Chances are good that mad, sire and me will visit FMX 2008 and Bitfilm-Festival from 1st to 8th of Mai in Stuttgart. Will have have a small talk about the making of Iso9241 and about our future attempts on realtime animation.
If you are also at the festival and want to muse about realtime animation, motion design or the death of the demoscene drop me a mail.
On 29th of April we will have another little demo scene event at my office in Berlin: right at the Alexanderplatz in the 9th floor of Haus des Reisens. We will start at 19:00 and but you have to arrive before 8pm because they will lock the front door.
We will show the latest demoscene releases from Breakpoint, Gathering and TUM. One or two of our own productions might accidently glitch into the selection too. We have pretty much room, so we welcome anybody interested in motion design and realtime animation to join us for a beer or two(which you have to bring for yourself).
During another job at Volkswagen I've got enough time and motivation on the daily train trips to update my website. Some people complained about its complexity, so I made a complete redesign.
The biggest decision, of course, was to drop support of German and go to English only. Somehow this is still feels like a weird decision; those are strange times when people no longer support their native language...
What a weekend! After three days of working, talking, designing, drinking and dancing the
Breakpoint 2008 is over. I met so many old friends
and made a lot of new ones that I am still full of adrenalin. Although working on our new
64kb intro "Invoke" turned out to be harder than I thought, I am very happy with the result. My head is
already filled with ideas for upcoming productions. We have already been qualified for Intel Demo Competition.
And then there are Function, Evoke, Assembly, Buenzli, nVision, BCN,...
After a gray winter, here comes the summer of demo scene :)
However I will spend the new 10 days relaxing and playing beach volley at Turkey. Ten days without computers, work and pouet? I will survive...
There is a very nice article about the demo scene at Spiegel online. It also covers the intel demo competition and has some very kind words for our production. Freely translated to English it might be..
... ISO9242 is full of unfolding robot sperms, flowing light particles, computer teapots and 3d ducks... The music got wild as well
I couldn't have described in better!
After two months of hard work, the contributions to the Intel Demo Competition have now been published. All releases are of excellent quality and we are very proud to be part of this selection. For Iso9241 we still had to use our DirectX7 engine which Mad extended with some new particle and rendering effects.
We are suprised and excited at once that Still has been selected to participate in the Intel-Demo Competition. Let's see if we can match the extremely tough competetion of XPLSV, ASD, Fairlight und Synesthetics!
"Still" is a network of senior members of the demoscene coming from groups like lkcc, bauknecht, matrix and haujobb.
At the end of a very exciting week, I am sitting in the train from Stuttgart back to Berlin. Together with Sire and Mad, I attended the fmx-festival, where perfect love has been nominated in the category "Demo". And we won! I still can't believe it. Avid sponsored an "Avid XPress Studio essentials" worth about 5000,- Euros!
The festival was really cool. Although it focuses on professional digital content creation, it is probably not very different from demo scene parties, except maybe that nobody is sleeping under the tables. "Gargaj" of "Conspiracy" presented a brillant making of "Project Nemesis".
I also had a lot of very interessting talks to people from "big" companies, including Autodesk and Microsoft and I was honestly surprised that such global players can have normal faces you can talk to very openly and in depth. Besides from extremely impressive lectures from "Pixar" and "Digital Domain" the highlights were the parties at Rockers33 and at the attic of the "Haus der Wirtschaft".
After being nominanted for three scene.org-awards (best direction, best graphics and breakthrough performance) and winning in one of the most regarded festivals in Germany we got new enthusiasm for future productions. Although they will probably not be released under the label Bauknecht, the future is Still open.
I am also thinking about visiting Assembly 2006 (which I believe will feature the best demo competition of the last years) and I am looking forward to Evoke 2006. If things go really well we might even...
From the animago-awards (which were also presented at the fmx-festival) I was extremely impressed by two entries: 90° (which won the second price in education) and "akjlsdf". I highly recomment viewing both. I was somewhat disappointed from the winner in the category "Composition" because I hoped for "Apple on the tree" by XXX (the girl friend of ??? diver aka. monostep).
Our demo perfect love has been selected for to demo-show at bit-film festival in Hamburg. We already visisted the festival last year and had a lot of fun with all the people from 49games / Farbrausch. Rumors are that Bonzaj from Plastic will be there too. And if things go really well Cynic joins in as well.
After some critique on my old site I spent a week-end on redesiging the front-end of pixtur.de. The back-end is still driven by my old clumpsy perl-cms-script but my motivation to invest time into this construction site is almost zero.
The new design mainly builds on the experience about decent html/css-design I made on the streber project. Another interesting point was my recent activity in the open software scene at sourceforge.net. It seems that a site without a blog is out of date. So here it started: the pixtur.de - blog. On free time I will drop my musings about demo-scene, computer-art, php and perl programming and general life. If I am bored I will add a comment-function as well.
The Evoke is the second largest demo-scene event in Germany. Lacking time and money I already missed the Assembly 2005, so I was really looking forward to my favorit scene meeting. The time before the party was extremely tough since I had to finish a small project for the IFA in Berlin and wanted to release a new demo-project together with Sire and Mad: perfect love. Sire had already delivered a very cool tune and Mad’s 3D-Engine was still “running perfectly” so I was under preasure. Some of the 3d-scenes were ready but getting the look of the first concept-scribbles with Directx7 was not easy. Most of the demo was timed and designed in the two days before Evoke, at the train and on the party. The result was ok (if not as perfect as the title might provoke). For me it’s actually the best production so far (fern was for learning, Trocken was for the brain, "perfect love" was for the heart only). We made the 3rd place in the demo compo and got some excellent reviews as pouet.net. If anything works fine I will write a “making of” hugi magazine.
The first place was Final Audition made by plastic from Poland. Those guys are really impressive and we had the honor of a long chat with bonzaj. This guy is scary: absolutely brillant and perfectly gentle at once. I really hope he does some more releases in the scene before being sacked in by the game industry or a major graphic card manufacturer.
The plans for releasing a next production are vague. Cynic already invested some work into a new 64kb-engine but it’s very far from being useable. Mad starts with his new job and probably will not have much time for the new DirectX9 - engine. For my part, I have some rough ideas I want to try out. They are more about art than 3d show-off so using the old subraum-engine should be sufficient. Maybe I can even convince nero to again join the team. We “still” have 8 months til Breakpoint 2006. Counting down.
