Phew, this is becoming kind of an exhausting week! Although… currently I’m doing what I’m best at: creating digital garbage! ;)
Ok seriously: There will be a presentation of a few shots of Ambient’s current project ‘Animals United’ (German: ‘Konferenz der Tiere’) based on a short novel by the famous German author Erich Kästner at the ‘American Film Market’ in November. Last Friday I was told that in one of those shots there’s a garbage can. This garbage can is not intended to contain any beverage packagings. Unfortunately until last friday this garbage can was filled with nothing else but beverage cans, beverage bottles and beverage boxes. So my supervisor and I had to model a whole bunch of garbage items which I also have to texture now. All within a week. Actually this is a nice opportunity for me to get a little into texturing and away from all the tree trunks and branches I’ve been modelling before.

I also managed to complete the report on my semester abroad at UTS which I mentioned in my last entry. It’s just a short and sketchy summary and it’s mainly written for future exchange students of the German Academic Exchange Service. You can download it here in German Language if you’re interested in reading it.

So it’s really over! In almost five hours I will be sitting on my plane to Seoul where I am going to stay for one night and I’ll be back in Germany in less than 48 hours. When I think of the first days here in Sydney, when we had to stay in an uncomfortable youth hostel and were searching for a flat, minutes seemed to pass by like ages. The last week on the other hand seemed to be exactly the opposite.

As you can imagine, I’m very sad at the moment to leave all the lovely people behind that I met here in this house, at uni or at some of the parties we had here.

Goodbye to all of you! I really hope our ways will cross again some day!

I’ll miss you very much and I’ll never forget you even if I’m getting old and grey some day! I promise!

So, to all those who I couldn’t contact yet via internet - if you want to keep in touch I’d very much appreciate if you’d contact me through the following ways:
Skype: san_marian
ICQ: 162523240
Email: marian.sander[AT]googlemail.com
I think I’m also going to create a Facebook account, as soon as I’m home.

But still… I’d also like to sum up a little bit what happened since my last entries… as long as memories are still ‘fresh’.

There was a really great party in our house at the beginning of June - I think with guests from any country you can imagine. As one of those guests said: It was a little bit like the UN, but obviously a lot more fun. ;)

Maybe a picture from the morning after can give you an impression of the dimensions of that party.

And that was only the garden…

Next I finished my studies on June 5^th so after that I had a couple of weeks that could be called ‘holidays’. Actually this was the first time since the beginning of my studies where I was not involved in any study projects! Well, unfortunately an almost-non-stop rain started two days before the end of the semester that appeared to last until one week ago. So I spent some time at uni to improve the animation that I created during the semester. And, believe it or not, I was following the way of the German football team through Euro 2008 although most of the games were at 4:45am… I think Sydney’s pubs and bars have rarely seen so many crazy European guys at that time of day.

I also used one of the rare rain-breaks to go on a whale watching tour which was a lot of fun not only because of the whales but also because of the fast speedboat we rode to see them… but maybe due to the cold wind on the open sea or due to the fact that almost everybody else in this house got a cold: I got a mean little cough and a running nose… Thanks tons of ricola herbs and fisherman’s friends I got rid of it before the start of the last sunny week!

Therefore I spent my birthday and the day after in the Blue Mountains which I would consider as the most impressive landscape I’ve ever seen. Unfortunately my camera was not nearly able to capture the whole beauty of it but maybe these pictures can give you at least a little glimpse of this experience.

The top of the huge cliffside that can be visited by people is very tourist friendly and a little bit overcrowded but if you go down the giant staircase (first I thought it was only a name…) you can enter a beautiful rainforest and go for a bushwalk.

Then, three days ago we said goodbye to a couple of American students that we met first on one of the first UTS parties and saw from time to time during our stay here.

Two days ago we had a very nice but also a little bit sad farewell party because three of us are leaving this house now. Anyway I think it was a very nice way to say goodbye!

Today all of the housemates came together for a last time to enjoy some very tasty Korean food and bid a last farewell.

And now I’m sitting here on my bed, torn between greatest joy to see my family, my girlfriend, my friends, my fellow students and my home again and deepest grief for leaving so many people behind that I became so fond of. It’s really quite overwhelming to me…

But… to cheer everybody up a little bit… here is something I almost forgot:
This is a little picture of something that I won’t order again on the plane this time. Guess why!

