Samstag, 15. März 2008

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".

2 Kommentare:

Greg Manwaring hat gesagt…

Hi JO,

Yeah, what a rollercoaster ride that production was! I think we're all still owed money - I know I am!! We worked our butts off to produce one show every month - with a paltry budget. The crew did a commendable job under those conditions!

nellabarca hat gesagt…

yes, they still owe me some money as well. Every year I'm writing a letter to the liquidation-lawyer to ask how far the process is. Meanwhile his a bit pissed off of that, saying I seem to have no idea on how long these processes work and that he will inform me when finished. I do not need to write again. ...hmmm we'll see ;)