Well… I admit that sounds a tad too dramatic :)

For the past year I’ve been working with a bunch of really talented artists here at my school on the concept, story and look of an animated short film. It’s been a very demanding year for me, both on the personal and artistic side of things (often they’re the same). Finally it’s time to go public!

OMEGA is a stop motion animated short movie which uses state of the art digital photography and high end CG to bring a unique, lively and complex look to the screen. The film will be somewhere around 8 minutes long, at the moment consisting of over 150 shots. You can read more about the movie on our temporary production blog. Make sure you check out the gallery with production stills and concepts. From time to time we’ll try to post updates of our current progress, pics from the studio and crazy sleep-deprived people… exciting times ahead!

For me this project is somewhat of a departure from pure digital art, which poses a much welcomed challenge to me… especially after kicking computers around for over a decade. I absolutely love stop motion and generally everything about animation.  Also for this project I’ve had the chance to draw crazy things, which is always fun.

An interesting detail of course for the Blender crowd is that we’ll be using Blender 2.5 to composite the entire movie (terrabytes of 3K Digital film footage). Some of the (larger) creatures and spaceships will be animated in 3D as well. Alongside with durian we hope to test and evaluate the Blender compositing pipeline in a real production environment. The somewhat cryptic results of our pipeline tests (digital SLR cam > computer > image conversion > offline processing > online processing > compositing) were posted some time ago here.

Anyways, there’s too much information to fit into one silly post, so without further ado…

OMEGA

.andy

- Blender Workshop - Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe -

- Nov 05 / 06 / 07 / 08 / 09 2007 -

Blender is the premier open source package for modeling, shading, animation, rendering, compositing, editing and game creation. it is used by hobbyists, professionals, studios and institutions around the world for a large variety of applications ranging from architectural design, commercials, motion graphics, illustrative art up to full blown cinematic movie productions.

For students / (emerging) artists like us Blender is especially interesting because it gives them the full flexibility / power of the movie industry to realize our projects - without depending on student licenses and / or large wallets. In this workshop we explore all the things that blender can offer… and more.

- edit: workshop over, some pics-

(more…)

yes, it’s indeed been a while since… any update on this site, so you might be curious what kept me busy for so long!

wellll, the crazy times started with a short trip to boston for siggraph 06. i had a lot of fun at the open source pavillion (which i also helped designing and constructing) with a few blender demos and support. shortly after that spent a month in argentina, helping out the totally courageous folks at the plumiferos project. in the meantime - while i was still being flooded with loads of emails in the aftermath of elephants dream and giving a few internet- and tv interviews about our movie - i applied, got accepted and eventually enrolled at the hochschule fuer gestaltung (university for visual arts) in karlsruhe, germany.

next weekend i will be travelling to bologna, italy to give a talk about elephants dream together with bassam at the future film festival. apart from quite a few uni projects i’m also planning to produce another short movie. busy busy busy… oh well… i’ll post another update as soon as i find my brain.

.andy