After 8 p.m., finding a seat in the Black Box at Munich’s Gasteig became difficult. Late arrivals had to stand through the three-hour programme assembled by host Gert Zimmermann of FilmtoolsConsult and Mediencampus Bayern.
#AnimationMeeting
Vit Komrzy, managing director of UPP (www.upp.cz), opened with a brief overview of the company. Its production work includes commercials for corporate clients, feature films and miniseries made for the US market. One current project is the six-part series “The Company”, based on Robert Littell’s bestseller and produced by Sony Television, TNT and Ridley Scott. Shot with an ARRI D-20, the series covers the history of the CIA during the Cold War. UPP created 700 VFX shots for the production. The series was scheduled for broadcast on Sat.1 in Germany later in 2007.
UPP’s work on the feature film “Perfume: The Story of a Murderer” involved combining Spanish locations and Munich studio footage through Czech postproduction to create a coherent picture of 18th-century France. Locations and sets were prepared with blue and green screens, while UPP combined matte paintings, live-action backgrounds and actors. A river shoot in Spain became a scene set in front of the Pont au Change in central Paris after roughly 250 layers of compositing.
Joachim Bode, managing director of Lichthof (www.lichthof.com), discussed character development for animation and advertising, from the initial design to a production-ready character. Traditional modelling clay presents very different logistical challenges from 3D animation, with substantial work required to build and maintain a figure. Lichthof created a commercial for Wrigley’s Hubba Bubba brand. The team decided early that conventional stop motion would be too expensive and that 3D animation with a clay texture offered more flexibility for movement experiments and character development. The animators made several clay textures and created a UV map in Maya to assess how the surface sat on the figures, stretched and reacted to light and shadow. The commercial series had already received several updates, including changes to the characters’ clothing and larger eyes.
Christian Schiller and Oliver Stannius of Munich-based animato (www.animoto.de) presented their production portfolio. They discussed work on the Danish-German children’s film “The Ugly Duckling and Me!”, which involved animating scenes that had already been rigged, and a 2006 commercial for the Audi A4. A specially built turntable capable of carrying an Audi, poor weather and no wind tunnel nearby pushed the team to demonstrate that sophisticated automotive commercials could also be shot in Germany.
The session closed with Scripted Reality, a young company led by Konrad Wieland, Benjamin Cuénod and Kook Ewo with offices in Munich and Paris. Scripted Reality showed how professional, artistically ambitious projects could be completed without large budgets. The end credits for “Silent Hill” (2006), for example, were animated entirely in After Effects, while a commercial for DSF Autoprofis was completed within ten days using a 12-megapixel camera and a sequence of individual frames (www.scripted-reality.com).
The next AnimationMeeting was provisionally scheduled for 8 November during Munich Media Days.
