WalkingMills

Welcome

2008-08-17T13:16:00.000-07:00

Welcome to my Portfolio. Here you will find different examples of my working skills. Beneath there are my posts in chronological order. On the right side you will find a column of links representing my CV and below you will have some specials and illustrations sorted thematically.

I am working as Animation-Director in an Online Advertising Agency in Düsseldorf. Here I'm doing Visual Development, Storyboarding, Illustration and Flash-Animation for Online-Ads and Microsites.

I hope you enjoy your tour through this site and I'd appreciate it if you leave a comment. Thank You!

The Runnin'GeGG

2008-08-17T07:39:00.000-07:00

smoox until now

2008-03-15T10:50:00.000-07:00

going online @ planetactive

2008-03-15T10:49:00.000-07:00

Then I had the chance to get into the world of online advertisement. At planetactive, an online-advertising-agency in Düsseldorf, now part of neo-ogilvy, I started as a trainee, doing illustrations for ads and microsites. I got into different dtp-applications like Photoshop, Image Ready, illustrator and Freehand and I learned to do Flash-Animation. I was there for about 20 months and these are some of the things I did there:

some of those images are concept-layouts and part of visual development and have not been launched as seen.

Koffergeschichten

2008-03-15T10:48:00.000-07:00

For JEP (Jürgen Egenolf Productions) in Cologne I made a classical storyboard for a 2D-children tv-show called "Koffergeschichten" which means "The suitcases histories" in which a suitcase (a character of the Rudi Rabe-show) is part of historic events. In this case he was the companion of Whimsical Walker, a clown at the age of queen Victoria:

here are a view pages of the board:

At the VW-Autostadt

2008-03-15T10:47:00.001-07:00

Then I had a little job for planb-media (now part of mindmatics). The purpose was to produce a christmas-motion-ride for the simulator at the theme park of VW. The Art-Director was Bolle Bollmann who now owns the daywalker-studios. So for the presentation we went to VW in Wolfsburg with the Volvo of plan b. After the presentation I took a little tour through the theme park and had one of the famous factory-homemade currywursts - very fine :)

I had to do a character-design of Santa Clause. I thougt he should be more of an originary nordish type wearing archaic and natural clothes:

on the other hand, he should have a modern slight made out of dark and white chocolate with orange-flavoured spots on it and which doesn't need deers:

But finally they went for the standard Coca-Cola-Version and a nostalgique slight:

no problem

GUM

2008-03-15T08:08:00.000-07:00

My first job I had after I moved to Oberhausen was in Cologne at the GUM-Studios.

GUM means "Gesellschaft für Unterhaltung und moderne Medien" which means something like "Society for entertainment and modern media". Since years they were making the german version of Spitting Image, "Hurra Deutschland", which was very successful in Germany. The idea of doing this was intitiated by Alfred Biolek, an extraordinary and wellknown german talkmaster since the beginning of german talk-shows and tv-cook and the Brothers Andreas and Stefan Lichter. Three years later Stefan took the enterprise to run it on his own. When I came there, they were starting with a 3D-animated serial for TV-Loonland called "Dragons-Rock". For doing things like this, Lichter founded a second studio, which was in the same rooms as GUM, called Tevox. With tevox he already did different small projects for trade-exhibitions. Tevox developed techniques for virtual speakers by motion-tracking. Now they intended to use their experiences to produce a tv-show. When I was at the Trickompany in Hamburg working on Junior they offered their knowledge to produce the Junior-Shows. They made some proofs but didn't succeed. Finally the canadian studio Klik got the deal to do the animation.

So for Dragons Rock they got two directors: Greg Manwaring and Roy Wilson

I was there mainly for storyboarding. But I also did the prop-design and a bit of set-design that have then been modeled by most talented Christoph Gaudl

Here are some results of my work:

After one year of production they stopped it because they got into trouble with the producer TV-Loonland about the property-rights of the Show. TV-Loonland stopped the paiements and GUM locked the doors for insolvency.

The co-producer and german tv-broadcaster SuperRTL showed the first five or six episodes, then they cancelled it and replaced it by "Sponge Bob".

Oberhausen

2008-03-06T21:00:00.000-08:00

In the first week of february 2002, Tahar called me and asked me if I had time for a new job that should start one week later. It was for a 3D-animated feature and my issue was to do the storyboarding. The production took place at triple e in Oberhausen (former HDO = High Definition Oberhausen, a special effects studio financed by the local county government).

