6:23 pm  •  29 March 2013  •  3 notes  •  View comments

6:22 pm  •  29 March 2013  •  2 notes  •  View comments

Yepp, that’s what happens when you stop to blog for a second and think “well,I’mjustgonnafinishthisthing before I post again..” and then BOOM! half a year gone!! :)
Animated films just make it so easy to get lost in them…
So here I present to you the first look on my latest film! Hope you like it, it’s a romantic comedy about the “End of Privacy”. Hubert, the lovely wannabe-casanova protagonist of this story has a bubble floating over his head (like in comics, you know), and in this bubble all his thoughts are visible. So everybody can read his thoughts, and since he mostly thinks about (naked) ladies, this gets him into big trouble…

In the coming weeks I’ll post a little more about this project.

I have to admit I’m a little tired at the moment. For the past two years I have been directing more or less back-to-back first on Studio Soi’s “The Princess, the Prince and the green-eyed Dragon” and now on this film. Hopefully I’ll be able to take a vacation soon.. :)

6:20 pm  •  29 March 2013  •  4 notes  •  View comments

Sitting in the fields, talking about games, sharing that song with a friend.
An illustration I made for the University of applied Sciences in Media, Stuttgart.

2:27 am  •  4 July 2012  •  2 notes  •  View comments

YAY! Next week, FMX in Stuttgart is coming up again! A week crammed with hopefully mind-blowing stuff on computer graphics, animation and general awesomeness.

Check out Sascha Geddart’s beautiful trailer for the conference. (I helped a little bit with compositing last november under lead Comp Johannes Peter’s supervision ^_^)

4:33 pm  •  3 May 2012  •  1 note  •  View comments

I made a seagull.

1:37 am  •  3 April 2012  •  9 notes  •  View comments

What a horrible week for the science-fiction community. Last week end, Ralph McQuarrie, genius behind the visual design of Star Wars passes away, and today, the french science-fiction and fantasy legend, Jean Giraud aka Moebius, has died in Paris.

I cannot express my deepest sadness about the loss of two of the greatest influences not only on me, but a whole generation of visual artists.
RIP

1:59 pm  •  10 March 2012  •  9 notes  •  View comments

While watching Bayer Leverkusen getting destroyed by Barcelona today, I drew this little piece here. I was applying my patented drawing-without-thinking™ method, so the different elements, like the character, the trees and the clouds, don’t match at all in their visual style, the color palette is the only thing holding this together (I mean, not even the trees are consistent with each other!!). It was fun to do and I left it like this, and it made me think about the common “Manga Masking Effect”, where characters and backgrounds can differ greatly in visual detail and style.

And then I thought, man, wouldn’t it be cool if there were more videogames that incorporated this? A game that looks like The Amazing World of Gumball or *cough* our “Princess and Dragon” film, with superflat characters and photorealistic BGs, or something that looked like a photo-collage, or a game with hi-poly, beautifully shaded humans in low-poly, transparent worlds or *insert random ideas*…
If you look at older games with pre-rendered backgrounds, like Resident Evil or Final Fantasy on the Playstation One, you can see some examples of different styles for characters/BGs, because of technical limitations. But I have the impression, at the moment, games are too consistent.

(..and too serious :), but that’s another story.)

2:11 am  •  8 March 2012  •  2 notes  •  View comments

There’s an excerpt of our film “The Princess, the Prince and the green-eyed Dragon” on the official Studio Soi website. To watch it, go here http://studiosoi.de/#/work/ and click the rainbow thumbnail (second from the top).
(Sorry for the inconvenience but the site doesn’t support static links at the moment)
Hope you enjoy this little snippet!

Biniman

10:57 am  •  6 March 2012  •  3 notes  •  View comments

Found this little gem on Youtube, a wonderful little set of three songs performed by Beirut (there’s more from that gig if you search around..)

1. “My Night with the Prostitute from Marseille”
2. “Siki Siki Baba” by turkish (?) singer Durmus Cigdem
3. “La Javanaise” by Serge Gainsbourg

Somehow, now I want a turkish band for the next party… :)

11:22 pm  •  13 February 2012  •  1 note  •  View comments

Dragon Cave to the left, Royal Castle to the right; Traffic is easy in the world of
-> “The Princess, the Prince and the green-eyed Dragon”

2:51 am  •  9 February 2012  •  78 notes  •  View comments

The princess is not amused.
-> “The Princess, the Prince and the green-eyed Dragon”

9:43 am  •  8 February 2012  •  16 notes  •  View comments

Daydreaming Dragon, caretaking Princess.
-> “The Princess, the Prince and the green-eyed Dragon”

1:02 am  •  6 February 2012  •  1 note  •  View comments

For our film “The Princess, the Prince and the green-eyed Dragon” we used handdrawn Flash-Animation within backgrounds that were partially built in real life (by setbuilding-specialist Gottfried Mentor) and partially painted on the computer, which I think gives the film kind of a funny, unique look.
The animation was done by our incredible french team, consisting of Adeline Grange, Bong Nguyen, Florian Parrot and Benoit Tranchet, who came from the distinct Parisian Gobelins L’Ecole des Images to our small studio in rainy Berlin, and churned through our daily animation quotas like mad. I tell you, these guys mean business! >:)

The lovely designs were done by Jakob Schuh, while I composited it all together in Nuke, using a combination of 2d drawn elements, 3D-elements, and faux 3D for stuff like faked camera movements etc.

More images to come…

initial Post on -> “The Princess, the Prince and the green-eyed Dragon”

-> all Posts on the project

1:21 pm  •  5 February 2012  •  6 notes  •  View comments

Gonna find out who’s naughty or nice… :)
-> “The Princess, the Prince and the green-eyed Dragon”

1:20 pm  •  5 February 2012  •  View comments