Erasmus 24 7

About us

Stefano De Marco and Niccolò Falsetti started co-operating under the name of ZERO in order to realize a viral video campaign for the Italian University of Rome "La Sapienza". Since there they started working on their own projects together. We are now based in Berlin, where we're creating movies, docs, music vids, web series, virals etc.

UPDATE: Alessandro Grespan is a London based part-time thinker and videomaker. He is currently writing and producing internet commercials and music videos, while working on his second short film “An Exercise”, due to be released in early 2013.

About Erasmus 24_7

Erasmus 24_7 is a documentary about the Erasmus program, the biggest European mobility project for European University students. The meaning of 24_7 is quite simple: playing with the common use of the expression 24_7 we wanted to enclose, in a very short phrase, the essential structure of our story. Infact, our documentary will show 24 hypothetical hours of seven students, coming from seven different European nations, living their Erasmus experience in seven different universities around Europe.

The structure

The documentary will be divided in 5 main sections that will drive the audience from the morning through a whole day towards the end of the 24 hours with our seven students:

The first section shows the awakenings of the students. In this first part we will introduce all the seven main charachters, the places where they live in (and more specifically their accomodations) and what they are studying. We will focus on the way they organize their lives abroad and on the expectations they have about the experience they're going to live, that we want metaphorically enclose in 24 hours.

The second section of our film is about the cities the guys are living in. We will walk around with them, discovering their feelings about their "new" home, the relationship each city has with the student community and the daily life of all these places, including transports, times and rythms, lifestyles etc. Every city will be introduced by the students themselves and the presentation will be strictly related to their point of view.

The third part treats one of the main points of our movie: the Universities. In this section the students will drive us in the very center of the Erasmus mechanism showing the audience they way each university lives the Erasmus experience. Moreover we will also be shown the interaction the students create with their colleagues and with the whole academic system in every particular situation. This is a very important point of the documentary because, above all, the Erasmus program is a University project.

The fourth section is about friendship. As known, the great majority of Erasmus students build a strong net of friends in their new country. We want to see how the guys we are going to meet built their friendships, the way they interact with their new friends, the dept of their feelings about the new people they met and the leap this gave to their lives.

The fifth and last part of the video is about what usually is considered the main moment of the social life of an Erasmus student: the night. Erasmus parties are incredible events where students coming from all over Europe, sharing the same town for a quite short piece of their paths, meet other people like them. The Erasmus nights are something we really want to show because they really represent the most significant moment of an Erasmus student's social life.

Focus on Erasmus

Since 1987, the first year of the Erasmus, more than 2,5 millions students coming from about 4000 universities from 31 different European countries have been involved in the program.
We've been looking around for every kind of video, movie, short, documentary, viral or any other kind of product that could deal with our topic. Except for the famous film “L'Auberge espagnole” almost nobody decided in the last 25 years to talk about this kind of experience, that has been playing such an important role in the development of a big part of the new European youth. We believe that this kind of human experience can affect, positively for sure, a young student's grown, in a way that can't definitively be ignored.
We have been listening out to some rumors that the period 2007-2013 could be the last for the program. We just know it from some newspapers articles so we still don't know what is going to happened about that. For sure we know that for now (december 2012), no funds have been allocated by the European Community for the Erasmus program for the period 2014-2020.

What we need

We set our goal to 5.000€.

As you can see, we started a fixed founding campaign, because the money we are asking for will just cover the main expenses. We are giving away our time for free, working without earning money just beacuse we strongly believe in the potential of our project.
Your money will help us to cover:

• Equipment
• Travel
• Accomodations
• Food
• Inner city transports
• Gadgets and materials

No major production companies or sponsors will be supporting us, we want this to be an indipendent project, born and developed among the students, made by simple people with the help of anybody who will want to help. It will be only us, living with students, sharing their life and their feelings, capturing all this with our cameras. We have the skills to take care of everything: concept, organization, shooting, editing, post production, finalization and distribution. 

We have the purpose to send the final product all over the most important film and documentary festivals around the world. We are sure about the catchment area of the   topic and about the quality of the product we can realize.   

Timing

Our campaign will last 50 days. If in the first 30 days we will reach our goal, we will depart for our shooting by the beginning of February, breaking our piggy-banks. Otherwise, if we will reach our goal just at the end of the campaign, we will move our departure forward to the beginning of May. After the shooting we will need a month to edit, post produce and finalize the video.                      

Other Ways You Can Help

We know that not everyone can help us giving us money. Here are other ways to support our project:

• Share the campaign page through your favourites social networks
• Share our promotional video 
• Like Erasmus 24_7 on facebook

AND

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Thank you everybody for your support!