About me // CV // Recommendations

Childhood

Born in 1981,  lived pretty much my entire childhood in a small town near Frankfurt.

First Company

When I was around 14, I got bored with just living my life as a pupil and decided to put my talents in the computer area to good use and start a company. A year and a few miles of red tape later (German bureau"crazy" isn't really happy about you creating your company when you are under aged ...) I had my company PC Creator Studios up and running and was doing what I could do best: I built pc systems, did a whole lot of network administration, helped out with any pc related problems - basically anything to pay the bills. It wasn't the best of business plans but at the time you could actually make quite a bit of money in this area.

First Step in the World of 3d

Still it was only that. A way to earn money.

I started working with 3d Software at the age of 12. It got really serious when my parents bought me the 3d package "Reflections" for Christmas. From this to 3D Studio and 3d Studio Max 1 it wasn't such a big leap and I was doing oversized animations for the first Animago Awards in no time.

After I did an internship at a small design company in marburg I knew that this was actually what I wanted to do. So I expanded my company portfolio to include small design jobs. Since this wasn't really big business to me, I rented out the pc building business to students and concentrated on improving my skills in the graphics department.

During this time I was still considering to become a character animator - either that or visual effects supervisor :) So those where the areas I put my time in. I was trying to learn the art of compositing and getting a foot in the door of character animation.

"Acting for Animators"

In 1999 I learned about a guy called Ed Hooks, who created a workshop called "Acting for Animators" after having worked for PDI/Dreamworks as an acting teacher on their CGI Debut "Antz". Since he was only doing these workshops for big companies like disney and dreamworks I only had one option. Host my own workshop with him.

He was really interested in getting known around Europe so he agreed to participate in those workshops. To cover travel expenses I made some dealings with the film academy in ludwigsburg, the university of potsdam and the FMX conference in Stuttgart (where he is an annual participator and well liked speaker by now). This way we could host our workshops in marburg and he could earn some additional money and reputation on the way. In the year 2000 after some heavy advertising in universities and at FMX I finally got to host his first public workshop in europe. Together with animators from around Germany we had some absolutely unforgettable days.

This cooperation lasted for about 2 years.

Graduation and Comunity Service

In 2001 I graduated from school with the German "Abitur" and started a year of comunity service during which I directed my first movie. It was "only" a documentation about my school and I basically made it an epic 2 1/2 hours saga :)

"Professional" 3d Artist 

After my year of comunity service it was time to actually dive into the animation industry. When I was advertising at FMX a year before the guys at the booth next to me were looking for people to participate in creating the first German cgi feature film "Back to Gaya". Within a week I had my first interview and even though I applied as a compositing artist the producer Holger Tappe actually thought I would be better suited in the texture department. Boy, was he right.

3 months into the job I felt totally at home. Painting Textures and creating shaders came to me pretty effortless (well, you tend to learn things quick if you are doing it 18 hours a day).

Bu then my second application came through. I was considered for the position of production assistant at the posthouse in New Zealand working on nothing less than "Lord of the Rings". It was certainly the chance of a lifetime but I decided against it in favor of continuing to work on "Back to Gaya" in a creative position where I was actually starting to gain some momentum with a promotion to "Lead texture Artist".

In 2004 "Back to gaya" was released but was a mediocre success. But through hard work and literally thousands of extra-hours I was promoted to the position of Texture & Shading Supervisor on the next movie "Impy's Island" which was released in 2006 and actually did quite well. I completed my work on the sequel of this movie in December 2007. In Januay 2008 I took some time off to look for new challenges in a new company which lead to a job at Animal Logic in Sydney, Australia where am working since May 2008 as a Surfacing Artist on their animated feature film Guardians of Ga'Hoole.

 Extra-curriculum work

Besides my work on "Back to Gaya", "Impy's Island" and "Impy's Island 2"  I participated in some other projects - mostly under the roof of Ambient Entertainment.  I worked a short amount of time on the movie "Thief Lord" doing some texturing of wooden animals. I worked a whole lot on some Volkswagen commercials and did some work for Daimler Chrysler texturing and lighting car interiors.