Yesterday I watched Roland Emmerich’s ‘10,000 BC’.

Before any movie starts you get to see a trailer. So before I start my report I’d like to provide you with this trailer from the upcoming German feature film ‘Urmel voll in Fahrt’ that was animated by Ambient Entertainment from Hanover. A lot of current and former students from the FH Hannover (University of Applied Science and Arts, Hanover) worked on this project so I think I should promote it a little bit. ;)

Back to 10,000 BC: Why did I watch it? Because of the cool advertisement poster at Central Station and because two students from the FH Hannover also worked on this film as compositor and renderer. And at least compositing and rendering are very well done… But the story is so bad… I don’t even know an English swear word that is bad enough to describe it! ;)

I mean it’s not only about the issue that successful movies nowadays always seem to need a ‘prophecy’ or a ‘chosen one’. You can get used to it as long as the rest of the plot is working well. Although it’s really remarkable that people seem to lust for messiah stories that much. Is it because everybody doubts that society can deal with it’s problem on it’s own anymore or is it because everybody wants to be or at least wants to identify with a messiah like character for two hours to escape their life as a nobody?! Who knows…

Anyways, this movie is about a chosen one and a prophecy and has no good plot around it, although the setting had high potential. The idea of placing the story at the dawn of civilization is opening up so many possibilities. You could deal with questions like: How to define civilisation? Is war a consequence of it? You could think about which kind of persons did and which did not fit into this new world…

10,000 BC shows you a white hunter called D’Leh who seeks to fulfil his destiny to free some enslaved black guys, a few of his white buddies and his girlfriend from the claws of an alien-pharaoh-god-creature. During his journey he meets some oversized animals which I actually liked because they give you the feeling that mankind is not yet superior to its environment in that time. The bad guys have a strange Arabic look (Arabic or Persian looking villains seem to be hip at the moment…) and are building pyramids in the desert. After some hilarious dialogues, some technically nice cg shots and some very grainy, low quality shots that are really offending the viewer’s eyes you get to see the kitschiest ending in movie history I think which I will not spoil for those who still want to see this movie. ;)

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.

Hello there!

It looks like I managed to finish the work on this website just in time. Still it might be a little buggy especially if you use an older browser e.g. Internet Explorer 6.0. I’m going to fix that as soon as possible.

So what’s the purpose of this website? Due to the fact that I am studying communications design at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Hanover I needed an independent platform to publish some of my work samples on the internet.
I also thought of writing a blog for some time and now that I am going to study at University of Technology, Sydney for the next five month I decided that it is about time.
The semester abroad that lies ahead of me is the main reason why I wanted to publish this site completely in English. It might also be an effective way to improve my English skills.

So feel free to advice me of any mistake you can find!

Finally special thanks go to Felix Middendorf who was incredible helpful and patient when I was knocking together this internet presence. I certainly could not have done this without his help. You can find him blogging on this website.

Now I hope you enjoy your stay on this website.

Yours,
Marian