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

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.

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:

Production days: Spardabank Frankfurt

2008-11-04T21:20:23Z

Again we are having some working days in Frankfurt to finally set up the illumination of the Spardabank-Hessen e.G. headquarters' facade.

Matthias, David and me are sharing a room in the luxury Mövenpick Hotel next to the Frankfurt Trade Fair and – determining this choice – vis-à-vis with the Spardabank-Hessen e.G.'s headquatres!

Elevator crammed with equipment

After arriving on last sunday afternoon, we built up our tentative office in the top floors room 737. All together we have five computers, including two notebooks and one PC serving as main render client. This way we are able to keep on working, while our creations get rendered. Our daily routine includes working on AfterEffects-compositions till afternoon, en passant rendering new and final compositions as well as test screens. During todays blue hour we took some footage of the building gaining the hindmost, steelblue sunbeams of this wonderful autumn day.

David, working

Night is the time to check out how our work takes effect on the facade. From the roof garden of our hotel, we document which parts of our animation need to be altered and which geometric shapes are recognizable or not. Nearly every sequence of moving lines, dots, shapes and colors has to be altered again and again to get this last little dodge, which makes most of the capabilities of the LED-lightened facade. In the end there should exist a looped movie, shown on the facade from dawn till midnight.

We have two days left to get some new themes running on the Spardabank's facade. I am looking forward to show you some video footage of the facade, up to now this footage is still waiting to be edited. Maybe this article will see an update with video soon!

Production Days: Spardabank Frankfurt

By the way we are following the first predictions of the Potus elections, presented by ARD on the giant, muted flatscreen dangling off the wall right beside my workstation! Exciting!

AERenderer and its flaws

2008-11-01T19:24:45Z

The render system coming with After Effects provides a sophisticated set of configuration dialogs. Be careful using these options!

Working for the illuminated facade of the Spardabank Hessen e.G. headquarter in Frankfurt we have several giant (up to about 7000 pixels wide) After Effects compositions. Some of these setups take hours and hours in the process of rendering.
Due to different needs, we do not always need the full resolution. Fortunately the AERenderer has this small dialog to reduce the actual size a composition is rendered at: Render every [n]th pixel. Unfortunately this will not work as expected in every composition!

One would presume, that the rendering of just every umpteenth pixel works like a pre-rendering-resizing and besides speeds up the whole process because the pixels in between are not computed.
Not knowing exactly what causes errors at this step, I presume that there is a incompatibility of some plug-ins with this functionality of the renderer. Which is especially irksome, since some of the most performance-consuming effects will cause errors in the final display, e. g. the glow effect.

The last composition I had to render wanted to have about 50 hours of full power from my MacBook Pro (2.33 gigahertz, 2 gigabyte RAM) in full resolution. The rendering of every twentieth pixel resulted in a way darker image, than the full resolution rendering. Large parts of the composition are lightened by the mentioned glow effect. In the end I decided to render full resolution in low quality. This took about twenty hours.

Maybe Adobes hands are tied since some plug-ins are programmed by third parties, but at least the default effects supplied by Adobe should work properly. Perhaps this option is not used frequently, so that there is low interest in solving this problem. Perhaps just few people know about this possibility. Anyhow Adobe should improve the rendering process as soon as possible.

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

Project »INFINITY« [update]

2008-10-18T23:43:40Z

Bringing movement to lights.

Together with the German light designer Stefan Hofmann we created the animations for his light installation INFINITY for the Luminale 2008 in Frankfurt.
The installation was constructed in Frankfurt's Senckenberg Museum in April. The construction consists of 50, 3m high columns with integrated LED Pixels. The columns stand in a circle of a about 7m radius.
The idea was to entirely surround the spectators with light, creating an infinite light room. Our abstract 360° animations supported the infinite surrounding we wanted to create.

Project »INFINITY«

The installation will be presented again at GLOW 2008 in Eindhoven, Netherlands in November 2008.

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...