The new trailer for FMX 2026, created by students at the Filmakademie Baden-Wuerttemberg’s Animationsinstitut, pitches the upcoming milestone 30th-edition of the conference with a sense of optimism and transformation. The trailer’s standout visual? A bus growing legs.

Director Julian Mehn says the goal was to “create a sense of connection”, the core spirit of FMX, by showing something unexpected happen in an everyday moment. With the walking bus, hovering rocks, and raindrops alluding to previous films such as “Shape of Water” and “Avatar”, the team intended the trailer as a tribute to their creative inspirations. The final shot doubles as the “key visual” for FMX 2026. The filmmakers consciously steered away from visual darkness. Instead, they aimed for a sunrise-lit world that feels hopeful and inviting, capturing what they imagine as a “road ahead” toward future possibilities.

Because of time constraints, the team kept production pragmatic: they parked an actual bus in the Filmakademie yard for a week, shot its interior, and scanned the vehicle to rebuild it digitally for the animated transformation. According to Mehn, even unexpected weather, a surprise snowfall , stood in contrast to their intended summer night setting. The trailer’s audio was recorded live with an orchestra in Sofia, described by the team as a labour of love from many contributors. Mehn and crew hope the trailer will put the industry and community “in the mood” for FMX’s conference sessions.

FMX 2026 in context

FMX (short for Film & Media Exchange) is widely and rightfully regarded as Europe’s most important conference for animation, VFX, games, interactive and immersive media. Each spring, international professionals and students gather for FMX’s mix of presentations, panel talks, workshops, master classes, and company showcases. The “FMX Forum” complements the main conference with a marketplace, a recruiting hub for studios looking for talent, and a “School Campus” where media schools present their programmes and student projects, making FMX a major industry crossroads.

For 2026, FMX marks its 30th edition. According to what the Animationsinstitut announced with the trailer, part of the event’s spirit will involve a nod back to its roots and perhaps a forward-looking “road ahead.”

The post New Trailer walks FMX 2026 home first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

The legendary FMX conference will celebrate its 30th edition from May 5 to 8, 2026 in Stuttgart, Germany. Founded in 1994 by Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg, FMX has evolved from a student event into one of (or even THE) the world’s leading gatherings for professionals in animation, visual effects, realtime graphics, and digital media.

The 2026 edition runs under the theme “The Road Ahead”, a nod to both the conference’s anniversary and the industry’s perpetual motion. According to FMX organisers, the event will explore transformation in creative production, from AI-driven workflows to new collaborative models, all while honouring three decades of digital artistry and technical ingenuity.

From “Jurassic Park” to Generative Pixels

The first FMX took place in the wake of Jurassic Park’s CG revolution and just before Toy Story hit theatres. Thirty years later, the creative toolbox has shifted from Silicon Graphics workstations to neural networks, but the mission remains: connect artists, engineers, and educators in a space where future workflows are debated and occasionally demystified.

FMX’s organisers call this anniversary “an opportunity to honour the past, survey the present, and discuss the future of digital media creation.” The quote of choice for 2026 comes from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: “Our task is not to predict the future, but to make it possible.” In other words: no crystal balls—just solid pipeline design.

On Site, Online, and Still in Stuttgart

FMX 2026 continues the hybrid format introduced in recent years: three days on site in Stuttgart’s Haus der Wirtschaft, followed by one exclusive online day for remote sessions. The organisers promise “brand-new and first-hand tech and innovation” as well as discussions around AI, global production pipelines, and sustainability in digital media—though detailed programme announcements are still pending at press time.

If past editions are any indication, attendees can expect a mix of production breakdowns, realtime showcases, and a steady supply of caffeine-fuelled networking. Also, if you plan to attend: book your hotel early. By the time the keynote titles are announced, Stuttgart tends to run out of beds.

A History in Motion

From Jurassic Park to Avatar, from Toy Story to Fortnite, FMX has mirrored the evolution of film and interactive media. It has hosted artists and technologists from across the world, reflecting how postproduction and visual storytelling have adapted to every new wave of technology.

The 2026 key visual, titled “Bus Buddy”, comes from the FMX trailer produced by Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg, another annual tradition that gives the event its visual identity. The trailer itself will be unveiled on FMX’s online channels soon.

Save the Date, Seriously

FMX is a calendar fixture for many in postproduction, VFX, and realtime graphics. Hitting its 30th anniversary is both a reason to celebrate and a reminder that, yes, we’ve all been rendering frames for quite a while now.

So: mark your calendars, Stuttgart, May 5–8, 2026, and prepare for another round of technical talks, production insights, and the occasional philosophical debate over whether Pixels can actually “have a soul”, and if “color is real” while standing atthe Schlesinger or Maritim Bar. Just random examples.

And if the last three decades of FMX have taught us anything, it’s this: the tools will keep changing, but the coffee machine will always be there.

The post FMX Turns 30 in 2026 first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

When I opened the TD Meetup 21, I asked a simple question: “Why talk about virtual reality again?”

A few years ago VR was everywhere – headsets, conferences, demos, hype – but it quietly faded into the background when projects stalled and the novelty wore off. At the same time, I’ve seen steady progress: VR now serves as a practical, cost-saving tool for architecture, design, visualisation and increasingly for our industry of VFX and animation.

I recall first meeting Dan Franke (Instagram) at the FMX 2025, where his VR artworks reignited my interest. His work in Quill VR showed that virtual reality can be more than a viewing device; it can be a creative environment. For previsualisation, VR allows directors and supervisors to plan set extensions and camera movement directly inside a 3D world. For artists, it allows sculpting and painting in a space that feels natural, intuitive, and immediate and for audiences, it redefines immersion, especially in documentary or experiential content such as the Fukushima 360° recordings. My goal for the evening was to let Dan demonstrate that potential in action and to remind our technical community that VR is not gone – it has simply grown up.

