I made a seagull.

1:37 am  •  3 April 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

A slightly romantic coverillustration I did past summer for my former university. It features some guy teleporting through a glowing window into the sky to meet a girl floating and swimming through the air…this is what puberty does to you. :)

It’s called Ein Münchner im Himmel, after the hilarious german animated short from 1962 (sorry bavarian german-only…)

1:37 am  •  29 November 2011  •  5 notes  •  View comments

Yippieh! FMX, the Digital Content Convention of my University is beginning tomorrow! Come to Stuttgart and get your brains melted at the tech talks (and the parties in the evening!)

Here’s a little test i made to get comfortable with the rendering/shading workflow in Softimage. I have to say, coming from Maya, that rendering in SI seems much more fun and intuitive to me.
(Technical blabla: Modeling, Animating in Maya, Exporting via PointOven, small displacements done in Zbrush, rendered textured and shaded in Softimage via Mental Ray, little comp in Fusion)

2:45 pm  •  2 May 2011  •  1 note  •  View comments

“The Day the Movies died” by Mark Harris is, as the title suggests, a bit overstated, but still a thorough and comprehensive overview about what’s happening with Hollywood in the past and coming years, and also outlines what role animated feature and VFX films play in the steady decline of creativity and quality. Recommended read!

Again, the illustration has nothing to do with the article :)

11:30 pm  •  16 March 2011  •  6 notes  •  View comments

Adventure Time! Come on and grab your friends!

adventuretime:

Thank you guys for creating this awesome show. Its fun, creativity and fresh wacky-ness have impressed me and a lot of my peers! Please keep the algebraic work! :D

Submitted by biniman

(Source: adventuretime)

3:34 pm  •  26 February 2011  •  142 notes  •  View comments

Waiting for spring to return.

8:56 pm  •  8 February 2011  •  9 notes  •  View comments

Yippieh! The Gruffalo has been nominated for an Oscar in the Category “Animated Shortfilm”! Check the trailer for Studio Soi’s masterpiece on —> Youtube!

The illustration however has nothing to do with that… :)

3:38 pm  •  27 January 2011  •  3 notes  •  View comments

Been on my mind since Irvin Kershner died.

5:01 am  •  8 January 2011  •  4 notes  •  View comments

Drunken ape wishes a happy new year. his resolution: to drink even more?

1:44 am  •  4 January 2011  •  2 notes  •  View comments

Louise wasn’t just constructed as a perfect household robot; next to her uncanny ability to reach even the tiniest corner and clean them from the recurring dust, Master Gabriele valued her keen political interest, charming conversational skills and her robotic, but heartwarming sense of logic. And still she wondered, as if it were a cosmic joke on her well constructed and planned existence, thought to amuse the gods:

“Why do I have to cough when I clean the carpets?”

(Loop recommended, grab it in HD on ->Vimeo)

Please also check out this neat little teaser for David Levy’s next film about his Grandpa. The cute anecdote told in this excerpt makes me curious for the finished film :)

1:18 am  •  16 December 2010  •  View comments

Studio Soi’s The Gruffalo” is in the shortlist for the next Academy Award. Rooting now for the next step, the nomination for the Oscar :) Yippieh!

1:23 am  •  3 December 2010  •  2 notes  •  View comments