Digital Worlds "made in Germany"

Digital Worlds "made in Germany"

Whenever people talk about special effects, you usually hear them mention the big Hollywood blockbusters like Men In Black, Titanic, Godzilla and Jurassic Park where the digital wizardry literally comes out of the screen at you. The average cinema-goer would logically think that the term "digital post production" is something to be equated with the creation of aliens, explosions, spaceships and monsters than anything else.
And, of course, it is terribly expensive, so there is no way that these effects could be achieved in Germany, so the argument might go ...

Far from it.

In fact, little does the layman know that, as a TV viewer, he is being literally bombarded, day in day out, by countless digital effects during the commercial breaks between the television programmes.

The advertising industry has been a prime mover in the development of the digital special effects scene in Germany over the past few years and, slowly but surely, there is a growing awareness among film and television producers that digital effects are an interesting tool for the realisation of their projects that doesn't always have to mean astronomical bills.

Pool of talent

Pinocchio, bibo tv

Moreover, there is an ever increasing pool of talent in Germany able to meet the artistic and technical challenges of creating special effects (SFX) of an international standard that can hold its own with anything coming from the big US post houses.

Indeed, the quality of the new generation of German SFX artists was underscored at this year's animago Awards held during the FMX conference and festival in Stuttgart when the first two prizes in the animation category went to graduates from the local Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg in Ludwigsburg.

While Ludwigsburg has been the first stop for some digital experts on the way to a successful career working for Roland Emmerich in Hollywood on Independence Day and Godzilla, other training grounds for fostering "home grown" talent include the Kunsthochschule für Medien in Cologne, the College for Design in Wiesbaden, the Technical College in Furthwangen and Babelsberg's Academy for Film & Television (HFF).

The high standard of the students being turned out by the colleges is very much state-of-the-art, but, as any practitioner will tell you, the course of training doesn't automatically qualify one to start working as a SFX supervisor, even though it provides an excellent basis. As Gert Zimmermann of the SZM Studios in Munich or Stefanie Stalf of CA Scanline on the Bavaria Film lot point out, there is no substitute to practical experience of working on con-crete projects for a digital effects post production house.

Nationwide locations

Thanks to Germany's federal structure, there is no particular concentration of the SFX scene in one central location like there is, say, with London in the United Kingdom. True, many companies are based in the traditional media locations like Munich, Berlin, Hamburg and North Rhine-Westphalia, but other areas - such as the Rhein-Main region and Baden-Württemberg - can also speak proudly of their knowhow in the field of digital SFX.

While the number of companies specialising in this rapidly expanding sector grows by the week, this article serves to cast the spotlight on just a handful of players to show that Germany does not have to shirk any international comparison.

First stop on our tour of Germany is the picturesque town of Bad Homburg to the north of Frankfurt where we find the headquarters of the family-run concern bibo TV which has been involved in classic film production for the last 40 years (coproduction credits include Fellini's Ginger & Fred) and also made a name for itself as a pioneer in digital post production.

Nationwide locations

Neverending Story III

Thanks to Germany's federal structure, there is no particular concentration of the SFX scene in one central location like there is, say, with London in the United Kingdom. True, many companies are based in the traditional media locations like Munich, Berlin, Hamburg and North Rhine-Westphalia, but other areas - such as the Rhein-Main region and Baden-Württemberg - can also speak proudly of their knowhow in the field of digital SFX.

While the number of companies specialising in this rapidly expanding sector grows by the week, this article serves to cast the spotlight on just a handful of players to show that Germany does not have to shirk any international comparison.

First stop on our tour of Germany is the picturesque town of Bad Homburg to the north of Frankfurt where we find the headquarters of the family-run concern bibo TV which has been involved in classic film production for the last 40 years (coproduction credits include Fellini's Ginger & Fred) and also made a name for itself as a pioneer in digital post production.


Neverending Story III, bibo tv
For example, bibo spent over five years on the in-house development of its "Toccata" high-resolution digital film compositing system which was officially unveiled in 1992 and used in the $10 million German-Belgian-French coproduction Taxandria by Raoul Servais, which starred Armin Mueller-Stahl and Elliot Spears and was six years in the making.

One of the "effects" achieved with "Toccata" was a digital pan: director Servais decided during post production that he wanted to add a more dramatic dimension to a particular scene by panning the camera from one set on the right to the other on the left. Seven live action shots were scanned from 35mm film and combined with miniatures, computer-generated elements, and retouched mattes to create this post production digital pan.

Since Taxandria, bibo TV has worked on the effects for The Neverending Story III and made Pinocchio's nose grow (among much other wizardry) for the live-action family adventure film starring Martin Landau, and has started to make the transition from being a pure service provider to that of content provider through the forging of production partnerships with US partners.