Who Is Dan Franke – From Student to VR Pioneer

Dan traced his path from his days as a CG generalist sculpting aliens in ZBrush, to discovering his passion for direction and storytelling. During his studies at the Animationsinstitut, he created a 2D short film that confirmed his interest in animation. Later, as a co-director on the children’s series Petzi at Studio Soi, he learned the realities of production management and communication. Dan described that time with a laugh: “I was a student with imposter syndrome, surrounded by world-class animators, suddenly telling them what to do.”

That experience taught him not only humility but also efficiency. Big projects require coordination, teams, and budgets – luxuries students rarely have. So he began searching for tools that could give him independence, something that let a small team or even a single artist, produce complex animation on their own terms.

The Moment Dan Discovered Quill

Dan’s turning point came when he discovered Quill, then being developed at Oculus Story Studio by Goro Fujita and Inigo Quilez. The tool allowed painting and animating directly in 3D space inside VR. When he saw early demos of artists sketching in volumetric space, he realised he needed to try it.

By coincidence, only a week later Goro came to Dan’s university for the first public Quill workshop. Within two days Dan had learned the basics. One day later he produced his first 3D painting entirely in Quill. He described the revelation: Quill is essentially Photoshop in three dimensions, where you can paint brush strokes that exist in space and then animate them in real time.

Because the Quill community was small at the time, Dan’s early experiments quickly gained attention on Facebook groups and later on Discord. That visibility led to collaborations on major VR projects, connecting him to studios and other artists pushing the same frontier.

Early Projects: Namoo, Tales from Soda Island and Studio Syro

One of Dan’s first significant productions was Namoo, directed by Oscar-nominated filmmaker Eric O. The piece, both a VR experience and a 2D short, was built by a small team that included former Pixar and Disney artists. Dan’s contribution was painting and animating the environments entirely in Quill. Every tree, branch, and memory sequence in Namoo was handcrafted in volumetric brush strokes rather than traditional geometry.

After Namoo, Dan and a collective of Quill artists pitched an experimental concept to Meta: a world built of music, colour, and tiny creatures, inspired by the label Soda Island. Meta funded the idea, and Tales from Soda Island became the first full VR series created entirely in VR. The group formed Studio Syro (Instagram), a distributed studio that operated remotely during the pandemic and didn’t meet physically until years later.

Dan directed the first three of seven episodes, each more technically ambitious than the last. In the beginning, he still thought in 2D, using storyboards and fixed “cameras.” By the second episode, moving through full 360° space, he realised that traditional storyboarding didn’t fit VR storytelling. He had to adapt.

He recalled following Einstein’s quote: “Everyone knew it was impossible until a fool who didn’t know came along and just did it.” Dan chose to ignore established VR conventions and invented his own film language by borrowing timing and rhythm from 2D cinema but applying them in a 3D world.

As production evolved, Studio Syro discovered that Quill could replace much of the previsualisation pipeline. They began creating layouts, camera moves, and storyboards directly in VR. The approach combined storyboarding, animatic, and previs in a single tool, accelerating iteration and improving communication across the team.

Quill Techniques in Practice

When Dan switched to live demonstration mode during the meetup, the chat went silent. We all watched a butterfly appear in front of him – a cloud of brush strokes grouped into parts. He grabbed one wing by its pivot, moved it in real time and Quill recorded the motion. There was no rig, no keyframes, no constraints. Just his hand and the headset tracking every nuance.

He explained that the technique relies on simple grouping and pivot placement: Once you define the hinge point, you can record your hand motions as animation data. The result looks organic because it is organic. Human motion captured directly as a brush movement.

“I animate the wing by grabbing it and rotating it in real time. No rig involved – just grouping and recording my hand motion.”

In another scene, he built a stylised water effect: Creating an empty layer, looping frames, painting fluid motion stroke by stroke and using the grab tool to distort the surface. He described how easy it was to “make it rain” in Quill by simply painting downward strokes and looping them.

Later, he opened visuals from a project for music artist Bad Bunny, showing psychedelic stage graphics created entirely with painted animations in Quill. Clouds, waves, and surreal textures moved fluidly, achieved by layering and distorting rotating spheres and painted strokes. Watching him deform shapes live felt closer to sculpting clay than editing polygons.

Dan emphasised that Quill rewards improvisation. You paint one small detail, duplicate it, rearrange it and soon the space fills into a world. It’s procedural, but handmade. An artist’s version of Houdini logic.

Quill as Previsualisation Tool

To show how Quill functions as a previs system, Dan built a miniature tunnel scene from scratch. He painted simple grey strokes to form walls and ceiling, duplicated them for depth, then added colour and placed a camera. A rough character shape followed; a black silhouette with a stick weapon.

He then activated record mode, grabbed the character, and moved it through the space while looking through the camera view. The animation was recorded instantly. Within seconds, he had a readable scene: The character walks forward, pauses, then reacts to falling rocks that he painted in next. The result looked crude yet expressive enough to read the motion, staging and timing.

Dan pointed out that such iterations would normally require drawing, editing, compositing, and re-timing across several programs. In Quill, it happens in one continuous creative act. That immediacy, he argued, shortens iteration loops and encourages experimentation.

Integrating Quill into the Pipeline

After the demos, Dan addressed a question many TDs were waiting for: How does this fit into existing pipelines? Quill, he explained, can export geometry and animation as FBX, OBJ, or Alembic files. Those can be imported into Maya, Blender or Houdini. Because Quill’s geometry is built from individual brush strokes, the surfaces are not watertight meshes; lighting them directly reveals visible edges. For that reason, Quill output is best used for stylised effects, abstract backgrounds, or reference geometry rather than production models.

Nevertheless, it can serve as an excellent art-direction tool. Effects departments can import Quill volumes as timing and motion references or even as collision shapes for simulations. Dan also mentioned upcoming work on integrating Quill-like tools into Blender via the new Grease Pencil VR prototype. Such integration could make these workflows accessible to more artists and, importantly, open to scripting and extensions.

I added that this is precisely where technical directors come in. New tools often lack the surrounding infrastructure: exporters, optimisers, render bridges. A TD’s role is to evaluate these technologies, write the missing connectors, and make them usable for the rest of the team.

