Two weeks of laundry detergents

After two months being out of work I finally went to Germany to start working on this market research project that was suppose to be starting in January. A small market research company based in London were looking for a German speaking Filmmaker - me! :)

The research involved going to Hamburg and interview 16 people about laundry detergents. It was qualitative research - I had to spent 4 hours with each person in the interview! So needless to say that I felt shattered after each day talking, filming and generally looking interested in laundry detergents. On the first day I thought I must die. The thought of doing this for 2 weeks didn't really appeal to me. So the first few days I thought of the good money I was making from this. But then it was actually ok. All the women and the one man I had to interview were really interesting. It sort of made me think about what I will buy as my detergent of choice in future.

All of them seemed to have done market research before, and obviously loved to talk. Maybe just a couple really seemed to have enough after 4 hours, the rest really didn't mind. I also had to ask about their lives and what makes them tick. Probably the oddest things was a lady passionately telling me about her husband's various jobs, like working in a sex shop on the Kitz, now being a shoe maker for transvestites and a body guard for a dominatrix. But all of them were really cool in their own way, many of them I would have loved to have a coffee with and talk about life and other stuff.

I haven't dreamed about detergent yet - phew - but that might change after having logged and digitised the 26 tapes I shot over those two weeks. I now have to log and digitise about 5 tapes a day. Today I managed to do 1. :/ But then I was still collecting the harddrive and deck for doing the work. Any excuse counts. Wish me luck.

ps: I also heard from those women that Klementine, the face of German Ariel advertising, died recently. So this is a tribute to her too.