Kara

Yessss! We received filmfunding support for development of our feature film Kara, directed by Sinem Sakaoglu.

Thank you good people from FFHSH (Filmförderung Hamburg/Schleswig Holstein) and MFG (Filmförderung Baden Württemberg)!
In October we started working on the teaser production, Julian Hermannsen from visual distractions Ltd. being our producer. Starting up with a small core team we are now 25+ people from nine countries. You can follow our progress on our blog http://blog.kara-the-film.com/ or on our facebook page https://www.facebook.com/karathefilm.

Please meet Mr Fleas

A book

Something else.
I won a grant to do a book. It will have to do with the guys you see on top of this page, fish, cats and Osman Kastan, an ex-chestnut-vendor.

Sandman - The Storyteller

Here´s one episode as an example. The others can either be watched on TV in the Sandman-series on german television or can be found at youtube as this one.

The series aims at preschool children and these stories turned out to be quite nice.

Sandman - The Storyteller

Some time in summer I was asked to develop and create a production design for 7 episodes of Sandman  goodnight stories. Director Sabine Fischer from Fischer TV wanted to get back to the origins of goodnight storytelling and had pitched her concept of having a real storyteller to the broadcasters from RBB and they had liked it. What she now needed was an environment for the actor (Axel Prahl) on stage as well as a concept for the visualization of the fairy tales. And, mind, I was given a kind of restricted budget which called for economical solutions.
So I contacted several people and came up with a concept as back-to-the-roots as the story teller idea: Shadow play/ scissor cut backgrounds that should become alive with limited animation and blend with a real "scissor cut" tree on stage. The tree and the book were done by Gunnar Zimmer and his wonderful colleagues at Spreekulissen. Animation was done by Matthias Daenschel who´s too much an animator by heart to sincerely do limited animation as you will see in the Quicktimes. Micha Hirt did unlimited compositing and the opening fireflies. I did most of the storyboarding, Design, all production  backgrounds and characters, planning, calculating and coordination of the visual part of things. I was busy for a while.

Final Picture

A tiny stage in a big studio...

Inital Sketch/Concept page

Plan for setbuilding

Setbuilding at Spreekulissen

Design for the owl

In the meantime

I have not been here for a while. Superdog got older.

Arrugas wins

I shall absolutely not forget to mention, that Arrugas, the fabulous and touching film by Ignacio Ferreras, produced by Manuel Cristobal from Perroverde films, about two old guys in an elderly home, won the prize for the best animated feature at ITFS in Stuttgart and got a special mention in Annecy. (And has won several important prizes before, was Annie nominated and is still touring the festival to win some more).
I sincerely hope the film finds a distributor in Germany soon - with not exactly a mainstream story I m afraid it might take a while here.
Wonderful film.

Kara Update

We are still working on Kara.
Sinem just finished the first draft of the script to which I contributed ideas and illustrations in picture form - all thanks to FFHSH (Filmförderung Hamburg) who substantially supported the script development. Visual distractions Ltd. from Hamburg will be producing this Stop Motion Feature and we look forward to making a teaser as soon as we can.

The Gulyabani of Istanbul

Iceskating on the frozen Golden Horn.

The Arrival

Kara arriving in Yesilcam.

Duet

Mr Fleas and the Emerald Fish singing together. Sometimes they have to.

Crossing Bosphorus

Evil Twins

Marionette Theatre

Grand Bazaar

Broken glass

Bert

Bert is a mole. He suffers from claustrophobia.

Ninjago 2nd season, the trailer

Lego - Ninjago 2nd season, Design

I had the pleasure of working on Ninjago, the Lego TV- series, for Wilfilm Copenhagen. From beginning of season 2 till the end of season 3 I worked together with Bjarne Hansen on the Design of the series, including set-, prop- and characterdesigns (characters only when it came to beasts and scary  non-minifigure-creatures). The design team was completed by Frederic Bertrand, Robert Brandt and Niels Bach. Many of the designs made the rounds - initial done by one of the team, worked upon by somebody else, back again to the initial designer - some back and forth which makes it in most cases impossible to name a single author of the file. The ones I post consist of the file overlap of the ones I like best and the ones I share a sufficiently big part of the ownership.

Not all of them are posted in their last and final version.