in auto oxidation for the manufacturing of hydrogen peroxides. His experiences at the plant, managed by Asian Peroxides Limited, taught him the safety protocols for shutdown and startup of a hydrogen plant.