Audience Q&A Highlights

When the Q&A opened, the questions came quickly. One attendee asked how long he can work in VR before fatigue sets in. Dan said it varies widely between people. During his workshops, newcomers sometimes need a day to adjust, but he personally can work ten to twelve hours in Quill without issue. Early in his career he trained himself by playing VR flight games, performing barrel rolls to eliminate motion sickness. Then he laughed and admitted he once fell asleep wearing the headset and woke up still inside the virtual space – a surreal experience he does not recommend.

Another participant asked whether Quill supports painting over live video. Dan explained that you can import footage as layers, remove alpha channels, and paint directly over them. His Arcane reel used this method: He filmed his hands on green screen, composited the footage inside Quill and drew the environment around it.

A third question concerned hardware. Dan recommended Meta Quest headsets, specifically the Quest 2, 3, or lightweight 3S, as ideal for Quill. Even older Oculus Rifts still function, though with poorer optics. He added that Quill runs smoothly on mid-range PCs or even laptops; high-end GPUs are not mandatory.

Finally, someone asked how technical Quill is to operate. Dan described it as “the least technical software I’ve ever used.” With only a few controller buttons to memorise, the barrier to entry is low. Within two days of workshops, most students forget the buttons entirely and focus on creation. But integrating Quill into a production pipeline is another story: Depending on project complexity, a studio may need an import/export script, shaders or performance tools. He recommended that TDs interested in supporting Quill learn basic Python scripting to build these bridges.

Quill in Production Contexts

At that point I asked Dan to imagine returning to Petzi and directing a new season. Would he use Quill purely for previs or even for final output? He replied that for Petsy, Quill would excel in the early stages like storyboarding, layout, animatic, and camera blocking. The advantage lies in speed: Directors can test ideas directly without waiting for new drawings.

For final production, Quill could contribute stylised effects like smoke, rain, splashes, painterly transitions but likely not main characters. The stroke-based meshes show seams under realistic lighting. However, he added that exporting animated Quill volumes as Alembic can serve as perfect guides for effects artists, giving them a timed and shaped reference for further simulation.

I agreed. Productions often struggle to communicate tone and feeling from 2D concept to 3D execution. VR sketching bridges that gap by letting everyone see and feel scale, movement and atmosphere directly. A line drawing leaves room for interpretation; a spatial sketch shows intent.

Reflections and Takeaways

After nearly two hours of live painting, animation, and discussion, I took a step back. Watching Dan work made it clear that Quill sits at a fascinating intersection of art and technology. It reintroduces immediacy to digital production: The artist’s gesture becomes motion, not data entry.

The implications for production are tangible. In early design and previs, VR tools can compress the time between idea and validation. A director or TD can sketch in space, test pacing, iterate on blocking and hand off to layout or animation without traditional bottlenecks.

Equally important, these tools demand new types of collaboration. Technical artists need to connect them to render pipelines, while creatives need to understand what they can ask from them. Quill proves that the two roles of artist and technologist are no longer separate worlds but overlapping disciplines.

What’s Next and How to Join

TD Meetup continues monthly. The next session will tackle Python Challenges, focusing on automation and problem-solving for real production pipelines. If you would like to join future events, visit td-meetup and register. Recordings of previous sessions, including Dan’s full Quill demo, are available on the TD Meetup YouTube playlist.

Dan’s VR Painting Foundations Course is available at vrpaintingcourse.com, where he teaches Quill basics and advanced VR animation techniques. For those wanting to experiment, Quill itself can be found at quill.art, and Meta Quest (Facebook-Login Required?) hardware details are listed at meta.com.

Final Thoughts

The TD Meetup 21 reminded us that VR is far from dead. Tools like Quill demonstrate that immersive creation is not a gimmick but a workflow accelerator. Dan Franke’s live session showed how real-time painting and animation can merge art, direction, and technical design into one fluid process.

As we move into an era dominated by AI tools, his closing comment resonated: VR remains the most human form of digital creation. It captures not the machine’s interpretation, but the artist’s hand. Watching him animate by literally waving his hand in the air, I thought: This is where technology feels alive again.

See you at the next Meetup,
Alex

The post TD Meetup 21: VR, Quill & the Renaissance of Real-Time Storytelling first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Alexander Richter.

When Red One dropped last this year, audiences got get a holiday cocktail of Jumanji-style action (The director was the same – Jake Kasdan), Christmas mythology, and CG hellhounds. Behind the visual spectacle: RISE FX, tasked with bringing a gooey portal system, guard monsters, and an actual magic chicken to life. We caught up with VFX Supervisor Michael Wortmann at FMX2025, to talk creature design, feather grooming in Houdini, and what happens when Krampus goes full-screen. From Atlanta to EmberGen simulations—here’s how RISE tackled 280 shots for Amazon MGM’s festive actioner.

DP: What was RISE FX‘s scope on Red One, and when did you get involved in the project?

Michael Wortmann: RISE came aboard the production during the shoot in Atlanta, Georgia in March 2023. We were tasked with some sequences for the new, secret Amazon christmas movie alongside Sony Imageworks and Rodeo FX. We had already worked with VFX Producer Cari Thomas on Shazam but we never worked with Jerome Cheng, the overall VFX Supervisor of the show. We ended up delivering 280 vfx shots for Red One over the course of twelve months requiring a mix of CG creatures, digital set extensions and a lot of hardcore 2D augmentations.

DP: Red One walks a fine line between Christmas fairy tale and action film. How did that tone influence the visual style and your VFX approach?

Michael Wortmann: We knew that production vfx supervisor Jerome Cheng and director Jake Kasdan had already worked together on Jumanji: Welcome to the jungle so it was clear that they would expect topnotch photoreal vfx work and a colorful phantastical design at the same time. But overall this movie would be a comedy so everything needed to help that and action would not be considered the most important thing.

 
DP: So, how duo you get that “fairyle” style in a story like this? 

