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.

OMG!? Watching oneself speaking is always embarrasing. esp. if you are half drunk during the interview.

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.

Evoke is over and we even managed to release or final version of Outside. The reception was surprisingly good. Well, we won the demo competition. Additionally we got some really funny press coverage on one of Germany's biggest IT-news-sites Heise news.

In der Königsdisziplin der Demos siegte Still mit "Finally Inside". Aus ihrer politischen Gesinnung macht die Demo keinen Hehl: Eine Überwachungskamera wird zu vielen; später ist eine Galerie mit Politiker-Bildern zu sehen; am Ende fliegt die Kamera durch eine zerstörte Stadt.

Which could be translated into:

In the champions category "PC-Demos", Still won with "Finally Inside". This demo does not make a secret of its political orientation: One surveillance camera becomes many; later you see a gallery of politicians and finally the camera is flying through the remains of a destroyed city.

Can't wait, to the police searching my home :-)

This was a small concept I was working on with iq.

7 days to Evoke.

Just came back from vacation, and didn't do any work on our production for Evoke 2010. But at least, I got not too distracted by the beautiful temptations of the Adriatic Sea and worked a little bit on the Interaction Design of Tooll2.

Right now, the demo looks like this:

Together with our friends from c-base, we organize a party to celebrate the death of demoscene culture.

Pixtur will show his favorite productions from last years. After this we will flood the dance floor with electronic beats. Live visuals will be delived by raytrayza and pixtur. We got two top DJs (Ronny Pries from Farbrausch and Fraktral from Icon), barbecue and friendly people at the bar.

Entrance will be less than 5€.

The last weeks have been quite exciting. And with some luck I will survive the next couple of days. Most of friends already noticed that I started my first full-time job ever! In the Berlin office of Nokia I work on user experience for next generation's web runtime eviroment. This is a drastic change from my 10 years of freelance work.

But right now I am in south France, waiting for the delayed demo competition at Main Party. I spent that last 48 hours working on a release. After a short nap I will fly to Boston.

Life rushes buy, almost too fast to appreciate the details.

Get the newest releases from pouet.

2008 was a very productive year for still so it's nice to hear, that we have been nominated for four scene.org awards:

- "Best demo" and "Best direction" for The Seeker

- "Best 64k-intro" for Invoke

- "Most original concept" for Passing

I am convinced that we don't have a chance in any of the categories, but hey: It's a nice ego-booster anyways. Thanks for nominating us.

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.

We just booked our flights to this year's Function in Budapest. I can now relax from the stress of the past months, and work on my new demo projects. So, if things turn out fine, we might even release something. I am really looking forward to visiting Hungary!

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.

The nomination for the Intel Demo Competition 2007 hit us with some surprise. Because of the tough time schedule we decided to used our ancient Direct-X 7 engine one more time.

We started with some brain storming and doing lots of conceptional Photoshop sketches.

The resulting concept evolves around the question what might happen if you dig up things from the underground and give them a closer analysis.

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

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.