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.