Samstag, 15. März 2008

smoox until now







going online @ planetactive

Then I had the chance to get into the world of online advertisement. At planetactive, an online-advertising-agency in Düsseldorf, now part of neo-ogilvy, I started as a trainee, doing illustrations for ads and microsites. I got into different dtp-applications like Photoshop, Image Ready, illustrator and Freehand and I learned to do Flash-Animation. I was there for about 20 months and these are some of the things I did there:











































some of those images are concept-layouts and part of visual development and have not been launched as seen.

Koffergeschichten

For JEP (Jürgen Egenolf Productions) in Cologne I made a classical storyboard for a 2D-children tv-show called "Koffergeschichten" which means "The suitcases histories" in which a suitcase (a character of the Rudi Rabe-show) is part of historic events. In this case he was the companion of Whimsical Walker, a clown at the age of queen Victoria:

here are a view pages of the board:






trained eyes will see, in the circus-scene there is John Lennon sitting in the audience... 

At the VW-Autostadt

Then I had a little job for planb-media (now part of mindmatics). The purpose was to produce a christmas-motion-ride for the simulator at the theme park of VW. The Art-Director was Bolle Bollmann who now owns the daywalker-studios. So for the presentation we went to VW in Wolfsburg with the Volvo of plan b. After the presentation I took a little tour through the theme park and had one of the famous factory-homemade currywursts - very fine :)

I had to do a character-design of Santa Clause. I thougt he should be more of an originary nordish type wearing archaic and natural clothes:




on the other hand, he should have a modern slight made out of dark and white chocolate with orange-flavoured spots on it and which doesn't need deers:


But finally they went for the standard Coca-Cola-Version and a nostalgique slight:





no problem

GUM

My first job I had after I moved to Oberhausen was in Cologne at the GUM-Studios.

GUM means "Gesellschaft für Unterhaltung und moderne Medien" which means something like "Society for entertainment and modern media". Since years they were making the german version of Spitting Image, "Hurra Deutschland", which was very successful in Germany. The idea of doing this was intitiated by Alfred
Biolek, an extraordinary and wellknown german talkmaster since the beginning of german talk-shows and tv-cook and the Brothers Andreas and Stefan Lichter. Three years later Stefan took the enterprise to run it on his own. When I came there, they were starting with a 3D-animated serial for TV-Loonland called "Dragons-Rock". For doing things like this, Lichter founded a second studio, which was in the same rooms as GUM, called Tevox. With tevox he already did different small projects for trade-exhibitions. Tevox developed techniques for virtual speakers by motion-tracking. Now they intended to use their experiences to produce a tv-show. When I was at the Trickompany in Hamburg working on Junior they offered their knowledge to produce the Junior-Shows. They made some proofs but didn't succeed. Finally the canadian studio Klik got the deal to do the animation.

So for Dragons Rock they got two directors: Greg Manwaring and Roy Wilson

I was there mainly for storyboarding. But I also did the prop-design and a bit of set-design that have then been modeled by most talented Christoph Gaudl

Here are some results of my work:















Here an example Storyboard Reel (Animatic) of the whole Show, Ep22:


After one year of production they stopped it because they got into trouble with the producer TV-Loonland about the property-rights of the Show. TV-Loonland stopped the paiements and GUM locked the doors for insolvency.

The co-producer and german tv-broadcaster SuperRTL showed the first five or six episodes, then they cancelled it and replaced it by "Sponge Bob".

Donnerstag, 6. März 2008

Oberhausen

In the first week of february 2002, Tahar called me and asked me if I had time for a new job that should start one week later. It was for a 3D-animated feature and my issue was to do the storyboarding. The production took place at triple e in Oberhausen (former HDO = High Definition Oberhausen, a special effects studio financed by the local county government).

I asked, where is Oberhausen? and Tahar said, its a part of Köln.

I arrived there on the 12th of february. And I recognized, Oberhausen was about 80 kilometers away from Köln. Instead it was in the middle of the Ruhrgebiet, between Duisburg, Essen and Mülheim.
I then worked there in the development-department together with Dieter Klapper who was the production-designer and Ulrich Zeidler who was the art-director. On the floor below us where dozens of very talented international 3D-Artist, mattpainters, marquet-builders and our director Peter Claridge. And on the first floor was sitting the girl I fell in love with and the reason why I left Berlin and moved to Oberhausen after the end of the production. The film-title was "tamanana" and it was supposed to be the first german 3D-animated feature entirely done with motion-capturing-technique.

Here is some of my work I did there:




By the way, the production has never been finished because the money was already spent, long before the end of the production. So all that's left are these few scenes:


Youa

While I was in Guatemala, Tahar prepared my first job, organized by Die Kolonie.
I should work as one of a team Tahar recruted for the developement of a new edutainment software for children to make them learn english with fun. The teams purpose was to develope characters and their background and to produce a short trailer with them to assure the constancy of the financing of the project. My position in this team was supposed to be concept-design and animation, while tahar stayed in the background doing a bit of production management.
For this reason the producers (among them Springer-TV) rent a huge loft in West-Berlin. The enterprise name should be Youa-Edutainment.
I got aware of this job a few weeks before from my neighbour Anke, in Berlin, who I knew from Hamburg, where we were working together in a claymation-studio that was producing shorts for the german version of the sesame-street. I told Tahar about it, and as we found out that the organisation, Mr. Eckart, and the conceptor, Gila Hoppenstedt, of the project were seeking urgently for a team because the first team they reassambled broke apart by dismanagement, we thought this should be a great test-balloon for our young agency. Especially as we recognized that the producers of the project had no idea about animation and filmproduction. So the first thing we told them was, that they need a team of high-talented artists and a high-quality equipment, which costs a lot of money.

As animation director and 3d-supervisor we found Peter Kaboth, a good bloke at that time. We knew him from clayart and we were hanging around together a lot then. He's a very talented guy and is now working as 3D-animation-director for films like "Lissy und der wilde Kaiser". Only for him Youa rent a maisonette-apartment with a roof-garden in Berlin-Charlottenburg.

A friend of Peter, a girl called Urte also joined the team. Then I asked Michael Carrol from Dublin, who was living in Berlin and working in several animation studios since a couple of years. I knew him from a project at Cinevox in Babelsberg. Furthermore he was living in my flat and kept an eye on it, while I was in Hamburg. Michael learnt classical clean-up in a 5 year hard school at the Don Bluth Studios in Ireland. He himself also brought a friend he knew from the animation-business into the team. Finally there was the winner of the pitch for the character-design, Martina Theisen. She created the main character Marvi Hämmer, a rat. Harald Siepermann also pitched for the job, but they didn't like his designs.

This is one of the designs I made of Jay-Cee, one of the characters of the story. She should represent a new-yorker hip-hop-street girl with afro-american roots. I thought to make her more proud, I give her a nubian profile. They didn't like that design either.


and this is Emma; for the british quote:


What happened meanwhile to the project you will find here



Montag, 3. März 2008

Sunnie&Pollie


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