Michael Wortmann: For example: the Krampus castle was conceived as a matte painting for the shot when Cal and Jack enter the realm of Krampus. When the second wide shot was added later, we did another matte painting because we never built the whole asset. Iterating the matte painting was straightforward and didn’t require so many rounds, in contrast to the design of the portals. Portals are not a new idea, so we needed to come up with something that would be funny and cool looking at the same time. 

The key requirement was to create something that happens fast because if something is overly complex or too long-lasting it is a) NOT funny and b) hard to read and understand by the audience. We started with the membrane simulation and made it feel gooey, later we refined it by adding ice crystal structures and depth blur. The last step was to foreshadow a bit of what is behind the portal. Our compositor Cintia Coll went through all the steps and then distributed the setup to other artists.

DP: How do you plan and prepare when a sequence might end up being full-CG—even if that’s not the original plan?
Michael Wortmann: Creating a full set or shot in CG is very expensive and time-consuming. As soon as directors or producers know that something is fully digital, they suddenly feel different about it. So we always try to shoot anything and keep it in there, so we might just end up with a 99% digital shot – just out of pure psychology. 

The big difference is when something is planned as digital from scratch it’s a long but more controlled process because it will be designed and relevant data will be acquired. However, if a shot turns from footage to full digital, it’s more likely to not have all the reference we would need. If we are lucky, we can reference a lot from the shot that cannot be used but still might help us get it right. All this factors into the bidding, planning and execution of a given shot. However, I have to admit that this can happen, but it is very rare that a shot is going overboard, and we need to rescue it.

DP: What were the most iteration-heavy sequences in Red One, and how did you manage creative feedback?
Michael Wortmann: The most iterations on Red One happened in character animation, especially the hellhounds and the chicken were a big challenge. When you do character animation the pressure is up because the director will ask for a certain performance and that means your shot is suddenly focussed on in a very different way as if you are doing a wire removal. So both, internal and external review iterations are really high in comparison to other vfx shots because it really needs to be perfect because one shot of bad character animation and the illusion is ruined.

DP: Can you walk us through the guard monsters? What went into designing and animating them?
Michael Wortmann: We received a ZBrush sculpt from the production with a design that was relatively close to the final design. So the first thing was to retopologize the model to make it suitable for rigging. 

Our modeller Marius Pörsel took care of that and also refined muscles, facial details and the porcupine spikes that are growing from the neck like a lion’s mane. After that texture artist Timo Scheu started to build shaders and paint textures based on the hires displacement maps generated from the ZBrush model. 

The tricky bit was to combine subsurface shading for the skin with rhinoceros-like armoured skin parts. As we knew that the hellhounds would only be visible in night scenes we developed shaders for the eyes that would give us nice reflections and even catlike yellow reflections also called Tapetum Lucidum. 

Rigging was rather traditional, we tested Houdini’s skin simulation tools but eventually found that we would not see much at night and the camera distance to the hellhounds. So our rigger Thorsten Schulz took care of this and adjusted the rig based on feedback from our animation supervisor Thorsten Kesse.

DP: We’ve heard tales of “The Chicken”. You must explain.
Michael Wortmann: The chicken in Red One is one of the funniest characters. In the story, the chicken is a bewitched agent of the E.L.F. agency and can be turned from a rubber chicken key ring to an actual live chicken by Callum’s actualizer.

Because of the interaction with the CG hellhounds, it was clear we needed a digital chicken. The director Jake Kasdan even owns chickens himself and sent us video footage of his favourite chicken, which is called Ellen.

We used Ellen as reference but, as Ellen is of brown colour, we had to make her white eventually because the brown colour was cancelled out by the blue night colours. Our FX artist Luca Schippmann used Houdini’s new set of feather tools to groom Ellen. This required a lot of development time as the tools were new. Ultimately, we could simulate all feathers and render Ellen with feathers made from curves, which allowed for the closeup shots we needed.

DP: What was the most unexpected challenge during the show—something you couldn’t have planned for?
Michael Wortmann: I think the biggest challenge was Krampus. When we were confronted with the Krampus sequence and briefed on the work, everybody was a bit concerned if we could pull this off. The approach was to rotoscope the Krampus character including fur and hair from the plates, scale him up and digitally recreate the areas that were missing in the plates now. 

We decided that we could do this, and after we completed the first couple of shots we became more confident. The shots turned out beautiful because we had nearly no chroma keying going on and everything looked great from the beginning as in the provided plates. There were a lot of test screenings, but for the biggest part this didn’t affect our part of the work.

DP: What kind of tools or workflows did you use to prepare for test screenings?
Michael Wortmann: For the first test screening, we worked completely on Quicktime proxies. We made sure to set everything up in a way that we could refine match moves and roto we created for this. However, this doesn’t always work – so we had to redo some work later on the high-res plates.

DP: Any clever uses of real-time tools or GPU-based solutions—like EmberGen?
Michael Wortmann: We used GPUs for simulating the storm clouds in Embergen. It seemed like a good test case as we never used it before in production, and because our clouds needed a lot of detail but not a very complicated behaviour or interaction we gave it a shot.

When we had our voxel cache VDB files we found it was nearly impossible to render in Karma, our standard renderer in Houdini, so we tested rendering on GPUs as well using Karma GPU. This gave us the power we needed, but there were still some limitations at that time when it comes to AOVs, deep output and image resolution constraints of which I believe most are fixed by now.

DP: What’s your approach to making sure “annoying shots” don’t end up in the final cut?
Michael Wortmann: This is not really an option. If we face a shot or briefing that seems not doable, we start a discussion about it and offer options to satisfy our client’s needs. “No” is not really an option…

DP: How do you adapt when today’s final delivery deadline is also… for Netflix?
Michael Wortmann: This has hardly changed, we still deliver ACES Linear EXRs that contain enough range for HDR grades. It’s more likely to work in 4k now than some years ago, but this is not really a problem.

DP: What good resources or tools were essential in your workflow—and which would you recommend to others?
Michael Wortmann: We have a lot of custom tools for our pipeline which starts with our own database Risebase and continues through all departments with customizations for Nuke, Houdini and OpenRV. These help us get through these big shows and are tailored for our needs more than any software we could buy.

