thefoundation

Lighting Design Award for Telekombridge

2011-06-09T09:38:36Z

IALD Radiance Award for lighting design. In cooperation with LICHT KUNST LICHT we designed and animated the video content for the integrated LED installation.

The bridge was constructed due to a lack of options to cross the road to other Deutsche Telekom Buildings. There was no way in several hundred meters for Deutsche Telekom employes in Bonn, Germany to cross the road. A railroad track and a four lane road blocked the way across.
As a result they constructed this pedestrian bridge.

The LED installation is the main visual attraction of the bridge. It has around 444.000 pixels over both sides and uses a very bright LED technology that works during night and day times.
The idea of our video theme was to visualize the energetic connection between both sides. A group of typical Telekom digits makes its way across at a normal walking speed. More and more groups of digits start its way across, coming from both sides. On collision they emit a short flash of energy. Depending on the viewers perspective it may seem as if the digit groups follow the people on the bridge.

From the beginning our goal was not to make this architectural installation to one of the typical advertisement screens. The idea was to make a subtle video content that supports the idea of the lighting design concept.

Video produced by btf

Spardabank Frankfurt Lights Up the Dark!

2009-05-26T22:54:28Z

With Lichtkunstlicht from Bonn, Germany and Stefan Hofmann we worked on the illumination concept for the Spardabank Hessen.

It all began in mid 2007, when I received the request for the production of a facade animation. For us the task was to deliver an animation of about 15 to 20 minutes, to be played back on the new mediafacade.

We received several pixel mapping instructions from BARCO so David could start programming. He developed a script to convert Daniel's and mine animations to the format required by the content player of the facade.

The most important goal was to create a seamlessly integrated animation, with the demand not to work as a advertisement screen, rather than to merge with the architecture of the building.
Due to a resolution of approx. 50 horizontal and 1120 vertical pixels, it was not easy to create the content. The 50 horizontal pixels cover the entire new glass front of the building of about 150meters. The 1120 vertical pixels only cover 5 stories (approx. 20 meters). So we have a very different resolutions across the facade, what made it hard to imagine the final impression, while working on the animations with a computer.
Finally we figured out a pretty fast workflow to preview our animations. We completely rebuilt the building with blender and thus used it to preview our work. We produced several preview animations in advance so we could test the animation before we render them in full resolution.

Mediafacade Project »SPARDABANK«

The Wave Theme

Since our work on the Infinity light ínstallation we thought about creating a wave theme for the bank's facade. The width of the building suited very good for animations on the horizontal axis so we developed several transformations of the wave from more static to more dynamic motions. The size of our screen forced us to slowdown the speed of our wave. The impression of the motions speed on the facade is completely different to that on a computer LCD.
With the wave theme in mind we designed the rest of the animation.

The Goldrain Theme

For christmas time we animated a special goldrain theme. After several test with ourt previz worklflow, we figured out that it was not easy to accomplish. Movement of falling vertical pixels looked boring, so we had to work with 3d particels to create the glittery effect. But finally we managed to create the look we wanted.

Finally we started the video in January 15th, about 2 year after the project began.

More information:

Animation Frankfurt #1
Production Day: Spardabank Frankfurt - Daniel's great article about our second field trip to Frankfurt!

Cheonan Architecture Visualization

2009-01-15T00:01:16Z

With Lichtkunstlicht we worked on an animated visualization of a complex, two layered media facade of a new Galleria store in Cheonan, South Korea.

Daniel, David, Julian and me met at our new production studio in Cologne. We had to complete the project within six days, so we had to start immediately. Fortunately Julian already worked on the 3d model of the building so we didn't lose too much time during our main production phase.

The idea was to previsualize a facade concept of the light design agency Licht Kunst Licht. The architects from UNStudio designed a facade consisting of two layers. Each layer has its own structural bearing so that the facade seems to be transforming while the spectator changes his perspective. LichtKunstLicht's concept was to seamlessly integrate an invisible media facade between the two layers. LEDs, placed on the inner side of the outer facade layer, projected their light onto the milky inner layer. Over the main entrances of the building a high resolution facade is also seamlessly composed into the architecture. There is also a smooth transition between the high resolution and the low resolution parts of the facade.

