thefoundation

1LIVE - Dein Leben Lang

2010-07-16T19:13:28Z

In January the BTF Team produced a two minutes commercial for 1LIVE - the largest german youth radio station

1LIVE - Dein Leben Lang from bildundtonfabrik on Vimeo.

This film was the fastest project we ever worked on. From beginning to public release we only had two weeks. We shot on the RED One and did the editing with Final Cut Pro. Typography and animation was added with After Effect and 3d Studio Max.

The spot on the 1LIVE Website.

Something for the FIFA World Cup

2010-07-16T18:57:17Z

How we created a trailer for the FIFA World Cup in South Afrika!

Some time age in may, a TV guy from the german ARD Sportschau TV show asked us to create a short trailer for the FIFA world cup in South Afrika. He really liked our music video for Wallis Bird, so his idea was to create something with that style.

The idea of trailer was to emphazise the viewers in Germany to participate in the world cup with home made videos they could upload to Youtube. The best were chosen by the editorial department and aired on TV after the matches.

We shot the trailer in three days with our 5d mk2 in our basement studio. We rigged the camera over a wooden table and hooked it to a laptop for a live image preview. Our workflow turned out to be very simple, because there was hardly any compositing involved. Everything you see on the table was animated by our hands. After two days of animating at 10fps we had an image sequence of our animation.

Now the more difficult part began. As you can see there is a smooth camera movement going back and forth. This was created the same way as we did it for the Wallis Bird music video. We back-projected our image sequence on a white screen and placed a tracking grid in front of it. Then we filmed the screen with our animation and thus created the camera movement. After matchmoving the filmed video we placed the virtual camera in After Effects in front of our image sequence. So after that and after creating the rough look with some lens distortion we rendered the final video.

People Involved: Christoph Pietsch
Philipp Käßbohrer
Robert Windisch
Jakob Beurle
Matthias Schulz

The entire gallery

Music Video »Angry Young Man« for Artist »Get Well Soon«

2010-02-25T01:13:46Z

In November and December 2009 the team of the Bildundtonfabrik worked on the new music video for artist Get Well Soon. The outcome is a philosophical piece on mankinds attemps to fight and control nature.

I can't remember exactly how we had the idea, but the visual style of Lars von Trier's Antichrist was definately an important inspiration for us. We saw the movie in a small cinema in Cologne and were amazed about the highspeed shots and the color look of the movie.

Preproduction began in the end of October, while screening Der Tag An Dem Herrn Müller Einfach Nichts Einfallen Wollte on the 32. Biberacher Filmfestspiele on the 31. Filmfestspiele in Biberach. During the days, when there were no films to go to, we brainstormed a lot about the project and finally visited a beautiful forest not far from Philipps hometown. It was that forest that gave us confidence for our ideas.

Back in Cologne we started to tighten everything and began the official production. The were several very difficult decisions to make. One of the most difficult decision was the decision of our production format. Our idea was to shoot on S16mm or S35mm, but our budget was tight and we were thinking about switching to a digital system like the RED. Everyone recommended to shoot digital, but somehow we were not happy with that approach. It took a lot of time and many hours of budget planning, but in the End we decided to shoot on S16mm and S35mm ;-)
The next very difficult thing was our idea to shoot everything on minimum 50-75fps and two special shots on 1000fps. We knew the Phantom HD and the WeissCam, but theses systems are extremely expensive and the film rentals in Cologne couldn't make us a good offer. That was a big problem for us, because the majority of our concept was based around these ultra highspeed shots.
So we began an intense research and found Norbert, a guy specialised on highspeed crash test and nature shots. He supported us with the PCO Dimax camera system, which is basically the same as the Weisscam HS-2, but a little more complicated to use.