DP: Can you tell us what’s next for you or RISE FX—if it’s not under NDA?
Michael Wortmann: I recently wrapped work on Michael Ende’s Momo, a really cool project that I supervised completely including the shoot, coming to theatres later this year.

The post Rise FX saves christmas? first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

But before we get to see excerpts from the film at the lectures, we sat down with director Pascal Schelbli and VFX supervisor Marc Angele and let the story of “The Beauty” drift past us. And if you want to see the whole film in advance, you can find it here in full length on the Filmakademie’s YouTube channel: is.gd/filmaka_beauty

DP: What has happened to the film since Animago 2019, where “The Beauty” won the Jury Prize?

Pascal Schelbli: The film has had an incredible festival tour. In addition to countless awards such as the Young Directors Award in Cannes and the VES Award in LA, it won the Student Academy Award that crowned everything. This attention has certainly played into the hands of the online release and the film has also been doing the rounds on the net. In addition to the fact that the film generated orders for us freelancers, we also made some very interesting contacts from all sectors.
Marc Angele: It’s really great what we were able to experience with the film. A lot of people have now seen it, especially in our industry. People keep asking me about it and I’m always surprised where it’s been seen. Personally, however, the highlights for me were the Visual Effects Society Award and Animago. We were able to experience these two awards live, before Corona. The fact that we can now also be FMX trailers is of course mega!

DP: If you were to make the film again, what would you change?
Pascal Schelbli: I think we would have done everything in Houdini, including rigging and rendering. But we were both very much at home in C4D at the time and that’s why we brought everything together there.
As the film mainly takes place below the surface of the water rather than above it and the scenes each consist of a light source that is refracted by the surface of the water and hits the objects, there’s not much new in terms of rendering, apart from more powerful CPUs and GPUs. However, the last shot with the waste could have been made a little easier. For example, lidar scanning could have been used to scan the rubbish on site with a mobile phone instead of having to illuminate all the objects in the studio and then run it through the rather complicated photogrammetry process at the time. This would have allowed us to generate more assets more quickly and then simulate them completely. This would have saved us one of three shooting blocks. On the other hand, the power of real filmed material should not be underestimated.

Marc Angele: Basically, there aren’t that many things that I think we would do differently today. As Pascal has already said, back then we rendered everything in Cinema 4D with Arnold. Today, I would definitely do it in Houdini. Sometimes we had quite a lot of problems transferring all the attributes from Houdini to C4D. This was particularly difficult with the flip-flop swarm. We had to come up with a few workarounds. Even just getting the velocity cleanly to Arnold via C4D was not easy. I still think Cinema 4D is a great tool and it has simplified a lot of things, but managing things like that was pretty time-consuming back then. What’s more, we would certainly have replaced or added one or two tools today. I would rather do it with Renderman today, but that’s just a matter of taste.

DP: When was the last time you went diving? And what stuck to your fins?
Pascal Schelbli: The last time I actually dived with a tank was in St Malo in France during our last filming block (2019). Of course, I’ve been snorkelling here and there in Switzerland or Italy, but it’s not comparable to such a fascinating underwater world that you can dive into for an hour. I’m thinking about becoming a “rubbish diver”. They volunteer to clean up the lakes and rivers in Switzerland once a year.
But yes, who would have thought when I got my diving licence in Belize in 2013 that I would need it for my graduation film. And I think that’s what stuck with me. At some point, The Beauty was a thought in my head and became a finished product and it’s incredibly motivating that you can create something “tangible” from ideas and reach people in the form of images or films.

DP: The models still look great – how did you design the animals?
Pascal Schelbli: I can’t give you an exact number, but there were definitely a few rounds. It all started with a picture of a ray with a flip-flop flap on its back. Then came the moray eel, which was finalised very quickly. With the whale I had tried different types of bottles, with the bag the decision was with or without tentacles, the pufferfish almost ended up being a detergent container and the straw was first given a seahorse fin.

Marc Angele: “Realising Pascal’s designs in 3D was quite tricky, especially with the transparent creatures. We first had to find out how everything would behave underwater in order to model it correctly. The transparencies weren’t easy to create either.
We went round and round to find out which areas should be opaque or transparent so that the character and its expression could still be easily read. This was particularly difficult with the pufferfish. We decided to make the upper part a little more opaque and yellowed so that its face could be recognised at all. So every creature had its difficulties. The challenge with the whale was to find the right scale for the textures. A whale is huge, but the textures should look like a small PET bottle. It took us 2-3 versions to get that right.

DP: And how did you decide which combinations of creatures and rubbish you wanted to create?
Pascal Schelbli: After googling pretty much all existing plastic parts and known sea creatures and trying to combine them, the ones that made it into the film were the most exciting combinations.

DP: And with the moray eel, were you able to simply throw the tyre structure onto the surface?
Pascal Schelbli: No, unfortunately it wasn’t that easy. However, the moray eel was pretty straight forward and the first object that was finished. In terms of art direction, there wasn’t that much to do here either, as my character designs were actually already very detailed and we shot reference images of each creature underwater.

Marc Angele: From a lookdev point of view, the moray eel was by far the easiest creature. Fynn Grosse-Bley, our modelling artist, had already worked in a lot of detail. All I had to do was brush a bit of dirt on it and tweak the shader a little. However, the moray eel had the biggest appearance in our film with five shots and was therefore not easy for rigging and animation. Noel Winzen, our Creature TD, really got stuck into it.

Noel Winzen: The biggest difficulty in rigging was the complex movement pattern of a moraine. The undulating movement had to remain as “art-directable” as possible, which is why a procedural solution was not an option for us. At the same time, the movement could not simply stop when all controllers had reached the end of the moraine. The solution was to create a setup in which the controllers are position-unbound, so the order of the controllers doesn’t matter and in this way we could simply guide each controller back to the beginning as soon as it reached the end. From a technical point of view, this meant that we could find the next point (u-value) on the spline for each controller and use this 0-1 value to control a colour ramp, whose colour output could then in turn control the rotation or translation. We were also very lucky to discover and film a real moraine during our shoot. Using this footage, we were able to re-animate the movement of the moraine one-to-one and see if we needed to make any improvements to the rig. In the final film, we reduced the wave-like movement again to give the impression that the moraine was made of a rubber tyre material.