… how are you?

Bondi Beach, May 7th 2008 at 6:35am.

For the highres version click here.

I’m afraid I have to tell you that my fellow exchange student Bernd Peterwerth will never return to Hanover again. See for yourself what happened…

Ahoi. It just came to my mind that I left Germany about one month ago. Time seems to pass by so quickly by now.

Since my last post I had to spend a lot of time in the computer labs at UTS. Although it’s quite comfortable I had to get used to the damn well functioning air conditioning. I think it’s less cold in Germany at the moment than in those labs!

But of course I also explored some new places in Sydney like Manly for example where I went to meet Anna, a former fellow student of mine from high school in Germany. To get there I had to take a ferry - which was great - and to get to the ferry I had to go to the Opera House - which was also great. I think in reality it even looks better than on photos. Anyway, to get to the Opera House I crossed the Botanic Garden which is absolutely beautiful – but guess what? I forgot to take the memory card of my camera with me. I was told that hundreds of those huge fruit bats, that you can see flying around in the evening very often, are resting there during the day. Sadly I didn’t see any of them. So next time when I visit the Botanic Garden I will take my Memory Card with me and search for some bats.

Furthermore I found out that Australia might not beat Germany in the field of bureaucracy in general but in some areas they are not to be underestimated…

This story originally started in Germany. During our studies at our home university my fellow exchange students and I already specialized quite a lot in 3d animation. That’s why all of us wanted to enrol in subjects like ‘Advanced 3D Animation” from the course Master of Animation for example.

To do so we had to send so called e-requests to the UTS Student Centre, what we already did from Germany. Answer to all of us except Bernd who already has his pre-diploma:

‘Undergraduate students are not allowed to do Postgraduate subjects.’

But as all of our Australian professors and lecturers where fine with the idea of letting us participate in those subjects when we arrived in Sydney, we thought it would be easy to go to the responsible office and ask them again to enrol us. At least it only needed to be accepted from the official site. Unfortunately we had to find out that e-requests are the only way to substitute subjects. So we sent new e-requests, mentioning that our request was approved by the responsible course directors. After one week we got a reply saying that our request was forwarded to IT for their approval. Great! (At least they finally managed to press the forward button!) One day later we got our reply from IT saying that due to the fact that we are undergraduate students we would not meet the pre-requirements because we were not postgraduate students.

So Michael, the professor for the Master of Animation course recommended taking some printed emails from the responsible course directors and the international office to the guys from the student centre and sorting it out with them face to face. Guess what they told us there!? ‘Send and e-request and attach those emails!’ There should be no more trouble then and they would wave us through.

I think it’s not necessary to mention that our requests got rejected because we are undergraduate students…!?

The most interesting thing is: The undergraduate subjects we are enrolled in now are taking place at the same time in the same room and are led by the same lecturers as the subjects for the master students. The only difference in my case is that they’ll be listed as ‘3D Animation’ instead of ‘Advanced 3D Animation’ and ‘Introduction to Game Design’ instead of ‘Game Design’ on my final certification. Weird, isn’t it?

But I also experienced an opposite situation. For an interdisciplinary course project we needed to do some camera tracking. Until today UTS owns no tracking software and Mini DV cameras only which are impossible to use for clean tracking. Although Visual Communications is going to acquire ten HDV cameras soon we won’t be able to use them because they will need them for their own purposes. So they ordered the tracking program Boujou and the related Maya plugin Moujou within two days and a Panasonic HD camera within a single week! That is brisk!

Btw.: I’m sorry but the ‘more’ tag doesn’t work properly due to my little knowledge in all this html, css and php stuff. This is why this post apears to be very long. Unfortunatly it seems like I won’t have enough time to fix this during the next few weeks.

Cheers!

Heyho! I didn’t write anything for a few days mostly due to our bad internet connection or just because I was busy. We finished working on the mocap project… as long as we don’t get a call from Germany to go back to the UTS dungeon and shoot some scenes again during the next weeks. ;)
I did also wear the mocap suite for some shots and although it looks absolutely stupid and it’s quite warm inside it is still a lot of fun.
This picture shows me in front of the Viscon Interface that we projected against the studio wall. So the red-green-blue colored guy on left is basically the digital version of me.

