MICHAEL GEIDEL

Michael has been working in the media industry since 1999 in film finance, production and distribution. He since then worked at TV licensing and merchandising company EM.TV, KirchGroup’s International Co-Production Dept., for the largest commercial production company in North America, at ZDF Enterprises and the main program planning unit at ZDF itself. Michael worked long-term at leading German indie film production and distribution company Kinowelt, later Studiocanal, where he was involved in the marketing and distribution of international and German films and received awards for his work. Michael then went on to work on IT projects, like at an IT startup company for clients like Siemens AG or for the Free State of Saxony office in Brussels.

As a Media Economist graduate and trained journalist, he joined leading German  indie  film  production and distribution company Kinowelt, where he was involved in marketing and distribution of a big variety of  international  arthouse  and  mainstream  films  like  SAW1-4,  Blindness,  The Fountain, Once, BenX as well as German productions. He was the technical head for the introduction of HD-DVD and Blu-ray and, after becoming part of mini-major Studiocanal, Michael supervised the international and US domestic Blu-Ray creation for Terminator 2 in Los Angeles that received a DVD Association Excellence Award in 2009 for Advanced Interactivity (Games, Quizzes, Online). Michael left Kinowelt in 2009 to become a partner in an advertising agency. Knowing Annekathrin for 10 years by then, he also joined film production company MiriquidiFilm as creative producer to move it to producing feature films on a european scale and have a focus on cross-media development.

Over the last two years, Michael deepened his cross-media knowledge developing concepts and acting as analyst for the multi-awarded Climate Media Factory at the oldest German film school Konrad  Wolf  in  Potsdam-Babelsberg, developing new film and interactive formats on sustainability matters for a broad audience. He was, for example, part of the sustainable consulting team for the no 1 hit game ANNO 2070 for the publisher Ubisoft. Michael is the co-founder of Germany’s national Green Film Initiative and works with the people from BFI, Film London, BAFTA, BBC, Ecoprod in France and other initiatives like PGA Green or the EBU to promote and support sustainability in the film business.

 In 2012 Michael developed the concept and produced the Klynt-webdoc Bottled Life for ARTE/SRF accompanying the TV documentary. He is consulting on the browser game Forests of Eden and wrote the concept for the iPad pre-school game Wimmelwelt that has a working prototype and is currently being financed. Also he joined the team of the award-winning project Everyday Rebellion and co-created the mobile app and cross-media concept and will supervise the production in 2013. Michael was Jury member of the Online Jury at Prix Europa 2012, expert at the Berlinale Talent Campus 2013 and contributed to a book by Lance Weiler´s RebootStories writing about “Transmedia Finance“. He is part of the Jury of the Achtung Berlin film festival 2013.