DP: The whales and the puffer fish have transparent materials under water – how did you manage to make them realistic?
Marc Angele: Texturing and shading was one of the most difficult tasks of the project. Under water there is a different IOR for materials than in the air, so all reflections behave completely differently. For example, a surface underwater reflects 100 per cent from a much steeper angle, so the Fresnel effect is much more visible. Fortunately, we took a lot of reference material with us when we were filming in Egypt and were able to observe the effects very well.
In the end, however, we didn’t quite stick to the physically correct values, as our viewing habits are different and the resulting effects would probably have confused the viewer. When modelling, however, we absolutely had to stick to reality. After a lot of back and forth, we realised that we couldn’t fake too much in the shader. The models really had to be modelled exactly as they would be in reality – double-walled, for example. For the pufferfish, we modelled a geo for each bubble, which was given an IOR for air. This allowed us to precisely control each element in the shader. However, the additional geo didn’t really make the simulation of the inflation any easier.

DP: And the rendering was a challenge?
Marc Angele: Once the creature had been textured and shaded for the first time, the effort involved in the individual scenes was no longer so great. In the beginning, we created a light rig to simulate the underwater world with sufficient control. The rig consisted of a water surface with wave displacement, an HDRI sky that only lights up above the water surface, a lot of environment fog below the water surface, a directional light for the sun and a light with a caustic texture for the typical water effects. We shot the Caustic Texture in Egypt on the bottom of the pool of our hotel, which later became one of the most important assets.
We were able to simply apply this light rig to all scenes, make a few adjustments and render directly. The rendering itself took very different lengths of time. The scenes with the transparent creature took a very long time because we had to turn up the ray depth extremely high. The other scenes were rendered fairly quickly. All in all, it was easy to handle because we have a great infrastructure at the Film Academy with a huge render farm.

DP: The flip-flop swarm was certainly a simulation marathon with the art direction of “Fish Behaviour”. What was your approach?
Lukas Gotkowski: The flip-flop swarms were created in Houdini. We created point clouds in 3D space and used vector fields to move and align them. These fields were generated in such a way that they depict the movement patterns of a school of fish. The movement of the particles could be customised with additional parameters to change the speed or size of the individual small shoals. In this way, we were able to manipulate the movements not only realistically, but also with artistic control. After creating the simulation, several models of the flip-flops were attached to the particles to transfer the position and orientation of the particles. In addition, further variables that were helpful for shading – e.g. size and colouring – were distributed to the points. The data was output using the Arnold exporter (*.ass files) so that it could be prepared as flexibly as possible for Arnold in any software package.

DP: As water is always complex, how was the exposure – especially the sunlight that “illuminates” parts of the flip-flop swarm – achieved?
Pascal Schelbli: We filmed the pool water from the hotel where we were staying during our shoot and used it as a gobo. As I said, “The power of the filmed material”.

Marc Angele: We used the same light rig in the flip-flop scenes as in the other scenes. Here, however, it was very important to turn up the environmental fog a little. This is the only way to create a certain depth in the room and make the swarm look big and powerful. As a side effect, this also created more god rays in the volume, which resulted in beautiful variations due to the movement of the swarm.

DP: The animation of the underwater creatures is the centrepiece of the look: what were the differences in approach for you in order to achieve the necessary realism?
Pascal Schelbli: I think I’m speaking on behalf of both of them here, but I think what saved our butts was that we shot an underwater reference of all the materials. I also think that the turned backplates also contribute to the realism. Keyword bags: The challenge was that the geo moves “crumpled” to the animation and that could be solved a little more elegantly nowadays. We used Vellum to create a cloth simulation and generated the crumpling through displacement.

Marc Angele: Yes, I can only emphasise what Pascal says. The references were simply worth a lot! Personally, it was also extremely helpful for me to dive myself and see the underwater world with my own eyes.

I hadn’t realised before how many particles were floating around in the water and how short visibility is – keyword: environmental fog. Or just observing all the Fresnel effects underwater was very helpful for later understanding. Of course, we used the internet and the BBC series “Blue Planet” to help us visualise the movements of the individual animals. So to summarise: references, references and references.

DP: If we look at the entire pipeline: Looking back, where could you have worked “easier” or changed the order?
Pascal Schelbli: We didn’t have a pipeline. (Laughs) But now I almost only work with one and, looking back, we could probably have been a lot more efficient. Marc has become a pipeline pro in the meantime and thanks to him we always had our server in order. But he can definitely say more about that.

Marc Angele: Haha, yes, it wasn’t quite as bad as Pascal says. We already had a small pipeline that loaded all the tools correctly and made sure that the render farm didn’t do any rubbish. But of course, today we would automate a lot more and use production management tools to get a better overview of the whole project. Maybe then we would have finished a bit more efficiently and faster. But The Beauty only had 15 shots, so it was doable without a big pipeline.

DP: And if we look at the experiences from “The Beauty”, what tricks and experiences do you still use today?
Pascal Schelbli: From a director’s point of view, definitely the preparation! Yes, this is sometimes difficult in the industry as a freelancer for reasons of time and money, but a detailed animatic with elaborate designs and precise references is much more effective than, for example, describing the film/product in words.
I still find the combination of documentary material and VFX a very exciting form of storytelling, as you manipulate an obviously unadulterated image with 3D elements. Quasi deep fake in a creative way.

Marc Angele: With this project, we were able to take a lot of time to take a closer look at something, learn new technical approaches or simply push an iteration further. I still benefit today from the knowledge I acquired during that time.
Because we had enough time, we were also able to organise two reshoots, which really improved the quality of the shots. Unfortunately, there’s rarely time for such things in everyday working life, so I wish I had more time for quality in almost every project.

