Our Nominees for Studienstiftung Scholarship – Philipp Fritsch

A total of four cross-media publishing students from the Merz Akademie have been nominated for the 2021 scholarship call of the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes. This means that all the recommendations made by Professor Kevin B. Lee, who has accompanied and mentored the students since the beginning, have been included by the foundation in the further selection process.

We will be presenting the nominees in more detail here in the coming weeks.

Philipp Fritsch has been studying at the Merz Akademie for six semesters. He has an extensive background in film and video production and is already working at media production companies. Through his studies in Crossmedia Publishing he eagerly embraces new media forms while applying critical insights to evaluate their qualities. In the course Audiovisual Publishing, he made the very first video essay of the university about the dating app Tinder, using his classmate’s experience to study the app’s influence on the pursuit of romance and relationships.

At the same time, he is also fascinated with older media forms and the personal and cultural insights they can reveal. For the course Sharing Deep Spaces, Philipp made a personal documentary studying videocamera footage shot by his father, as a way of studying the techniques of amateur filmmaking from a past decade. Both this video and the video essay about Tinder were showcased in the 2020 Stuttgarter Filmwinter for Experimental Media.

As a Crossmedia Publishing student, Phillip’s exploration of film and media culture relies not only on producing videos. For the Crossmedia Fachkolloquium Media Innovation and Disruption, he investigated the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on cinemagoing in his hometown. After attending a cinema screening shortly after the cinemas opened (he was the only one in the theater), he attended a drive-in cinema that started during the lockdown. He reported his experiences in a vivid and amusing podcast, which aired on Freies Radio für Stuttgart Stuttgart.

The next step is a seminar in which the nominees present their work and have a selection interview with a jury of experts.

We keep our fingers crossed for Philipp for the further selection process!