Production DAY 1 // Nov. 19

We began with the highspeed shots of the kids and the bird. We built our set in the garden of the KHM and used a backdrop and a bush to let it look like it was in the forest. It turned out to work very well using the printed backdrop. I had some concerns about the color matching later in post, but we had so much color detail in the footage that it worked.
The slingshot shot was a little dangerous, because the actor had to aim directly on the lens of the camera, but we constructed a safety box around the camera and shot through thick glass.

The small packshot set needed a lot of light for the highspeed camera.

Alex in front of the backdrop.

Production DAY 2 // Nov. 20

Day two was our first day with animals at the Wildgehege Hellenthal. It was an about 1:30h drive from Cologne. We did not work with so many different animals before, so we were a little afraid of the situation. We had no animal trainers. The deal was to go into the enclosure and work everything out by ourselves. That was a huge risk when considering that we were shooting on S16mm at 75-150fps!
In the end we were very lucky and managed to bait them with some food :-)

The deer park

After shooting with deers, goats, racoons, ferrets, and roe deers we switched over to falcons and owls. The park had a special bird of prey section and the supported us very kindly. We shot a falcon ripping a dove, which they usually use bird food. Later on we shot with Hugo the owl. Because they were all trained birds, it turned out to very comfortable to shoot with them. They were doing precisely what the trainers wanted!

The bird trainer, Hugo the owl an me

Philipp checking a place for the falcon to start from.

Production DAY 3 // Nov. 21

Again we spent day three in Hellenthal shooting with two teams in two different locations. Team one was shooting with the actors in a nearby forest on the big S35mm camera and team two was in the deer park shooting on S16mm some of the animals we did not manage to shoot the day before.
The logistics of that day were very complex. There was always a car somewhere on the dirt road between the two sets. We learned a lot about how to manage two camera units and all what they need to shoot.

Unit one on production in Hellenthal.

Unit two shooting with animals again.

Production DAY 4 // Nov. 22

On day four we relocated everything to a forest near Windeck, Kreis Sieg. Again it was a 1:30h drive from Cologne, but to a completely different direction. Just like Hellenthal we visited this location about a week before production. We got the forester's address from the Anitchrist production manager, so in the end, we were shooting in the same forest as Lars von Trier did.
In the morning of day four we began everything so early, that we did not have enough light to start shooting :-) . During the day we had a lot of rain and so everyone and everything was soaking wet and full with mud. In Hellenthal we were a bit more lucky with the weather and lighting conditions.

Creating fog.

Unit one shooting a running scene.

As nearly every day, day four ends when the sun goes down. Unfortunately that was already at about 16:30, so there is not very much time to shoot on one day. But somehow we managed to shoot everything we needed.

Production DAY 5 // Nov. 23

Day five, our last day of production, was divided into three parts/locations. We shot the majority of the day in the forest in Windeck and as the sun went down we moved to a little pub in Windeck to shoot the old man singing. After that we drove to a dive centre in Siegburg where we shot the underwater scenes.
During our preproduction we found a nice location in the forest. The ruins of an old gunpowder factory look really beautiful through the camera. We finally shot the climbing and some running sequences there.

The crew shooting some last shots.

Director Philipp and artist Konstantin.

The 20m deep dive pool.

We decided shooting in the dive center, because there we had the chance to shoot through a window at a depth of about three meters. Hence we could save a lot of money we would have spent for underwater housing equipment. But still, the shooting turned out to be very difficult, due to the angle Konstantin had to jump in. It was very narrow and so we had to practice many times before we could actually roll the camera. At about 23:30 of our longest day we finished the production of the music video!

Postproduktion // Nov. 25- Dez. 7

Just one day after the exhausting production marathon, we continued with the postproduction. Therefore we first had to gather all of our footage which was mostly analogue but there were also some digital clips and still photos from our 5D MK 2. Philipp, Jakob and me drove down to Baden-Baden to scan our footage. Once again we did our standard film workflow. The S16mm and S35mm footage was scanned at 25fps directly onto HDCAM SR and 10bit Apple Prores HQ files. The tapes were actually just a backup solution, just in case something happens.
Back in Cologne Philipp started editing everything while Julian and I were already working on several composites. We did a lot of complex stuff, like to the bird shot, where we gave life to the dead bird. There were also a lot of removals to do.