DP: Where would you take the theme if you were to make “The Beauty 2”?
Pascal Schelbli: Sustainability was and still is very important to me and I also have a new film about sustainability in the post.
The idea of combining two things is nothing new per se, but if I were to choose a similar theme again that could work under the same guise, it would be groundwater pollution from pesticides and microplastics: frogspawn with polystyrene beads or algae made from nylon threads perhaps.

DP: How long did you work on the film and how big was your team?
Pascal Schelbli: It took us 20 months from the first sketch to the finished film. When the idea and the “story” came up, we had a great team of friends who joined the crew: David Dincer, who studied image design, specialised in the course of his studies to become an excellent underwater cameraman. It was then clear that we would actually shoot it and not do FullCG. Marc Angele supported the project right from the start and brought excellent shading, lighting and compositing skills to the table. They were joined by Noel Winzen, an animation and rigging genius like no other, Lukas Gotkowski, the Houdini magician, Fynn “ZBrush” Große-Bley, Aleksandra Todorovic and Tina Vest, who produced this elaborate project, and of course Alexander Wolf David and Robin Harff, who also gave us goosebumps on the audio level.

TEAM

Director & Concept: Pascal Schelbli
VFX Supervisor: Marc Angele
Producer: Tina Vest, Aleksandra Todorovic
Creature TD: Noel Winzen
TD: Lokas Gotkowski
Underwater Cinematography:
David Iskender Dinçer
CG Artists: Pascal Schelbli, Marc Angele,
Noel Winzen, Fynn Große-Bley,
Lukas Gotkowski
Editing: Pascal Schelbli
Grading: fatrat Colour Grading
Voice Over: Charlie Gardner
Film music: Alexander Wolf David,
Petteri Sainio, Meike Katrin Stein
Sound Design & Mixing: Robin Harff
Production company: Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg GmbH

filmakademie.de
is.gd/filmaka_beauty

DP: Where has the team ended up in the meantime?
Pascal Schelbli: I’ve moved back to Switzerland and work here as a freelance director and 3D artist. I’m part of a collective called PULK, which consists of similar creatives. Marc and I have already done a few advertising jobs together and, as already mentioned, are working on a new film together.

Marc Angele: I now live in Berlin and Zurich and am also self-employed. Sometimes I work directly for clients and agencies on my infrastructure, but I also often freelance for a few big London VFX houses. Most of The Beauty team are now freelancers, which I’m personally really happy about as it means we’re always working together.

After training as a graphic designer, he developed into a motion designer/CG artist. He directed various corporate films and broadcast openers and then began his studies at the film academy, which he completed with “The Beauty”. Today he works as a freelance director and CG artist in Zurich. pascalschelbli.ch

Marc is a CG and VFX supervisor in Berlin and Zurich. He studied Animation & VFX at the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg and graduated with the film “The Beauty”. He also loves working on set and has experience on over 60 different sets. marcangele.ch

The post The Beauty first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg.

Still not enough? We test the “Stable Release” from Cascadeur, play hands-on with an RTX 4090, Graden Remote with Colourfront & Pharos, test Creation FX and see whether Insta360 version 3 is finally “good”. We also talk about dinosaurs, Omniverse, Daniel2 and dinosaurs. Is that enough to get you out of hibernation?

Trash, Dance & Robots: What’s the story behind the tin mate on the cover? It’s a first-semester (!) project at the HFF – and there’s a lot behind it! A robot invites you to dance. (S. 128)

DP is looking for colleagues!

Do you have ideas about which stories are still important for every issue of Digital Production? Are you tired of the daily grind of production and want to tell stories instead? Then send me your application – DP is looking for an editor! Mail to: ichwillkatzenbilder@digitalproduction.com

The post Digital Production 2023, the second! first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

In nuce: In a study worth reading, the Animation Institute of the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg reports on virtual production – and how it can be used to realise sustainable film projects. The title of the paper is “Green Screens, Green Pixels and Green Shooting”, outlining in four informative pages how modern film productions can focus on sustainability.

Research question of the study: Can VFXs be produced more sustainably thanks to new technologies? To answer this question, the authors of the study contrasted two comparable productions: A traditional offline post-production and a virtual production with an LED wall.

The initial situation: According to the study, several recent reports show how conventional film productions affect the environment. The average CO₂ requirement of current feature film productions is estimated at 2840 tonnes. However, according to the study, visual effects and their impact were not taken into account. The Animationsinstitut study is primarily based on the Screen New Deal.

Comparing two approaches: As knowledge about the sustainability of virtual productions is currently thin on the ground, the authors of the study decided to compare two different approaches to film production: A production with commercially available offline rendering and industry-standard post-production, contrasted with a production with LED walls and in-camera visual effects (ICVFX).

Object of the comparison: In order to investigate the environmental impact of a film production, two Filmakademie productions were compared with each other: the offline production “Sprout” (2019) and the virtual production “Awakening” (2021). “Awakening” was part of a set extension workshop for Film Academy students, in which students get to know the different film departments.

Turning the focus – and the wheel of time? Will blue and green screen soon be a thing of the past in terms of production technology?

Production No. 1 – offline production “Sprout”: In this production, most of the energy consumption was used for offline rendering and post-production. Here, the traditional green screen was used in post-production. The study states: “The studio shots were realised in two days. The production comprised eight shots with a total of 3233 frames, including VFX.” It goes on to say: “The average render time was between 40 minutes and up to two hours.”

How much (wo)manpower was required for “Sprout”? The study says that the pre-production of “Sprout” took 100 man-days (eight hours per day), while the subsequent post-production was completed within 300 man-days. A person-day is made up of eight person-hours. The so-called person-hour measures the average performance of a person within one hour. A total of five students were involved in pre- and post-production.

How much electricity was consumed during offline production? All in all, “Sprout” consumed a total of 5073 kilowatt hours of electricity, 4% of which came from pre-production, 13% from post-production, 79% from offline rendering and 4% from the electricity required for the displays.

Sprout (2020) | VFX Breakdown

Production No. 2 – LED wall production “Awakening”: Instead of the frequently encountered green screens, “Awakening” used curved LED walls as part of a virtual production. The authors of the study measured “Awakening” with eight shots, which totalled 8898 individual images. In terms of workload, seven students were involved in the pre-production for five weeks, and six students were responsible for the post-production for a period of five weeks.

