Fall of the Berlin Wall - National History Day 2012
by Michel Sturm (Nebraska, USA)
Beginning of the year my American History teacher told the class that we will participate at the “National
History Day 2012” (NHD) for which we will have to make a research about a theme we would like to know
more about.The grand topic was “revolution” which is of course a wide reaching topic.
We created groups and because 3 out of 6 exchange students of Hastings High School were in the same
class, our teacher suggested to make an “exchange student group”.
Carl Finnander (Sweden), Richard Pabista (Czech Republic), Robert Pankratz (United States) and me,
Michel Sturm (Germany), as the members of the group, were thinking about many different ideas what
we want to do. The Rules of the NHD said that we will have to present the project as a paper (written and
presented reading), Exhibit (poster), performance (band, theatre, …), documentary (graphic presentation,
iMovie, audio) or as a website. It also said that we will have to use primary and secondary sources for the
research and to list all sources in a bibliography (source listing).
After a few weeks we finally chose our theme: “The Fall of the Berlin Wall”
We decided to make a documentary and to make our presentation as a movie, because we will find a lot
of audio and video material.
We started to write a script for the movie and get information. I called my grandparents and they told me
that they will send me newspaper articles (great primary sources) and an original piece of the Berlin Wall.
A few days later I skyped with my grandparents, recorded the video and asked them a lot of questions.
The next day in school Robert and I went to the European History teacher of our school, Rob Kerr, and
interviewed him also.
After the interviews I took my computer and started cutting the movie. The problem was, that I was the
only one out of our group who had cut a movie with iMovie and knew how it worked. So it was clear that i
had to cut the movie again, which is fun, but takes a lot of time.
The first 3 minutes of the movie where we explain the reason why the wall was build took me over 10
hours to cut. We downloaded a lot of pictures, videos, music, scanned the original articles and placed
everything on the bibliography.
The next part was really difficult because we had a lot of pictures and videos to cut together and make it
fit with the background music. After every little section I had to stop to record the spoken text. I worked
many nights on this editing and there was another problem. We didn’t want to have just me as a narrator,
but I cut the movie the whole night long so no one was there to record it. We solved that problem with
recording the text the afternoon before and then i had a second audio line to cut the right pieces into the
movie.
For the last 3 minutes of the movie i first had to reduce the 1.5 hours long interview with my grandparents
to less than one minute, because we needed to stay under 10 minutes total length of the documentary.
After 3 hours listening and marking important parts out of the video call i finally got my minute of recording
and plugged it into the movie strip.
Then, on March 14th, 2012, we finally presented our movie in front of the judges at the NHD in Hastings.
It was over 30 hours of editing and many long, sleepless nights.
The audience was impressed of the quality and precision of information and movie. We got many positive
feedbacks and it was a great day. The judges asked questions to all group members to make sure
everyone was familiar with the topic.
At the awards we won the qualification for the state competition of Nebraska on April 21, on which we will
present our video again.