I asked, where is Oberhausen? and Tahar said, its a part of Köln.

I arrived there on the 12th of february. And I recognized, Oberhausen was about 80 kilometers away from Köln. Instead it was in the middle of the Ruhrgebiet, between Duisburg, Essen and Mülheim.
I then worked there in the development-department together with Dieter Klapper who was the production-designer and Ulrich Zeidler who was the art-director. On the floor below us where dozens of very talented international 3D-Artist, mattpainters, marquet-builders and our director Peter Claridge. And on the first floor was sitting the girl I felt in love with and the reason why I left Berlin and moved to Oberhausen after the end of the production. The film-title was "tamanana" and it was supposed to be the first german 3D-animated feature entirely done with motion-capturing-technique.

Here is some of my work I did there:

By the way, the production has never been finished because the money was already spent, long before the end of the production. So all that's left are these few scenes:

Youa

2008-03-06T13:04:00.000-08:00

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. Then there were two gay system-administrators, who were employed from Youa as well as the creative director David Maas. 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

Sunnie&Pollie

2008-03-03T10:22:00.000-08:00

El Volcan De Pacaya

2008-03-02T14:09:00.000-08:00

At Upstart I met Christoph Salzmann. He started there as a Trainee. When I was there he was Animo-Operator and began learning compositing-applications like Shake and Combustion. Now he is at the Weta-Studios in New-Zealand as Digital Effects Artist and he was there working on stuff like "The Lord of the Rings", "King Kong" and currently he's working on "Narnia II".

In summer 2000 he and his girlfriend Silvia prepared a holiday-tour through middle-america. They intended to start in december and to voyage for eight weeks. Surprisingly another good friend of mine from Berlin, Klaus, aimed to do the same trip at the same time. He also decided to start his tour in Antigua in Guatemala with a one-week spanish-school. So I came up to join them.

As the time came, we all went to Guatamala then. After a few days of learning, Klaus school (we weren't on the same language-institute) proposed to make a sithtseeing-tour to one of the four volcanos around Antigua: el volcan de pacaya.

We started our climb from a little village at the buttom of the volcano called San Francisco, where our ciceroni were already waiting for us. As I was (and still am) in a not well trained physical condition, my compaignons were already descending while I was still climbing up the volcano. The last person who was passing me on his way down was one of the ciceroni who told me, I should follow him, because soon there will be dark and strong wind and clouds will come up. The volcanos peak was over the clouds.
I said, no problem, I just finish the climb and have a short view in the volcanos abyss and then I will return as soon as possible. So I continued the ascent while the guide was leaving me downwards.

I hit my little spot, thought that it was great and worthed the pain and started immediatly my descent.

But it was to late. By running down, the clouds were already rising and it started to get dark. The view got increasingly worse and I couldn't see the path anymore, that we were coming up. The area was that vast, that it was hard to make the right decision were to go along. I knew it was somewhere down there, I had to go left, but you couldn't see were that was, so I started walking fastly downwards, nearly blind trying to decide to do my leftturn at the right moment. But I passed the path and got too far away from it in the wrong direction. I turned around but didn't know where to go back because all you could see were clouds in the darkness. I didn't either see where the way could end if I continued ascenting, because the clouds and the darkness now were everywhere. So I decided to stay. I sat down on the hanging boulder of the volcano-ashes, tried to hide my face behind a little rock, that was lying beside, to save it from the cold storm that started icing over my body and put one foot on another tiny rock beneath to avoid to glide off into the nowhere. That was at 5.30 pm. in december. The sun would rise at 7 am. So I only had to wait 13.30 hours in the icewind. Great expectations!

Down in San Francisco they were waiting for me for a long while already and my friends got very nervous. So a small team decided to climb back up and to search for me. As they did so for more than an hour, it was impossible to find someone in this vast area and with this bad sightconditions. So they decided to go back to Antigua and to continue the search early next morning with a rescue-team.

I did not know anything about that. I was only thinking about how to survive the night and how I will get from here back to Antigua. Two days ago we met some young guys from Guatemala-City who told us, they intended to camp on one of the four volcanos but they changed opinion because the rumor was taking the round that there were lions and tigers in the area who escaped from a wildlife park and already attacked people. With these thoughts I tried to calm down a bit and waited for the first lights of dawn.