Meanwhile, just down the road in Wiesbaden is Upstart! Filmproduktion which concentrated from its launch in 1994 on the post production of commercials, industrial films, features and TV movies. A Berlin outpost of Upstart!, on the other hand, focuses on the production or co-production of TV movies and feature films, including two TV movies for ProSieben this year with TTD Checkpoint Berlin.

Upstart!'s past feature film credits include seven minutes of digital special effects in 1996 for the Warner Bros. co-production Die Story von Monty Spinneratz as well as SFX and sophisticated opening credits for Til Schweiger's directorial debut Der Eisbär last year. On the TV front, the Wiesbaden company invested some DM 500,000 in the creation of the effects for Germany's first creature TV movie, Das Biest im Bodensee, for RTL, which involved 20,000 man hours over 18 months to conjure up the 3-D character animation for the main figure.

Moving eastwards to Frankfurt, one comes to the birthplace of Germany's leading post production house, Das Werk, who focuses on high-end digital image processing, computer animation and special effects.

Traditionally, the clients of Das Werk had been advertising agencies and producers of commercials because of its location in Frankfurt, but the decision to open a facility in Munich in 1995 to win the film and TV industry over to the deployment of digital effects soon came up trumps.

Indeed, a third of the company's turnover now comes from this area of production, with effects undertaken for Joseph Vils-maier's Comedian Harmonists, Tom Tykwer's inter-national hit Run Lola Run and, most recently, Peter Thorwarth's comedy Bang Boom Bang, Giuseppe Tornatore's The Legend Of 1900 (in collaboration with the Babelsberg fx.Center and an Italian studio), Wim Wenders' new feature The Million Dollar Hotel, and the $ 40 million Leslie Nielsen comedy 2001 - A Space Travesty which was shot partly in Munich by Helkon Media this summer.

Lola rennt, Das Werk

Lola rennt, Das Werk
Now bolstered by its merger with Uli Felsberg and Wim Wenders' Road Movies and the stock market flotation, Das Werk is looking to expand and consolidate its market leadership position in the German SFX world.

But its sights are not restricted only to Germany. Last May, the company became one of the founders of a new pan-European initiative, MAX - European Post Production Alliance, along with Mikros Image (France), Blue Gold (Italy) and ACE (Belgium), to boost the European post production industry.

"We are aiming to provide all the services to attract and keep post production projects in Europe", declares MAX managing director Alex Patrick-Smith. "If the European post industry is going to entice US film studios to do their post in Europe, we all have to pitch in together and collectively offer an attractive proposition. Here in Europe, we have the equipment, flair and talent to deliver spectacular results and the highest level of service".

Even before Das Werk set up in Munich, the traditional ARRI concern had put the Bavarian capital on the SFX map in 1994 by becoming the first production house on the European continent to offer Kodak's CINEON digital image-processing system.

Since then, there has been hardly a major German release where ARRI Digital has not been involved in some way or other: the most recent contracts have included Bernd Eichinger's feature directorial debut Der große Bagarozy - ranging from a morphing effect transforming a poster of Maria Callas into the actress Corinna Harfouch to Til Schweiger plunging to oblivion from a tall building, as well as effects for Friedemann Fromm's Schlaraffenland, Sönke Wortmann's St. Pauli Nacht, Rainer Kaufmann's Long Hello and Short Goodbye and Hans-Günther Bücking's Die Häupter meiner Lieben.

Finally, our whistle-stop tour takes a leap from Munich to the outskirts of Berlin and the leafy avenues of Potsdam which serves as the home for such dynamic young players as Thilo Rex's Stardust Entertainment and Effectory Filmeffekte.

Comedian Harmonists, Das Werk

Comedian Harmonists, Das Werk

Originally, Stardust was set up to develop and produce Stevie Stardust, the first 3-D computer animated children's TV series à la Toy Story. Germany's Super RTL came on board as coproducer - they plan to make Stevie into their channel mascot and the US production and sales company Hallmark Entertainment was recruited as the project's international partner. Sales have already been made to the UK's ITV Network, TF 1 in France and Italy's Mediaset, proof enough that SFX "made in Germany" are internationally competitive.

Practically around the corner is Effectory Filmeffekte which was initially set up by German distributor-producer Wolfram Tichy (TiMe) to handle the special effects for the wacky Canadian-German scifi series LEXX - The Dark Zone which is now going into production of its third season this autumn.

In the meantime, around 70% of the company's contracts come from foreign clients, such as Daybreak Pictures' production of Dale Bradley's Kid's World from New Zealand as well as the children's film The Ball which had its premiere at the Kinderfilmfest in Berlin this year and was coproduced by TiMe's production arm.