Steep cliffs

First Visual Effects Meeting yesterday afternoon with 3d artists Jan Roth and Stefan Hähnlein and 3d & matte painting artist Marco Wilz. Soon the room filled with pure geekiness and ramblings and murmurs of tech talk, that I better do not recite here.

Marco is a friend of mine since we worked together at Pixomondo in 2006 on the misguided big budget German (anti-)war flick “Red Baron”. It tanked at the box office but it featured great VFX work, thus drew much attention from abroad and placed the young company on the world map. While I finished studies and spent three years to make “Die Farbe”, Marco returned several times to Pixomondo and worked on many high-profile projects, his latest credits feature “Hugo Cabret” (Academy Award for Visual Effects) and “Game of Thrones” (Emmy Award for Visual Effects).

Stefan and Jan are fellow students from university, while Jan spent three years to co-produce and work on “Die Farbe” (and doing smaller stuff to earn his living), Stefan – apart from helping us by creating the decaying mushroom in “Die Farbe” – did freelance work for companies like Scanline in Munich, where he contributed to two big budget German movies, “Wickie und die wilden Männer” and “Hotel Lux”, and most recently to the international spectacle that is “Cloud Atlas”, directed by Tom Tykwer and the Wachowskis.

But enough with the namedropping. What did we talk about? Sorry, but I really can’t tell you. You will see and I hope you will like it. Don’t expect too much, it’s a small team (I will introduce the other VFX artists later) and no one can work on this full-time in the coming months. But I’m quite confident that we will surpass the quality of visual effects you have seen in “Die Farbe” by far. After all I have switched from a single core 4GB RAM to a quad core 16 GB RAM machine in the meantime, yes I did ;)

If you happen to be a VFX artist yourself and you are interested in helping us, please give a shout and provide us some information about your work experience and skills, which programs you use, and also please show us some work examples. We’re especially keen on finding experienced simulation artists for fluids and/or destructions (oops, did I say that?).