ADOBE MAX - The Sophie Scholl Project

Sophie.

This project was never been done before. Shooting like an historically actual figure that lived on the forties, and now we had to bring her to life as if she would be still living as a person.

My name is Manuel Freund.

I work for Vice Media in Berlin as senior producer for the project I amsofficial on Instagram. It's a profile that consists of several different media like reels, historically shot scenes, photos, illustrations, and all the package as a whole basically makes the channel items of a shot.

Sophie Scholl is one of the most fascinating characters in the resistance movement of Weiser Roose. These were students. These were students who made resistance in a very special spiritual and intellectual kind of way.

Sofie was a young woman, a young modern woman in very dark times. She was full of doubts, she had conflicts, she had a love affair, she had a special relationship to a legion. And we thought that this would be perfect for the interaction in Instagram.

At the moment we are publishing the footage that's been shot and produced, but we are also creating new editorially storytelling every day.

We started in September last year, and this year on May the fourth, we made the first publishing of the project on Instagram, and we stop February the eighteenth next year. That's the day where the day where where she was arrested.

My name is Katja Siegel. I am head of production at Weiss. My role was the executive producer for Weiss.

So Weiss Media is a global media company addressing for years now the young audience, Gen Z plusminus, I would say. This is an audience which is very demanding and they wanna learn something. So this is important for the broadcaster as well that it's not only a one way street, but it's a both way street.

I'm Susan Bauer and I'm the channel runner of I am Sophie Scholl.

When we started the project, we had an idea that we would gain something like one hundred thousand followers within the first month. But then we gained over eight hundred thousand followers within the first three days.

Right now we have around eight hundred thousand young women mainly, which is fascinating that it's young women because we search for this kind of reception between nineteen and thirty four years old.

When we gained one hundred thousand, I thought this is great. Two hundred thousand, I was a little bit nervous already.

Eight hundred thousand, I thought, okay, now we have a problem. Because eight hundred thousand followers means eight hundred thousand people who want to discuss, who have questions, and want to get answers. And we had only one community manager at that time.

It was a great challenge, I have to say, because we realized there are no projects like this before.

So we had to find a way how to work together to actually make this happen combining a feature film crew, a social media department, and also bringing this all together in ten months time.

The challenges with this project was, of course, the huge amount of footage we got. Hello, I'm Isabelle Feifer. I'm the editor of the Sofie Scholl project. We got the first unit who shot mostly with a handheld camera. Most of the times, the actors themselves held the camera, but also we had other shots from the DOP. And then the social media team took photos, but also boomerangs and reels and loads of stuff to fill these ten months of Sophie Scholl's life in nineteen forty three.

We want to bring them, the Sophie Scholl, as if she was alive, as if she could talk to our community herself.

My name is Nina Englert. I'm one of the editors on this project, We had a historian who helped us come up with the content and to stay with the historical figure of Sophie Scholl.

We had smaller stories from Sophie's life, some of her diary diary entries that might be interesting for people today, for women today, because she kind of had the same questions in her head like we have today.

Social media gives us the possibility to very close to this person and also to interact in a certain way. If you do a feature or a cinema feature about a historical person, then you can watch it for ninety minutes and it's over. And here you can kind of interact, you can communicate, and you can also communicate with your friends about this. And this is something very, I think it's worth a lot.

We sometimes have people discussing things like recipes for potato salad. Sometimes we have people discussing very difficult political issues and we need space for that.

This complexity of the project led to a lot of communication that had to be monitored since we were all working from home.

The creative needs, especially with corona, changed quite a bit. Basically, everything is in the cloud, which is amazing because we can work from home now as well, which we couldn't do before. And that's a huge change for the whole industry, I guess.

We have some material that is fixed. Those are the scenes. We can't change that, and we are posting it in a plan. But we also have some other material, like photographs. We have other scenes that are not cut already.

We mostly work with Premiere Pro for this project, of course, editing all the footage and also Photoshop.

And we are reading comments from people what they would like to see. So we are kind of changing that after what we get to know from the community. But we also would like to tell the story in a very interesting way.

And that's why we need that flexibility.

We hope that with this project, can inspire young people to engage Okay.

Raise their voices and to become creative themselves. And I'm really wondering who's gonna be the next historical figure that we see on an Instagram channel in that kind of production environment.