Sometimes I keep wondering what I am doing with my life. Flying over to Barcelona to spend 4 days in dark, overly crowded theaters (sometimes even sitting) doesn't seem much fun.

The only reason I ended up there was a sluggish application for the CAN+OFFF Workshop. Then, suddenly sitting between Aaron Koblin, Mr. Doob and 10 other hard core interactive media experts was an unexpectedly awesome experience. Too sad, our new version of Tooll2 was not ready enough to be used and so I spent the day learning about Kinect, Blender and geometry conversion tools. I learned a hell of a lot, and thus it was a very nice day. But missed the opportunity of showing off and to defend Windows as serious design platform of realtime content.

Of course the average media style the conference was just my cup of tea: They featured most of my favorite vimeo-artists. Legends of motion design like Onesize, Physalis and Onur Senturk. Still, the repetitive bombardment with state of the art physics simulation, heavy editing and camera shake left me with a certain feeling of emptiness. Like the early years of the demoscene when you got some extra kudos for rending 2000 faces with phong shading. Quite frankly, most animation had nothing to say. After a couple of hours, every channel (how beautiful it may be) that lacks information just become noise.

From the 100+ animations/presentations I saw over the days, Physalis was probably the most euphoric. These guys certainly seem to enjoy their work somewhere between motion graphics and hardware tinkering.

The most motivating talk was definitely the one by Stefan Sagmeister. This time with a longer and updated version of his TED talk about happiness. I love his energy, logic and humor on how to approach real world topics. Thus, giving him the final slot of the conference was a perfect decision. Of course I know that you go to a conference for meeting people (a already knew of the the animations), but of all things I am scared of, approaching strangers is probably my biggest fear. If "having guts" makes you happy, I will try my best at the OFFF 2012.

After our first unlucky attempt with this topic, it took us over a year to touch the material again. Luckily, Drumhead had a nice soundtrack in the queue and so we completely redid the whole production. We had some issues with the quality of our SSAO passes. So finally, we decided to celebrate the noise which worked quite nicely in some of the scenes. Everything else got hidden behind thick layer of motion blur:

To me "Outside" felt like an extremely promising topic that I failed to play properly for various reasons. Since then, once in a while, I was creating more assets. Exploring a more traditional architectural work, potentially reanimating some training from university, I invested some evenings to combine Piranesi with Socialist Brutalism. Obviously I had a great time:

For the inside of the tower, I created some kind of 3-maze construction-set of a couple of stair- and bridge-elements. As usual, time ran and I ended up placing them by and instead with a script.

However, nothings beats mesh-importer bugs, when it comes to creating chaos.

To our all surprise, Finally Inside won the Scene.org-award for best direction 2011. This is, obviously, a huge honor for my. Finally, I can stop wasting my time with demos and can spend my evenings going bowling.

Once again we missed the Breakpoint deadline and decided to release a polished and ready release rather than a rushed half-baked party version. The two additional weeks indeed made a big difference.

Extremely fast production that was mostly done at the Main party in Arles. Although the results is rather average, it felt great to release something: The only way to learn how to make demos, is to release demos.

Our quick contribution to Function 2008 went a bit out of control. Although Passing is more or less reusing effects from The Seeker, I experimented with a more realistic look which took some more effort.

The original concept of syncing things passing by when looking out of car works very well with Mads excellent soundtrack what was originally released at on enough records.

I played around with this topic for more than two years. If it wouldn't have been for this year's Intel Demo Competition I probably would have percrastinated for another year. I ran also out of excuses to dq, why to hold back his track any longer.

Tooll is a self made application for creating digital content in real-time. It was developed primarily for doing demo scene productions like demos and 64kb intros. It unites features from a lot of different other tools (e.g. Werkkzeug, Abobe After Effects, Maya, and more). We are using realtime rendering to do motion- and visual effects design.

In the second 64kb intro we made with Tooll, I played with de(con)struction: I wanted glitches, video artefacts, wild editing synced to an abstract IDM track.

The first test scenes were really abstract and more following a 2D flat black and white scheme you can see at the first 30 seconds.

Sadly this didn't work well with the wonderful music by Szelei Kis Gergely (Gargaj). So the final piece got a little bit away from the original concept sketches.

