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

Short film »Der Tag an dem Herrn Müller einfach nichts einfallen wollte«

2009-08-12T13:47:35Z

A short film about a writer, who suffers from writer's block. In several short attempts he tries to stem this blockade. The film is now watchable on Vimeo.

I wanted to write this article for a long time, but I simply didn't find the right time…until now.

After we finished the final edit of Gemeinsam Allein the next project was already planned and Robert and Philipp were on location in southern Germany to shoot Herr Müller…. DP Jakob Beurle used an old Arri 2C 35mm Camera for filming, which was extremely loud, so that sound had to bee dubbed in sound post.
The Film was shot on 35mm Film and was scanned in full HD (Apple's ProRes HQ) for post production. For some shots we did animation and vfx, but the majority of the work was the grading that was done at our studio in Cologne, Germany.
In the end we created a nice, cinematic look for the film.
And now, about seven month after finishing the shooting, we finally mastered the film.

The film (about 7 minutes):

Der Tag an dem Herrn Müller einfach nichts einfallen wollte from thefoundation on Vimeo.

The postproduction workflow

For this short film we worked the same way as we did with Gemeinsam Allein, except that we worked on standard 35mm Film.
The scan was done at the SWR in Baden-Baden with a Decklink Extreme HD directly into Final Cut Pro 6 using the ProRes HQ codec. After editing Andy got an offline version for sound recording and design and I started to work on the look and the VFX. For compositing I used Shake and the grading was done in Color.

I hope you like the film and we would be very grateful for any feedback. Just send comments to matthias [at]thefoundation.de

P.S. At the moment we are planning to dub the whole film for an english version.

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

Björk »Wanderlust« in 3D

2009-03-17T18:37:26Z

Björk's music video of her single »Wanderlust« was produced stereoscopic and can be watched only in the internet.

This is already some time ago, but I decided to post this here anyway. Since we are planning to do some of our future project stereoscopic, we studied a lot about stereoscopic imagery and motion picture during the last few month.

You can watch the video here.

To watch the video you need to have a pair of red/cyan (blue) glasses, otherwise the two embedded images will not separate properly. You can get those glasses on ebay.

The Making of »Wanderlust«

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:

Thoughts on Apple's Color

2009-01-12T23:22:03Z

Sometimes while working with computers you run into stupid problems. The computer wants you to start everything from the beginning, only because you forgot to set a setting. But mostly, one hour of creative thinking lets you develop a fast solution. This time I ran into Apple's Color.

After I solved my problem with Color it again approved our way of working:

Never choose the think less, click more way of solving an issue...

But now to my problem: My friend Jens from Barracuda Film helped me out on a color grading project a fellow student shot last summer. We worked with Apple's Color 1.04 on am MacPro. He worked the entire weekend on that project, but when I came to the studio today and wanted to render the grades and export everything to Final Cut Pro, I discovered that Color's framerate setting was set to 24 fps. Unfortunately Color does not allow you to change this setting during working, so the rendered ProRes Quicktime files were all in 24fps. And the timeline export to Final Cut Pro was also in 24fps so the sound was not in sync anymore. We had a DVCPRO HD 25fps timeline in Final Cut Pro. But the editor worked with sequences as source material, so we had a timeline full of nested sequences and Color cannot deal with that at all. So the send to Color option was not a good deal for us. Because the film is only about 15 minutes long we decided to add the edits in Color while grading. In Color the source footage was in 25fps, but the project was set to 24fps. And that messed it up as I discovered later...

I searched every handbook, forum, website which had anything to do with that problem but none had a solution for me. But then I tried my own Shake style way. Because Shake saves everything in a script you can alter it, i.e. when Shake keeps on crashing on boot up, because it can't find the source footage. In this case you can solve the problem by relinking the footage manually or simply disabling the node.
In my case Apple hides everything in the color project file. You have to access the content by right clicking it and then show package content. There your find a file with the ending *.pdl . In this file Color saves a lot of stuff including the framerate setting. I simply changed this setting in row 6 to 25fps and Color started without crashing. After that the final renderings were correct and the export to Final Cut Pro worked. I think this only worked so easily because the source footage is also in 25fps. But I wonder why this setting is greyed out in the GUI.

Super16 film post production

2009-01-06T12:05:31Z

During this summer I edited the short film Gemeinsam Allein which was shot on super 16mm film. We found an easy way to do a full HD post production without spending too much money...

I was very deeply involved in the entire production process of the short film by Philipp Käßbohrer, a fellow student of mine. I did the main part of the post production including the editing and grading. During the pre production phase we decided to shoot the film on super 16mm film and try a full HD post production.

First I had no idea how to handle all the data. In SD it would have been no problem because nowadays the sata disks can handle the datarate easily. But in HD the datarate goes up to 140MB/sec [10bit, 25fps,1080p]. Finally I discovered Apple's ProRes codec which reduces the datarate to 25.8MB/sec [HQ, 25fps, 1080p]. I did some tests about image quality and generation losses but the results were very good. So we decided to work completely in 1080p 25fps throughout the whole post production.

Because we are all students we do not own all the high end equipment, but we still know people who do. So I drove to my friend Till and borrowed his Decklink HD card and built it into my mac. I did not have the chance to test the system before we went scanning to the SWR, but everything worked without the tiniest little problem. At the SWR we directly connected the Spirit 2K via BNC to the HD input of the Decklink card and captured all of the 16mm negative via ProRes to my mac. We did not even need some kind of expensive fast storage system.

After we recorded to footage to Final Cut Pro, I began editing. Due to our crazy professional sound guys Casi and Andy I had to work with 14 audio channels in my timeline. But that tourned out to be no problem, because you can link audio to clips in FCP. We finished editing in September and I started working on the grading. For the grading we decided to use Apple's Color, because it easily works with FCP and the KHM owns licenses. Before I exported to Color I collapsed the clips in my timeline to one video track to avoid export and import issues I discovered during a music video I worked on.

Finally the movie was complete and received well be our test audience. Throughout the entire post production we worked in ProRes HQ and it was easy to handle and there were no performance problems. The film had it's premiere at the 30th Biberach Film Festival and the images looked great on the big screen!

Google Street View car spotted in Cologne

2008-10-18T22:50:00Z

I recently saw a strange car standing outside my house. I'm pretty sure it's the Google Street View car taking photos of Cologne! I managed to take some pictures...

I'm sorry for the bad image quality but I only had my mobile on me and the camera is pretty bad...
There is this tripod construction on top of the car roof where presumably the camera rig is mounted on. I wonder how fast the car can go without creating too much motion blur...well, I certainly don't want to be the guy who has to deal with all the photos they take day by day ;-)

Google Street View Car in Cologne

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.

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...