Donnerstag, 6. März 2008

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



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