On Wednesday we first visited a barbeque for new UTS students where we met some American and Australian students. Afterwards we moved altogether to a pub where we participated in a trivia game. I think we placed fourth or something.
On Thursday there was a cocktail party for international students at UTS where you could get everything from beer to champagne – except cocktails. Anyway… champagne for students… what comes next? Maybe the cafeteria will sell caviar?!

Friday I saw Bondi Beach at night for the first time. Besides all the bars and pubs there’s also something like a public place where people meet to have barbeque and a few drinks. You just need to bring it yourself. Jimbeam-Coke in hand, feet in the pacific, slight guitar music in the background – I think you get the point of it. ;)

Yesterday we visited Tamarama Beach which is like a little sandpit between some cliffs.

Courses will start today. It looks like we will be allowed to enrol in the master subjects that I mentioned before. We will also be involved in an architecture project that is targeted on the realization of a futuristic vision of Sydney. Can’t wait! ;)

Oh… apropos UTS stuff… Did you know that the UTS tower was voted ‘Ugliest Building of Sydney’? I really don’t know how this happened… ;)

… more or less. But as long as you stay in an IMAX 3d cinema you definitely have the feeling you were part of the movie. Yesterday we visited Sydney’s IMAX and I can tell you… it’s really amazing. Although the movie sucks in terms of adapting the original Beowulf saga, the IMAX experience really makes it a must see. And if you look at the camera angles and movement you can clearly see that this movie was made for 3d cinema.

So yeah… here’s a little photo of Manuel and me to prove that we were there. I bet these funny glasses will become absolutely hip during next summer! ;)

Before we had the opportunity to watch this 272-mocap-camera-based piece of pure hardware consumption we had to face the problems that come with an eight camera system like the one UTS owns. Although it was very interesting and sometimes a lot of fun we had to accept that an eight camera system is not almighty. There were still some gaps in your motion capturing data when less than three cameras were able to see one of the markers at the same time. Monday we will meet again at UTS to continue working on this project. I am really looking forward to this.

Between gathering mocap data and watching a mocap data based movie we went through China Town to Darling Habour. So I got to see some new interesting places in Sydney. Here are some photos:

Today I was at UTS again and met some university lecturers including my german and my future australian animation professors. We talked about some subjects that my fellow exchange students and I would like to participate in and maybe there is a little chance to visit an advanced computer animation subject and a game design subject from the master of animation course. That would obviously be absolutly awsome but I know that uni politics can be very obstructive… Some of you should know what I mean. ;)

Anyway, we also visited the computer labs. Macs everywhere… a little bit scary. I suggested that they should rename the uni into iUTS. It still looked very impressive and comfortable at the same time… there are sofas and small chillout corners and of course… air conditioning. Maybe I’ll need a jacked during the animation subjects.

We also visited the motioncapturing facility where we will start working on an interesting short film project with our german university lectuters tomorrow. It is a vicon (I first understoon ‘wacom’ what I found a little bit irritating) system with eight cameras so it really seems to be quite mighty and I’m really looking forward to checking it out.

Finally I would like to provide you with a little snapshot that I took when I left my current housing this afternoon.

So this is what you see, when you leave the building where I currently dwell. You maybe won’t see it in this picture that well but Sydney absolutely reminds me of GTA Vice City…

I just wanted to tell everyone that I’m still alive. The flight was a little bit uncomfortable because it was very warm and it was not very spacious inside the plane. And yeah… if you have the choice between a european kind of breakfast and a korean one I recomend taking the eurpean one…

For the last few days I stayed at a backpacker hostel in Victoria Street near King’s Cross. That was quite… interesting. Just look up some information about King’s Cross and you will know why. When I told some students at UTS where I was currently living they just rolled their eyes and sayed “Don’t go to King’s Cross” at the same time. So I guess it’s some kind of rule in Sydney.

Now I’m living at Bondi Junction a few minutes from the beach so it’s probably going to be quite cool.

I’m going to provide you with further information as soon as possible. Cheers.