A land Down Under

I am thrilled to announce that I have accepted a posi­tion at the Oscar-​​winning stu­dio Ani­mal Logic in Syd­ney, Aus­tralia. Know­ing the qual­ity of their work and the cool projects they work on, I am very proud and excited to be part of their incred­i­bly tal­ented team.

Being more of a summer-​​than-​​winter-​​guy, I am also happy to skip the harsh Euro­pean win­ter this year and head straight back into a warm sum­mer Down Under. Last Christ­mas I spent a cou­ple of great weeks tour­ing Aus­tralia and I can­not think of a bet­ter place to be.

Sunset near Mildura, Victoria

Sun­set near Mil­dura, Victoria

What this means...

For Stu­dio Lampion

Not much, really. In fact my part­ners will con­tinue to run the stu­dio I helped build up with­out me. They are very sup­port­ive of my deci­sion and I’m leav­ing on ami­ca­ble terms.

For my plug-​​ins and shaders

I will prob­a­bly have less time to spend work­ing on them than I did in the past months. Expect updates and new releases from me to slow down.

For myself

Per­son­ally, I am super-​​happy to be mov­ing to Aus­tralia along with my girl! Our visas have already been approved and flights are booked… noth­ing can stop us now :)

Re: Normality's 50.000 Downloads

A quick follow-​​up to last week’s post about Nor­mal­ity reach­ing 50.000 down­loads: While I’m happy that the soft­ware is so pop­u­lar and that it is being put to good use in stu­dios around the world, what I’m not so thrilled with is the ratio of down­loads to donations.

So far only 13 (!) of the roughly 55.000 down­load­ers have con­tributed to say thanks and to sup­port con­tin­ued devel­op­ment of the soft­ware. Alas, that’s less than 0.1% of all down­load­ers.
Now I never expected to get rich by releas­ing a dona­tion­ware After Effects plug-​​in… but it would def­i­nitely be nice to at least be able to off­set my host­ing costs.

Main­tain­ing and sup­port­ing free soft­ware costs time and money that I am no longer able or will­ing to put in at this rate.

minning.de and bad, old browsers

It’s been brought to my atten­tion that this site doesn’t work too well in Inter­net Explorer 6 and 7. My offi­cial stance on the mat­ter? I could not care less.

I sim­ply refuse to waste any more time deal­ing with Microsoft’s issues. They broke it, they can fix it. minning.de looks fine in all mod­ern browsers and that’s good enough as far as I’m con­cerned.
So peo­ple tell me to give IE8 a try because it’s appar­ently much improved — no. I don’t care. I’ve had enough of Microsoft’s fail­ure to com­ply with 10-​​year-​​old stan­dards and I’m not inter­ested in whether they have finally caught up with the rest of the pack.

Same thing with Win­dows 7. After the hideous, bloated mess that is Vista, I am not giv­ing a Microsoft OS another chance. They clearly have other pri­or­i­ties than what I am look­ing for in an oper­at­ing sys­tem.
The main thing that both­ered me about Vista was that it looked like they let a bunch of ama­teur Win­dow­Blinds the­mers run wild with the inter­face. How am I sup­posed to per­form accu­rate color cor­rec­tions when I’m blinded by the flashy GUI? I quite inten­tion­ally didn’t set up my work­place to be a translu­cent, turquoise Fisher-​​Price envi­ron­ment and I’d pre­fer my com­puter desk­top to reflect that choice. Just stay out of my way, OS!

In the eter­nal words of Weird Al Yankovic: “Poke out my eyes, man!”

Appar­ently Microsoft has a vastly dif­fer­ent opin­ion there as they some­how inex­plic­a­bly man­aged to make the inter­face look even more gar­ish and tacky in Win­dows 7. Words fail me.

Now I’m def­i­nitely not a huge Apple fan — in fact the only time I turn on my Mac is to com­pile soft­ware. But I must hand it to them: At least their stuff looks pro­fes­sional and not like it’s aim­ing to woo preschoolers.

A Night at the Cathedral Teaser

Our ani­ma­tion stu­dio, Stu­dio Lam­pion, has finally posted a teaser trailer for our short film A Night at the Cathe­dral. The com­plete film will soon be shown at film festivals.

Watch Online

Down­load Quick­time (7 MB)

Watch at Youtube

Enjoy!

Introducing Studio Lampion

At long last, I’ve found some time to post on my per­sonal web­site again. Celu­light and Flood­gate have been final­ized a long time ago, and so has a new ver­sion of Nor­mal­ity, with some amaz­ing new fea­tures and much bet­ter inte­gra­tion of all its var­i­ous effects.
I’ve also made a deci­sion that will dis­ap­point some read­ers and users of my soft­ware: The new ver­sions of my After Effects plug-​​ins will not be released pub­licly. I have a vari­ety of rea­sons for this deci­sion; one being that my pre­vi­ous expe­ri­ences with sell­ing plug-​​ins for After Effects did not amount to any­thing that would have made the chores that go along with it worth­while. At the same time, I put so much work and effort into the soft­ware that not using them would be not only a shame, but also foolish.

How­ever, the main rea­son the plug-​​ins are not avail­able to the pub­lic is that I spent the bet­ter part of this rainy sum­mer prepar­ing for the open­ing of our own ani­ma­tion shop, Stu­dio Lam­pion. I believe that my soft­ware will ben­e­fit our work, pipeline and clients in more ways than one and giv­ing this advan­tage out of our hands can’t be a clever move.

So there it is: I’m finally open­ing my own ani­ma­tion stu­dio! Cer­tainly a dream come true and some­thing I’ve been think­ing of for a very long time.

Stu­dio Lam­pion is an ani­ma­tion stu­dio in the heart of Berlin, Ger­many, founded by my good friend Matthias Koenig and myself. In the long term, we’ll be focus­ing our atten­tion on non-​​photorealistic ani­ma­tion for film and TV, but for starters we’ll be bid­ding on any­thing we feel capa­ble of pro­duc­ing. So if there’s any­thing you need done animation-​​wise… drop me a line!

Frontpage Part Deux is no more...

Phew, that was close… with two CGTalk front­pages with my Demo Reel this month plus the free release of my After Effects plu­g­ins, my band­width was run­ning pretty close to its limit. I don’t think it would have got­ten through another day with­out pass­ing the limit, mean­ing I’d have to actu­ally pay for the priv­i­lege of hav­ing vis­i­tors down­load my reel!

So in a way, it’s a good thing they real­ized it shouldn’t be plugged twice and took it off a few min­utes ago… then again, I don’t know how often one piece of work gets plugged twice on CGTalk, so I’m quite happy anyway!