CGSociety :: Production Focus
1 September 2009, by Paul Hellard

This Filmakademie Baden-Wuerttemberg short film caught my eye the other day, released onto the web as a showing of a thesis final year film of a young director, Moritz Mayerhofer.

Moritz Mayerhofer started filmmaking and working with animation tools in 1995 when he joined a video community at school. Together with friends he created one short film each year until he had his A-Levels. In 2003 he got into the Filmakademie Baden-Wuerttemberg in Germany, to study animation. After three years he took up an exchange program at le Gobelins, Paris. There he started the visual development and design for 'Urs', which was his thesis-project. Now, three years later, he has graduated with that film at the 'Institute of Animation' at the Filmakademie.

At the Filmakademie, students are free to decide what they do as their thesis project. “Whether you do a VFX commercial or even a sand animation short film, you have the full artistic liberty,” describes Moritz. “I knew from the very first moment that I wanted to create a short-film. After my last project 'CAPs' (a trailer for the Stuttgart Animation Festival) I was determined my thesis was to be a very atmospheric film. I really love the cinema and wanted to create a film that is on the one hand something for the big screen with deep atmospheric images, but on the other hand has a story that is touching and believable. I really like to work conceptually and when I took 'Contrast' as my key-point for the whole story, the ideas started to spray out of my mind: Shadow - Light, Young - Old, Past - Future, Life - Death.”

A little help
"I'm very happy about the whole process as I got a lot of feedback and help," Moritz says. "It started in the script phase when I had some great comments by my teacher Andreas Hykade and the other students on my course. I realized that sometimes less is more and I cut many useless plot points out of the story."

For the production itself, I really want to mention my brilliant Character TD Jonas Jarvers who did some amazing rigs in PMG Messiah as well as FX-Animator Jan Locher who spent weeks on animating 2D breath and fire in TV Paint.

"In total, the team grew to about 20 people. From guys who liked to help me with the matte-paintings, 2.5D environments, Shading, Rendering and of course Peter Gromer who did the music and Michael J. Diehl for the sound. I'm very thankful to everyone who helped me on the film (the whole credit-list can be found on the Urs website). It wouldn't have been possible to make it without them.