Malewitsch was originally meant to be a proof of concept for Still's new realtime content creation suite for 64kb intros: Tooll. After working ages on abstract bitmap scenes for texture generation, we decided that it would be much better to work on a concrete project. The inspiration for the theme came from lead programmer Daniel Szymanski (cynic), whose common test scene consisted of a black square on a white background: Suprematism at its best.

A world of cubes

I started with sketching in Photoshop and I finally developed a concept around a world of cubes. This basic object promised both to be a sufficient building block for quiet complex scenes and easy enough to be implemented. In a quick session I came up with a motion sketch in Maya which I slightly boosted up with post processing. This was supposed to be our reference for the next couple of months: Our goal was to reproduced this animation in 64kb.

Original 3d models were rebuilt with Tooll using basic mesh and scene operators. With these sample scenes, we worked on a look which was doable with a shader model 2 post render pipeline.

Tooll's very basic instancing and replicate operators proved to be friendly for experiments. Playing around with realtime building blocks became a steady source of inspiration.

Look

I played around with Photoshop to get a grip on a general idea for the lighting and colors. When I was satisfied with my reference image, I spent the next days implementing this look with post render effects.

We finished Malewitsch at the party place in Barcelona. I still remember this as one of my favorite demo scene events because of the wonderful familiar atmosphere and all the great people we met there.

Welcome to feedback hell. Originally planned as quick remake of Fern pixtur fell in love with Tooll's render pipeline and bought a note book with decent graphics card just for finishing the production at the TUM-party place.

After an unlucky first colaboration with ronny on Iso9241, we are so happy he gave us a second chance. Once again he proved to be one of the best musicians in the demo scene and Ferner couldn't be imaginable without his contribution.

A warning: Ferner is GPU intensive. Although we do not have as complex shaders as it might look like, there are several passes with large render target sizes involved. It should run smoothly on nvidia 8000 series. But much else we don't take any responsibility for. You will need current video drivers, too. Since "Ferner" is based on feedback buffers, the results depend on frame rates. For a reference, on how it should look like, use the video capture.

After a very long delay, we finally finished this production. It is (after Trocken and Perfect love) the last part of the Subraum triology.

Despite gloom's wonderful music and the nice concept of turning a little man's world up side down, I am not quiet happy with the final result. Technical limitations of our DirectX 7 engine combined with an unclear design direction lead to an inconsistent production that could have been much better. With this in mind I was quiet suprised about the two nominations scene.org awards (best direction and best demo).

"All my systems are running perfectly." This is me second team work with Sire and Mad. Since most engine problems were already been solved, I just played around and tried to find visuals for sire's excellent soundtrack.

Originally it was done for the PC demo competetion at Evoke 2005 where it was placed 3rd.

The production was nominated for two scene.org awards

and was rewarded with the first price at fmx festival 2006 in Stuttgard.

Concept art

Very abstract piece on Shakespear. The creative freedo provided by director Herbert Fritsch was both: heaven and hell. But the intensive team work resulted in a very nice watchable short movie.

Trocken is German vor "dry", eventually living without drugs. Some people need medicine to keep the state of being dry or a from going mad again. In such a way Zyprexa is sort of an "antidrug" to diminish your fantasy; and finally your creativity. Some years ago Christian Melsa wrote a poem about this feeling, which finally became a real-time demo called Zyprexa.

Together with Rainer (nero) Mühr we reanimated this theme and made a remix using the same 3d-engine, effects and lyrics, but with a new exciting soundtrack and a heavy dosis of graphics design.

It turned out as a wonderful adventure of turning words into images.

Any moment was inspired by Oscar Wilde's "The birthday of the princess" - a story about the unfulfilled love of an ugly gnome to the young infantile princess infanta. She is both: protected and guarded at once by the inhuman apparatus of her father's hofstaat. Her naive arrogance finally leads into the gnomes death.

"But why he is not going to dance anymore?"

"Because his heart has broken."

"Then from now on, let those that come to play with me have no hearts."

I translated the story into a cold world full of technology and lack of feelings.

Although I put a lot of effort into this project, it never got into the state of realization. I put it here because of the concept art.

Driven by the contrast between short live time and the increasing documentary and artistic relevance of computer games, I dedicated one and a half year into the study of history, classification, archiving and presentation of computer games and computer hardware.

The academic approach to the subject finally lead into a comprehensible design process and a spacial implementation of a museum complex consisting of institute, archive and museum.

The thesis was rated with 1.0 and suggested for the "Tautstipendium" (i.E. the year's best thesis).