thefoundation

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

Google Earth Plug-in and Shiretoko

2009-05-10T15:11:16Z

While not officially supported, the Google Earth Browser Plug-in seems to work just fine with nightly builds of Mozilla Firefox 3.5, codename Shiretoko. Here is a simple hint to get it up and running.

When accessing the plug-in homepage using Shiretoko, Google tells you that your Browser version is not supported. Of course there is a reason for that. Messing around with untested software, especially with plug-ins, might hurt your user experience or data in ways I cannot predict here.

That said, the recent nightly builds on the Firefox 3.5 / Mozilla 1.9.1 branch seem to be pretty stable, at least on Mac OS 10.5. To get it running, you have to fire up about:config and change the key general.useragent.extra.firefox to something like Firefox/3.0.10. Now reload the Plug-in Homepage, download and install the Google Browser plug-in. After that, you have to keep the modified user-agent or the plug-in will cease to work.

Keep in mind that this might affect which add-on versions will be offered to you at addons.mozilla.org. Come to speak of it, I recently tried out the Minimap Sidebar that kind of gives your browser a Google Earth in the sidebar (or in a full tab). Really great: It allows you to switch between Google Maps, Google Earth and the awesome OpenStreetMap at any time without loosing position or bookmarks. It also integrates with various other location based services such as WikiMapia or loc.alize.us.

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