Groei Mee , 2007, (0:30 min)

Commercial for Groen Links, one of the Dutch Green parties. My first professional visual effects job.

Software: Maya, Digital Fusion.

For this exercise we were assigned a writing student and a painter and told to create an interactive representation of one or more of that painter’s works. In my case that painter was Caspar David Friedrich, the German romantic era painter.

While researching his work we found that there are certain elements Friedrich constantly refers to in his work and we chose to focus on these elements rather than on a specific painting. The elements we chose were the ruins of Eldena, the fact that most of his paintings of people have them facing away from us (especially inspired by the Wanderer in the mist), loneliness, and the dreariness of death and decay.

We combined these elements into a simple moving painting where the only control the user has is the progress of time. With this slider time slowly passes, the ruins crumble, the character gets older and eventually dies and all colour fades away. There are several distinct steps along the slider and it cannot go back (time, after all, cannot go back either). Move it too fast and you will miss some steps.

Controls:
Use the mouse to drag the slider
R to reset
Esc to quit

click to download game (12mb)

Claymation, 2006, (1:30 min)

Clay animation made in 2 days (one day character creation, one day animating) with two people. Soundtrack created by Daan Arens.

Software: Final Cut Pro, iStopmotion.