Bluescreen elements.

On our 5D the 2. Unit team shot several small animals like grasshoppers, a mouse and a rat in front of a bluescreen. We composited these elements in the foreground or background of the final clips.
Overall there was a lot of compositing to do for this project, but everything we managed to accomplish on our own.

After about two weeks of postproduction we mastered the video and passed it over to the label. Again one week later it was released on tape.tv and youtube.

Reactions

We receive very positive reactions about this video. The people recognize the distinctiveness of this video and discuss it heavily on the web. Many people ask how the bird shot was done and think that we used a living bird for it! I hope now no one thinks that any more.
Altogether I think we can be very proud of our creation and of what we learned by making it. I hope we'll have the chance to do this kind of project again in the future! The next time we will not shot in a rainy November, with animals and kids, with only 7 hours of light and everything on film at 75-150fps!
What we did was insane and we were not very far from a failure, but again somehow we did it!

Shortly after our release on Tape.tv and Youtube the blog Feingut contacted me with some questions about the music video and posted an article with my answers about the project.

A BIG thanks to every team member and everyone who helped us during this project!

The entire gallery

Wallis Bird - To My Bones [Official Video] released now!

2009-08-03T23:55:30Z

After animating 1200 single frames, we finally released this new video from Wallis Bird's new Album New Boots.

I was diving Palau's Blue Corner when Philipp had some hard time in Cologne writing the concept and managing everything for this great music video…
But anyway…it turned out to be one of the best projects I was ever involved in!

Even me (I have seen the video so many times during the production) can watch the video over and over again. Every time I watch it, I find new little details on the animated wall I didn't see before. Every animator created his own little world, with its own little moving objects. I am also very fond of the night scenes with the fast burning candles and the window shadow moving across the wall.

The Making Of

While I was still very far away, somewhere in Bangkok I guess, Philipp, Alex and Robert had organized and planned everything for the first shoot. Two days after I arrived the party scenes were shot. The plan was to shoot a very realistic and cool party and we knew, that you cannot stage such a party and direct everyone around and do a shot by shot thing. So we decided to just have a really cool ;-) party and run around with the camera without too much directing. Thanks to Alex and Robert, we had enough to drink (if you now what I mean ;-) ) and the party turned out to be a really funny and great party! 90% of what you see in the video has happened spontaneously! Even burning out studio sofa was not planned :-( . Well it didn't smell good anyway…
We shot all the live action stuff on an old Arri SR II with Kodak Visions 2 500T. The processing and scanning was done at the SWR in Baden-Baden. They sent us a HDCAM Tape which we captured to Final Cut (using ProResHQ) at KHM.

The days after the party we continued to shoot the stop motion animation in the KHM Studio. The set up was actually very simple. We used a wooden studio wall and painted it to a normal concrete stone wall. After that we startet capturing single frames using a Canon 5D MK II with Hasselblad Lenses. The camera was mounted on a tripod and secured so no one moves it. We shot at full resolution (21 MegaPixels) to have enough resolution for the shoulder camera movements we added later in postproduction.
On location we used Macbooks to check and save our images and to control the camera with Canon's EOS capturing tool. This tool was a great help for our production because you don't have to touch the camera, you can control every funktion of the camera remotely.

The next 4 days we repeated this 1200 times…

Postproduction

Throughout the planning and production we were facing some severe brain damage because we didn't really know how to deal with all those frame rates ;-) We shot the party scenes on film at 25fps, the animation on the wall was done at 8fps. For the animated wall we shot clips of Wallis singing with Canon 5D MKII using 30fps. So we ended up with three different frame rates with the plan of finalizing the video at 25fps. I actually don't really know how we did it, but somehow we did…
For the camera movement on the wall we built a setup with a back projection screen and a thin grid. On the screen we projected the image sequence we shot in the studio. Again with the Canon camera we filmed the screen performing the camera movement we wanted for the final video. After that we matchmoved the movement of the camera using Pftrack. Finally we could import the camera data to After Effects and render the final movement.
We could have animated everything right away in After Effects, but we didn't want to have the perfect bezier style movement. We wanted to have a handheld camera in front of the animated wall and this was an easy quick method of doing this.

