Finally we made it. With help of Stefan Goebel and the second camera man Ozan Tasci we filmed the video projection on it's premiere on 8th June in  front of the Globe Theatre in Neuss: 

I was so excited about the reaction of  round 400 people watching and listening. Around 10:30pm after the show I had to rush into the building and prepair the front windows with old sheets. They fit perfectly on the six windows. 


The purpose of this hods was to hide the backs. It is almost impossible to beam on black so the cover was to give us a nice white surface. When I was done Michael Kloss, the technician, instantly started the video. And then six minutes later everything was done. A perfect moment. 


The day before, we tested it for the first time as a projection. I draw mask for the perspective and then last  contrast adjustments were done. 

Last but not least I want to thank all people involved in this project. Not only the people listed in the credits but all support I got from friends and my family. Your feedback and positive energy helped to get through the sometimes very stressful times in the past half year.

Thank you!

It's time for the first test. So I built a 80cm x 135cm wooden scale model of the Globe theatre and projected the first footage I created. Thanks to  Rudy, a friend of mine, who recorded and edited the video. Here's the result:



It was just a test for the technique. Neither the sound nor the animation are in correct order. Sorry guys :)

The next couple of days I will spend on illustrating the Cover of the Festival Magazine 2012: "Was ihr Wollt"
This is really an honor to me. Im pretty enthusiatic about it cause the first brainstormings were promising.
I hope you guys will like it.

Phillip(left), Florian(right) foto: Andreas Giesen

After spending the last couple of days on improving the text of little William we finally made it to the Globe theatre. We were equipped with some audiorecording stuff trying to catch the beautiful scenery of the inside of the theatre even in the audio. After the first testruns you really could hear the significant difference between some studiorecordings and the great sound of the wooden Globe theatre stage in the echos of the voice.

So it was definetivly worth it to spend the day in the feezing cold theatre and make the recordings on spot.
After all I want to thank Phillip cause it was quite hard for his voice spending the whole day repeating the sentences in this cold Globe. Nevertheless he really achieved to give Will an extra layer of personality and depth!

It was time to work out the details for the concept. Writing the screenplay, making some Stylesheets to experiment the final Layout. Also writing the Monolog for the character was kind of challeging for me. But it is also fun cause this is the step were the creative magic happens. You can adjust all your ideas you have in mind. When I had a meeting with Andreas Giesen, to give him an update in the process, we made the final big change to the content.

To keep the show interesting for you, I'll add the final screenplay not until the premier will have happened. Only this hint I wanna give you:

Will has to prepaire himself for a presentation and he is really not amused about that...

After I listed all the tasks, I was overwhelmed by this massive amount of work. I had to find a solution for that. So I looked for some support. Right now I can proudly announce that the famous Phillip Brehl will give lil' Will it's voice. Also he will improve the text to give him this special kind of extra he still needed.

Also I'm in touch with a second Animator and a Foly Artist who will definitely improve the sound effects. But still nothing is sure so I actially want to wait before I introdruce them to you.

Last week I spent time on creating some details for Will. Defining clothes, giving the hair some structure. I think it was worth it cause there are plans to use this character in some still images, too. I really enjoyed the digital sculpture process to create this detail. Most of the time when I passed this step I really thought that the character looked even more realistic, even more natural to me. He also doesn't have this 3D'ish look any more when he just came out from the 3D program. Once again it's only about the forms and not about the color or materials. They will be added later on.

Let's get digital:

Computer work could be very boring. Especially when you tell somebody who isn't very interested & familiar with this kind of stuff. So I try to keep it very simple and short. If you have more questions. Comment this post and I'll see what I can do for you.

First of all I created the base mesh. This is the point when you rebuild the clay figure digitaly into your 3D-program. In this case I got great references cause the clay-model stood right next to me on a table. Besides what is visible here he also has theeth so when he opens his mouth theres also something to see

Then I started to create a lot of so called blendshapes. In this step lil' Will got his mouth expressions e. g. when he smiles, frowns has its mouth wide or narrow. A speacial treatment what I never did before is to connect his moustage to this expressions, so when his mouth deforms also his moustage adjusts with it. For the nerds between ourselves, ...this is very cool :D

To control his expressions with his brows I found another solution. The brows deform along curve which you can control with this yellow circles. If you change their position you can create remarkably readable emotions on Will's face.

All the colorful curves you see in this picture are to control the position of lil' Wills body. Therefore you had build a humanoid skeleton inside of his body and bind them to the skin. This whole procedure of character building took me about  21 days.

Until here only the rough form of the body and the proportions has been determined. We still can change his apperance on the screen/wall dramaticly. When it comes to rendering and lighting. But this I'll explain to you in one of the following posts. :)

clay: classic 3D

With the thoughts and rough scetches in my mind I immediately began to clay. I like this method very much cause you get all information you need to build this character in a 3D program. Also it's one of the last things you don't do with the computer. So I enjoyed to work with my hands. At the same time you see at this step if things work in space. Sometimes things you scetched earlier in your scetchbook don't work in 3D space. So it's a very important to translate the 2D design to our world before pushing it immediately in digital into the computer.

This sculpture took me about five days to make. Onder the surface there is a wire construction to keep this tiny thin arms and legs in position. So you first need to build the rough proportions with wire and fix it on the fundament wood. Then you start to build the claybody around it. Without a good wirejob you won't get a good result after all. What also should be mentioned is that this T-Pose is very handy to go on working in the 3D-program with. So for this reason it's modelt in this weird way.

While I was working on this I was inspired by the great costume designs in the film "Shakespeare in Love". They did a very good job on this project. However this cheesy film was only worth it for the costumes.