And they came. And it was incredible. I was sitting there nearly on the top of a volcano in the middle of Guatemala watching over the awakening land. Wow!

Wow!

After that i started my descent. As the boulder was very slippy I fell down many times and got blessed all over skidding on my but and knees. But finally I past the first plants, partially burnt from eruptions. From a seared tree i snaped off a small branch and used it as staff. And I felt a little bit like the man from the mountains. The way got greener and the day got warmer and I felt my freezed-out body coming back alive. It became a little jungly and I passed a huge turd. I thought, this one does not look like a donkey's one and so the rumour came back into my mind. But the next problem already kept me to concentrate on: thirst. I hadn't drink for 24 hours and it started becoming a problem. But there was no water around, no pond nor creek. After a while of staggering through the woods i had to sit down very exhausted and despaired. I was close to fall asleep, the sun warmed me and as I hadn't slept the whole night, the fatigue and the dehydrogenation were lurking. I was afraid if I fell asleep now I might never wake up again. So I arised and continued my walk, searching for civilisation and water.

After a few minutes I came to cornfield and I thougt this is my resource. I broke off one cob from shrub and peeled it. But the corns I uncoverd where dried-out and hard. These rare cobs obviously had been left from the last yield. They were inedible and had not one nutritious quality. So I continued my path delirously, when suddenly I reached the back of a little farm. On first sight the farm seemed empty. There was a ton filled with some kind of liquid and there was a tube lying beside of it. I went to the ton, hoped it was rainwater, put the tube into it and suck, so that the water ran out. I layed down and let it flew into my mouth. As I lifted my head two indigene children stood in front of me and as I watched them they turned and ran away. I felt looking like someone who came out of the wilderness, dirty, perished and with a long-grown beard (at least that was the way, they looked at me). I followed them in the house where they covered behind their mothers skirt. I told her my story and asked her if there is somewhere a bus that could bring me back to Antigua. She told me to follow the street and after a few hundred meters there will be a bus stop. From there I should asked again for further informations.

I had to cross the village to reach the busstop. On the way, a young man passed me with a two-liter buttle of coke. To reassure, I asked him, if I was on the right way. He asked me what happened. I told him and he invited me into his house to get something to drink and to repose a bit, while he wants to care for solving my situation. I followed him. His wife was just cooking a soup with some meat and vegetables. They seemed very poor. They had a small and very simple house with two rooms, one to sleep and one to cook and to live in. Outside there was a little garden. In the kitchen on the wall there were pictures from italien tourist places like Lago Maggiore and the young man said, one day he wants to get there and see these fruity beauty places. The meat was obviously the only they had in one month, as well as the coke. I drank half of it. They let me lay down in their marriage-bed. Aide was the bed of their little baby, who was chuckling and mumbling. So I reposed while the young mother was preparing the soup and the young father was making a few phonecalls.

About half an hour later she called me to come to eat. They didn't eat, they were just standing beside me, watching me. So I ate their only meatsoup of the month. It was very tasty.

Totally unexpected the door opened and three bomberos and a journalist came in, asking me if I was the lost german. The whole situation was very hectic, the journalist was taking pictures while the bomberos and rescue-men where checking my health. I had to lay down in the front-yard and the journalist had to take pictures while one of the bomberos was taking rescue-measures at me, grining into the camera, to become the hero of the day in guatemala. Then they put me into their jeep and drove me nearly a hundred kilometers from there through guatemaltequien highlands and dusty serpentines, passing hundreds of little villages where poor barfooted maya-children, chicken and dogs were running behind us. I don't now what was harder, my private waltz on the volcano or this kamikaze-flight to the hospital of Guatemala-City. But the guys were laughing and singing during the whole trip. Finally and seasick we arrived at the hospital. And with this, the most spectacular part of the adventure was over.

Nice to add is: After I got emergenceley supplied, I was sitting across from the hospitals front-door, waiting for my friends (who meanwhile got informed, to pick me up) with a few other people. Some where also waiting to get picked up, some where sitting there since hours as their business, with a begging-cup between their legs. Of course one of them started telling me his lifestory. Which wasn't that uninteresting. His father had big bakeries in North-America, behind the frontier of Mexico. But he preferred his cousin and threw him out of the house, because he felt in love with a girl, his father did not want to except. He could have stayed in las Estados Unidos but he decided to follow his heart.