It was very important for the design concept that the integration of the facade would serve the art of the architecture rather than operating as a screen for information or advertisement.

CHEONAN production team

The final visualization:

Touch Me - Interactive Lights

2008-10-18T23:58:37Z

Visualization for my idea for future architecture lighting. Sensors of any kind can have influence on light mood or even animation.

I created this short video for my portfolio for the KHM. It's an idea on how future architecture lighting could be solved. With sensors placed in the ground in front of a building with a media facade videos can be manipulated by the sensors values.

Here some high res images of the video:
"TOUCH ME" images

The Foundation Showreel 2008

2008-09-21T01:42:13Z

This showreel represents our visual effects and animation work of the past 3 years. It includes 3d work from David and animation and compositing work from Daniel and me.

In April I edited this showreel with nearly all the projects we finished during the past years. From short school projects to recent compositing jobs. It mainly contains non commercial work we did, but work with our most creative output.
I especially thank Jan for his crazy intro sound mix for my title displace animation. Excluded of this showreel are short films and recent projects we are working on right now. I hope to soon find the time to update this showreel because there are several visually interesting projects nearly finished.

Network rendering with After Effects

2008-09-11T22:49:32Z

How to use the outdated methods of Adobe.

I am still sitting here with Daniel and David in this small hotel room in Frankfurt. We have completed an animation for the facade and now we want to render the animation.

Because of the resolution of the facade we animate with a resolution of 7000x1120pixels. And that is a lot of data! After Effects has the option to render only every 20th pixel, but unfortunately this doesn't always work with the used effects. Some effect are relative to the comp size and when you render only every 20th pixel the effects thinks the comp is much smaller and so the effect is different to the big comp size which produces unusable images for us.

So this forces us to render the full frame, every of the 7000x1200pixels. To speed things we now render with two computers, one MacPro and one MacBookPro.

To achieve this you can use the hidden app aerender in the After Effect directory. Here you can finde it:

/Applications/Adobe After Effects CS3/aerender

Aerender is a command line tool to start and control After Effects rendering jobs. You can access everything of your project and set everything up. I actually do not know all the commands and much about using the terminal or other crazy stuff David uses, but I managed to start the rendering :-) . Here is what I did:

I have an animation completed and set it up in the render queue as I need it. Check the Skip existing frames box, when multiple machines render the same image sequence.
Now, don't hit the render button! Just save the project and quit After Effects. It's easies if you only have one pending job in your render queue.
Open the terminal and type:
cd /Applications/Adobe\ After\ Effects\ CS3/
Then type:
./aerender /yourharddrive/projectfolder/project.aep

This renders everything in the render queue as you set it up in the steps before. You can open a second terminal and run the commands again an now you have two instances. When doing this you have to render image sequences, otherwise it won't work. In my case this doubles rendering speed! If you have several computers in your network you can do the same on them.
But for this you have to be sure After Effects has the same file paths on every machine. In this case it is useful to have all your data on a network storage, so you have the same mount point on every machine.

Here you can find Adobe documentation of aerender.

Animating Frankfurt #1

2008-09-10T14:56:53Z

Creating images for a media facade. 2km of cabels and a UMTS internet card in a small three bed hotel room in the middle of Frankfurt, Germany.

Yesterday, Daniel, David and me moved all our stuff to Frankfurt, Germany to proceed with a project we began in 2007. A bank in Frankfurt redesigned their front facade and integrated a grid of LEDs into the glass facade.
So now we are here to animate a video for the facade. The tricky thing about this is the arrangement of the pixels. We have a grid of approx.1100 Pixels vertically and only 49 horizontally on a building that is 6 stories high and 250 meters long. So we have 49 high resolution LED lines on the building. For our animations we have to consider this lack in horizontal resolution.
Daniel and me animate the themes while David is in charge of the correct pixel conversion of the animation and all the connection to the servers we need.

Now we really have to get something to eat! I will add some images soon...