EMAIL: martin@kleppmann.de
NAME: Martin Kleppmann
TOPIC: Escape
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Own Way
COUNTRY: Germany
WEBPAGE: http://www.kleppmann.de
RENDERER USED: 
    Blender 2.28

TOOLS USED:
    Adobe Premiere (for cutting individually rendered scenes, fades and title)
    The Gimp (2D graphics)
    VirtualDub (File format conversions)

ANIMATION DESCRIPTION:

    The theme "escape" mentally connected with another idea that I had had in
    mind: To write a song along the lines of "unemployment rises, if you are
    fired you are nothing but an anonymous figure in the unemployment
    statistics, your views of future may be dark, but remember to always view the
    world positively, because that is the only way you can cope with the world".
    The latter idea crystallized in a song lyric around the line "everyone is
    special in his Own Way".

    The point where "escape" comes in is when somebody tries to break out of
    being an anonymous number and attempts to find his own identity. This
    animation shows a man captured inside a metal shell, forced to wear a golden
    mask - a pretty, but unified symbol of his anonymous existence.

    He manages to break out of his confines, but in order to find his identity,
    he must fight through society which constantly produces anonymous numbers.
    This is symbolized by a gigantic factory hall in which the golden masks are
    produced. Finally, he finds an exit.

    The song "Own Way" has been recorded together with my good friends
    Alexander Heß, Johannes Hauser, Jan Kettler and Philipp Scholz (collectively
    known as "Kryptopathen"), and this animation will be used as part of its
    music video.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED:

    All 3D scenes were created using Blender 2.28. (This is my second animation
    I ever made... it just grew and grew.) Rendering was distributed over
    family's and frends' PCs, as it was done in full PAL resolution. It would
    have taken something like 100 hours on a 2.6 GHz PC.

    The newsreader (thanks to my sister Nicola Kleppmann) and the escaping man
    (thanks Johannes Hauser) were recorded in front of a self-made 20 m^2 blue
    screen, using an old analog camcorder (that's why the quality is not so
    wonderful) and digitalized with a capture card. Adobe Premiere was used to
    cut out the non-blue areas, and the resulting bits of movie were placed
    as animated textures on a plane orthogonal to the camera viewing direction
    in the Blender scene, and then rendered. The static noise at the beginning
    is recorded from the camcorder tape.

    No post-processing was performed on the actual frames - Adobe Premiere was
    just used to cut the scenes together, to add a few fades and to add the
    title.

    If you have any questions or comments, don't hesitate to send me an email.