Then a TV-team came up and asked if I was the aleman perdido en el pacaya. I said yes, and as I wasn't that fluent in spanish, the begger helped me translating, so that we could do an interview. The director of the TV-team was that inspired from the translator and the situation that he proposed a job at the tv-station to the homeless.

I thougt this is a brillant end of the story. At this moment a little bus arrived with my friends in it yelling and shouting for the reunion.

Two days later, we read in the newspaper, that one of the guides who was in the rescue-team crashed on his tourist-climp up to the pacaya and died.

Die Kolonie

2008-03-02T05:44:00.000-08:00

When I was at Clayart, i met Tahar Jaber. He was managing the project I was working on.

Doing this project, we had a lot of fun and bizarre situations to lough at and with that came into a friendly relationship. During this time we often met and talked about animation-business and its sometimes strange intern ways. We had a lot of ideas how to change things for a more effective production and we were thinking about the possibilities of realising great animation stuff by pooling all the talents we knew at this moment and how enthusiastic potentials can produce animation-films with international standards without only abusing the federal aid-system in Germany.

After the production, a few weeks later Tahar disappeared from the surface. I went back to Berlin. Half a year later he resurrected. We met in his flat in Wiesbaden and he told me that he did a lot of research about the growth-possibilities of the animation-market in Germany and that he's thinking seriously about starting a representation for animation-designers. The agency shall be called "Die Kolonie" and he asked me if I like to join it as the creative-consulting part. We smoked another one and I said: "Yes, ..... cool!"

For one year, we had a lots of fun and some serious success. Then I left Die Kolonie for personal reasons.

http://www.diekolonie.com/

The Valley of the Walking Mills

2008-02-28T03:07:00.000-08:00

It says, the term Walking Mills comes from the German word
Walkmühle, which means something like tumbler-mill, i.e.
a mill where large amounts of laundry is tumbled; and which
is the name of the townsite, where i grew up.
But this is not true.
The truth about the valley of the Walking
Mills is the following, told by a tribe called Vembols , who are
living in this valley now since many generations.
I met them one day, when i was trotting around the globe.
This little guy in the header of this page on the left is one of
them. His name is Folm. By the way, the guy on the right is
Mr. Voo. He has nothing to do with WalkingMills and the story.
He just asked if he could appear in the header for personal
selfportrayal reasons. I said, it' s okay because I like him.

So this is the story the eldest of the Vembols told me.

Once there was large beautyful and calm valley surrounded
by harmless welfaring and arboreous hills and sugarloafed
mountains. In the middle was a beautiful lake with water clear
as crystal and sweat as honeywine (what?). The large lushed
meadows smelled puissantly of herbs and flowers.

In this valley were living the walking mills, peacefully.
They were bathing in the lake, eating grass, flowers and herbs
and were sleeping in the sun or the moon when ever they felt
like to. Their children, still light-weighted, were running and
flying around, playing „find the mill“ or „tumble-me“.

But then, one day, from a dark forest, three valleys away in
the north, hundreds of huge, dark and terrifying spirits came
over the mountains and hills and through the trees and destroyed
everything. They hunted and ate the little mills and ruptured
the parents. Nothing stayed alive. Then the spirits left the
totally devastated valley as quick as they came.
For many years the destroyed mills were lying around in the
valley and the vegetation started to cover their stones, bricks
and woods.

One day, the Vembols, until that day a normadic folk, came to
the valley and discovered the ruins. They understood immediatley
what has happened, because the story of the Valley of the Walking
Mills has been told since ages. So they decided to stay and settle down
in the valley to protect the cemetry of the walking mills.
They never touched any of them and left the nature fullfill its purpose.
But they guarded and watched over the valley with eagles' eyes.
They built little turf-huts to live in with their families and while the
wifes and the children were in the village, busy or playing, the men
were standing on the hills, guarding and overviewing the valley,
always aware of a possible return of the dark spirits.

But because of the bravery and courage of the Vembols, the dark
spirits never came back since.

Well, that's it. And it's the truth.

Upstart!