Wallis Bird music video shoot

The Crew

Wallis Bird and band
Philipp Käßbohrer
Alexander Rechberg
Robert Windisch
Matthias Schulz
Sylvia Bußmann
Katharina Huber
Matthias Gerding
Julian Schleef
Theresa Locker
Evy Hack
Marius Beyersdorf
Lisa Krane
Philipp Grußendorf
Holger Pest
Paul Trommer
Andreas Fabritius
Julia Kotowski

BEAM ME UP - Die Große Star Trek Show

2009-05-26T23:43:10Z

During the last weeks of April our studio in Cologne was crouched with people working on an animation for a German TV show. We created the graphics and the opener for the BEAM ME UP Star Trek Show for kabeleins.

Again, everything had to be done extremely fast and there was absolutely no time for any preparation… ;-)
Sony Pictures Germany and @d art medienproduktion produced the show and asked us for the animation parts. So we met at our studio, bought a lot of chips and drinks and started to develop a graphical concept for the show.
Andi and Philipp immediately started to work on a remix of the original Star Trek theme. Julian began to create a 3d model of the U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701A ;-) . Alex did a heavy illustrator job and constructed the LCARS design. Philipp Grußendorf and Daniel worked remotely and produced great typography in Star Trek style and a logo design.
I…well…I tried to keep everyone happy and working ;-) .

Thousands of rendered frames and many difficult approval procedures later the show was aired…puh…

Thanks a lot to the entire team for your great work!!

This was aired on German TV an May 6th, 2009:

Just the opener:

StarTrek Show BEAM ME UP from thefoundation on Vimeo.

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:

Music Video »Wolke - Kleine Lichter«

2008-10-04T16:10:02Z

Together with Dino Korati and Reto Gnad I created this low budget video clip for the Cologne based band Wolke.

Making the Video:

The title of the song means small lights so we came to the idea to work with video projections of the two singers on walls around the city. Starting with miniature projections we wanted to let them grow during the video until they fill entire buildings.
We shot the projection video for our location shoot in the KHM studio. The two singers Oliver and Benedikt performed in white suits in front of black, so our projection will not have borders where the projection ends.
We shot two days at night in Düsseldorf and we were equipped with a 220V generator, a video projector, a macbook to play back our videos and DV Camcorder. Several location later we had a lot of footage of our band performing across walls, pipes, etc. .
The postproduction of this videos was actually very easy because we only had to edit it. People keep asking me about the amount of work, because it looks like a lot of tracking and compositing work. It's actually all captured directly with the camcorder, except the last three shots, where the singers perform on large buildings.

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.

Multiple After Effects instances

2008-09-10T18:00:14Z

How to keep on working with After Effects while rendering.

I just had a problem because I was rendering an animation and the time counter said "1:30h remaining"! But I cannot lose any time so I found out to run 2 After Effects processes under Leopard. Its pretty easy actually:

Open the terminal and type: cd /Applications/Adobe After Effects CS3/Adobe After Effects CS3.app/Contents/MacOS
And then type: ./After\ Effects
Be sure to run the app as super user.

Now After Effects starts in the terminal. When it's done the interface appears and everything should work normally.

With this method you are able to run several instances of applications. But it's not always useful. After Effects can use multiprocessing and when you are rendering and working with the other instance there is not much processor power left. But since CS3 Adobe puts a little hidden app into the Adobe After Effects folder with which you can run renderings from the terminal and have full control over the settings.

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...