PRE-PRODUCTION AS DISCOVERY

September 14 – 18, 2026
on-site
Max. 12 participants
Fee: 800€
APPLICATION DEADLINE: JULY 15, 2026

This workshop offers filmmakers the chance to explore an emerging project and develop a proof of concept using generative AI, sound design, somatic practices, and creative exercises—not as finishing touches but as starting points. In most productions, sound and image-building tools arrive late or never. We reverse that sequence. You arrive with a raw concept—a mood, a texture, a fragment—and we begin generating audiovisual material immediately, before a screenplay exists.

Over five days on HFF’s LED virtual production stage, you’ll work collaboratively to build immersive sketches that become a film’s sensory language. Through hands-on experimentation with sound, movement, live AI visuals, and generative exercises rooted in human imagination rather than datasets, you’ll treat the sketch as a site of inquiry. These sketches evolve into a tangible, pulsing proof of concept—a sensory compass that guides what your project wants to become.

Along the way, we critically examine what these tools cost—practically, conceptually, ethically—and explore what it means to create with and beyond them. You’ll leave not with a treatment or a script, but with a vivid, working sense of your film’s sonic and visual world, ready to carry forward.

The workshop is open to all. No prior experience with AI tools or technical software required.

Tools & Technology
Provided by HFF:

  • LED virtual production stage
  • Editing workstations
  • Node-based live AI visual system (TouchDesigner)

Participants should bring:

  • A laptop (Mac or PC) capable of running TouchDesigner
  • Headphones
  • A zoom recorder or smartphone for field recording and on-location capture

Participants will leave with:

  • A working audiovisual sketch — the sensory pre-production document for a film
  • Hands-on experience with real-time AI visual systems and creative sound design in a production context
  • A critical framework for evaluating the use of generative AI in creative work
  • An understanding of how reversing the conventional production order opens unexpected creative possibilities
  • Direct experience of collaborative, process-driven filmmaking across disciplines

Application materials:
1. CV with filmography (if available)
2. Letter of motivation (half a page)

WORKSHOP LEADERS

Kathryn Fischer

Kathryn Fischer

Kathryn Fischer (they/them), artist name Mad Kate, is a Berlin-based electronic producer, performance artist, choreographer, and filmmaker with more than two decades of experience at the intersection of experimental sound, movement, and interdisciplinary art. Fischer is an accomplished sound designer for film and theater with performance works presented at Volksbühne Berlin, Maxim Gorki Theate and many others. Their ongoing research with HYENAZ, Foreign Bodies, investigates themes of migration, resistance, and extractivism through field recordings, sonic interventions, and performance. They have led workshops in contexts ranging from Tohono O’odham land near the US/Mexico border to queer-feminist conferences in Ukraine and Armenia.

Adrienne Teicher

Adrienne Teicher

Adrienne Teicher is a Berlin-based transfeminine sound designer, composer, and performer. Her practice, rooted in queer and feminist inquiry, investigates power, borders, bodies, and relationality through sound. As one half of the artistic duo HYENAZ, her collaborative work investigates migration and resistance through the research project Foreign Bodies, using field recordings, sonic interventions, and performance to interrogate extractive dynamics and the politics of listening. This extends into collaborative VR (“Entanglements”) and professional sound design for film and theatre, including scoring and sound design for the features The Visual Feminist Manifesto (IFFR) and Queer Core (IDFA), and for theatre works.

Marlo Duchêne

Marlo Duchêne

Marlo Duchêne is a Swiss-French artist and researcher based in Berlin. They make artworks that stage bodies slipping through computational systems, using drawing, video, writing, web-based media, performance, and installation. Trained in VFX/3D animation, with dual Master’s degrees in Solo/Dance/Authorship (HZT Berlin) and Critical Curatorial Cybermedia (HEAD Geneva), they collaborate with choreographers and researchers, from independent spaces to the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences. They teach creative methodologies to scientists and technical workflows to artists. Info: https://mrlo.studio/

Beatrice Babin

Beatrice Babin

Beatrice Babin (she/her) is a professor at the Chair of Editing. As a film editor and dramaturg, she has worked on fiction and documentary films for many years. She has collaborated with directors such as Emily Atef, Volker Koepp, Markus Imhoof, Cordula Kablitz-Post, Elisa Mishto, Wim Wenders, Tuna Kaptan, Pierre-Alain Meier and Mara Eibl-Eibesfeldt. Her films are predominantly theatrical productions that have screened at festivals worldwide.
Since 2018, she has been performing regularly as BeBab – as a live video performer and VJ, particularly in the genre of Live Cinema. Her video installations and VJ sets revolve around the permeability of memory and invention: dreams of a future that has sometimes already become the past. For her performances she combines analog modules, video synthesizers and digital video mapping into sets that are trippy, glitchy and atmospherically dense. She is a founding member of the Berlin-based VJ collective Trial-and-Theresa and of Suuperpose.