2008-02-27T13:02:00.000-08:00

was one of the finest chapters. http://www.upstart.de/

Here, i was first working as a layout-artist for a new trailer of a children-tv-show called "Rudis Rabenteuer" which means something like "Rudi's raventures", as Rudi is a raven.

After that job they asked me, if i liked to supervize a team of 12 animators, layout- and clean-up-artists for a serial of 5 animated tv-commercial-spots for one of the biggest cellphone-netprovider in germany (now O2). I swallowed and said yes.

The commercials looked like this:

some of the spots here (i.e. the golf-spots) were done before i came by Hansi Helle http://www.hansihelle.de/ and Ulrike Pietsch (now Hofmann) http://www.kawom.de/

Next Stop... Frankfurt

2008-02-27T12:46:00.000-08:00

Then i thought it's time to take my sheets under my arm and take a tour through Germany, to see, what else is there. My first stop was Clayart, a Claymation-Studio in Frankfurt, a division of http://www.scopas.de/ , runned by Thomas Schneider, who came to the west from the east und who knew Nick Park from Aardman. This was already the last stop of my tour and so I stayed and worked as only 2D-Artist on a redesign of the trailer for a german mishap-show.

as life wasn't that digital at this time yet, that's all what's left at the moment:

a Phonecall...

2008-02-27T12:04:00.000-08:00

back in Berlin in January 2000, one morning I had a phone-call by Gerhard Hahn, who is running a big Animation-Studio in East-Berlin. He said he heard of my Junior-Characters. It was early in the morning, 11 am, and i was still in dreams. He asked, if i liked to do some sketches of some characters that shall become the stars of a new tv-cartoon-serial, adopting a video-game.

Some of these sketches were those:

he liked it and he invited me to his studio.

He forgot that i was a trainee at his studio two years ago. I guess, he never knew.

I was sitting on the couch in his office. He brought me some coffee and we were talking about the possibilities of game-characters in cartoon-shows and the future of animation. At this time, they had just started their 3D-Department and were doing some outsourced-job for a munich-based studio, that was working on a 2D-feature-film with 3D-parts in it.

I was working on the game-characters for a month. It didn't worked that well. In some ways, it is strange, to work in his studio. Finally the characters were finished by one of the most talented character-designer at Hahn-Film at this time, Heiko Krischker, himself a follower and padavan of Markus Koch, himself a follower and padavan of Thorsten Kieker. http://www.stenarts.com/

And this is Jane...

2008-02-27T11:56:00.000-08:00

at least, one of the first scribbles...

What time is it...?!

2008-02-27T08:46:00.000-08:00

By the way, it is not, that i'm posting in the middle of the night,
it is that I'm about ten hours away from where the posting-time
is set :)
Where I am, it is 6.00 pm now.

good morning!

The Junior-Characters

2008-02-27T08:34:00.000-08:00

These guys were born in 1999...
... Junior, Jane and Jaz. There were running for a year or so
as inserts between cartoon-shows and commercial-breaks on
a german broadcast-channel called Sat1:

animation-school-hamburg

2008-02-26T14:43:00.000-08:00

then i went to hamburg for 18 months to get qualified as animation-designer at the animation-school-hamburg.

this is the graduated-film i made there in company with Ulrike Barth, Sabine Dubb,
Axel Nicolai and Alexander Tiedke:

The Beginning...

2008-02-26T14:15:00.000-08:00

...is the best way to start.

And I started my animation career in 1997 in Berlin as a trainee, doing stuff like this:

and this:

I still hear my teachers voice saying: "i don't see where the lines go to!" - she was there from london at this time and very experienced and severe. It took me a several times, to finish these turn-arounds successfully...

The Moquats - some drafts

2008-02-26T01:55:00.001-08:00

And here is it, the first picture (of course not the first of my life, but
the first in this blog though).

So to make it more clear I'll seperate time now in B.B. (Before Blog)
and A.B. (Anno Blog) which makes this picture a Picture 1 A.B.
(or to complete : picture 10829 or something B.B. which accidently
equals to my zipcode in Berlin -Schöneberg in 1995 A.D.)

Here we go!

2008-02-26T01:43:00.001-08:00

So this is it then.

this blog shall show a bit of my work to those who are interested in - my portfolio.

Enjoy!