How big was the (wo)manpower of “Awakening”? Six people were involved in post-production for five weeks, resulting in a consumption of 504 kWh. The authors point out that one might have expected a lower figure for ICVFX, as it is generally understood that in-camera visual effects are those that are recorded on set and do not subsequently require post-production.

How high was the power consumption of the LED wall production? The authors of the study estimate the total power consumption for the LED wall production at 1594 kilowatt hours, of which 37 % was used for pre-production, 31 % for post-production, 10 % for the displays, 19 % for the LED wall, 1 % for LED wall rendering and 2 % for offline rendering.

In their conclusion, the authors of the study came to the conclusion that a virtual production can consume around three times less energy than an offline rendered production. The authors therefore consider virtual production to be a sustainable and environmentally conscious production technique. However, the authors emphasise that they are not giving a clear vote in favour of virtual production, as it is “not a solution for all aspects of film production”. At the same time, however, it should be seen as a valuable option that presents environmentally friendly and sustainable solutions.

Click further: You can read the entire study in either German or English. Click on the links to find out more about the Film Academy, its animation institute and its research activities. Prospective students can find out everything they need to know about the Ludwigsburg university’s training programme in our article “Filmakademie: Auf zum Studenten-Oscar?”, printed in the print edition DP 03 : 2021.

The post The Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg researches sustainable filmmaking first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Patrick Poti.

In addition to our own animago “Jury’s Prize” 2019, the diploma film The Beauty , created at the Animation Institute of the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg, is going on a trophy dive: The short film was recently honoured in Los Angeles with a VES Award in the category “Outstanding Visual Effects in a Student Project”. The team directed by Pascal Schelbli(VFX Supervisor: Marc Angele, Animation: Noel Winzen, Producers: Tina Vest, Aleksandra Todorovic) beat three other nominated student productions. You can findall the winners of this year’s VES Awards here.

The Beauty Making-Of in the DP 19 : 06

In The Beauty, the Animationsinstitut team takes us on a ‘deep dive’ into a rather uncomfortable part of the world. However, beautiful images and sounds from the depths of the oceans can be seen and heard – consisting of shoals of flip-flops, coral reefs made of plastic cutlery and straws, plastic jellyfish and bottled whales. You can read all the details about the realisation in our article from DP 19 : 06 here for free.

Further information: To the website of the animation institute

The post The Beauty wins VES Award first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg.

For this special occasion, the FMX team is preparing a birthday present for the audience – packed with talks, presentations, workshops and forum partners presenting the latest projects from the fields of animation, effects, games and immersive media. Volker Engel (CEO Uncharted Territory), Regina Pessoa (animation filmmaker) and Steven Appleby (artist and author) can be announced for FMX 2020. The FMX ticket shop at www.fmx.de will also open on 10 January 2020.

FMX 2020 theme Imagine Tomorrow

For its 25th anniversary, FMX has adopted the theme Imagine Tomorrow. Based on this, it will present innovative workflows and tools and invite speakers to share their visions for the future of the media and entertainment industry – from abstract concepts to clearly defined strategies – with the audience.

How can ideas develop into intellectual properties? How can the Uncanny Valley be overcome so that digital characters can no longer be distinguished from real people? The merging of artistic and artificial intelligence will also become a relevant topic for the future. Technical challenges such as the linking of physical and virtual production as well as business-relevant topics such as the development of new distribution channels will also be discussed.

In all its presentations, FMX will take a look at the entertainment experiences of the future – both in front of and behind the scenes. There are no longer any limits to presentation possibilities in the media sector. How can media professionals utilise this freedom for a better future?

VFX pioneers and animated filmmakers

Volker Engel (President Uncharted Territory, VFX Supervisor, Film Producer) has been involved since the first edition of FMX in 1994. After studying animation at the Film Academy, he was supervisor for the groundbreaking visual effects in the blockbuster Independence Day, for which he received an Academy Award. More recently, he worked as co-producer and visual effects supervisor on the sequel Independence Day: Resurgence. For FMX 2020, he will curate the track The Evolution of SFX:

“In the mid-90s, I attended the very first FMX and had a showreel that started with the bold sentence “If you think you can’t do Visual Effects in Germany… think again!”. A quarter of a century later, I am pleased and proud to say that this sentence has long been completely outdated. In Germany, some of the world’s best artists create visual effects to the highest standards in the industry – and at FMX they present their achievements together with their colleagues from all over the world. And true to the motto of the 25th FMX, “Imagine Tomorrow”, they will not only imagine this future, but contributeto a better futurewith their skills and inventiveness .”

Animated filmmaker Regina Pessoa (Ciclope Filmes) will give an insight into her latest film Uncle Thomas: Accounting for the Days, one of the most popular animated short films of 2019. She has received numerous awards for her films, including Kali the Little Vampire and Tragic Story with Happy End, the most awarded Portuguese film of all time. In all her films, Regina Pessoa uses various engraving techniques, from plaster to computer animation, or as she herself likes to say: “from stone to pixel”. When asked about her view of the future, Regina Pessoa replies: “Analogue art is considered obsolete today, but in combination with the technology of tomorrow, it can become invaluable in the future.”

FMX Forum – First confirmations

FMX is delighted to have SideFX as a main partner. The company will offer a workshop and present itself with a company suite. The SAE Institute will offer two workshops. Maxon has booked a company suite. InstaLOD and NuBoyana FX will have stands at the FMX Marketplace. BigHugFX, Boulder Media, Realtime UK, Pixomondo, Scanline VFX and Trixter will be taking part in the Recruiting Hub. The FH Upper Austria Faculty Hagenberg and the ifs international film school Cologne can be announced for the School Campus.

Tickets

Tickets can be purchased in the FMX ticket shop at www.fmx.de from 10 January 2020.

Further information: To the official website of FMX 2020

The post FMX 2020 Imagines Tomorrow first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.