minning.de - Stefan Minning: CG Artist and Developer

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.

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!