About This Site
I’ve created a page with all the information about this website including technical details of how this site is run.
About Me
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some quick things about me
- I make movies using blender
- I play guitar
I was born in Switzerland in Zurich and am still here after 20 years. I just finished high school (Gymnasium in Switzerland) and will go to university soon. 8 years ago my teacher showed me blender after seeing my interest in animations I made in powerpoint, which was the starting spark for all the interests I have now. Of course I began doing creative and technical things earlier but from that moment on
I look back fondly so let me recollect how I came to this point.
[topics i 3d printed
Early Days
I always liked working The notion of people making their childhood seem like the defining momen …. i find stupif. I was a normal child living a normal childhood in Switzerland (which is not normal in relation to the world). My interests where in drawing and especially playing and building with legos. It was an obsession; day, night and everything in-between was used … .
[image of the short film]
My first public work was a short film I shot and edited over the span of a few days. At the beginning of 2016 I took an old camcorder that my dad lent me. There was no artistic idea behind it, I just wanted to film a model train crash into a playmobil car (i cared too much for lego to crash into them). The video can be found on youtube here. Notice the messy background and but I found it very enjoyable to work on this short film, I don’t know why I didn’t make more.
Finding Blender
[image my first blend]
In the spring of 2017 my teacher showed me the free 3d software blender. I was interested in 3d animation because of the 3d lego short films on youtube. I watched them for hours upon hours. While on the one hand I loved the more “artisanal” stop motion lego films I really liked the cg animated ones too. So my teacher showed me Tears of Steal and Sintel for me to see what blender was capable of; it hooked me on the spot.
That evening I downloaded blender 2.78 on my dads old desktop computer. The software looked daunting and I did not understand anything. My only other interaction with 3d software was a CAD software I used in a workshop in 2015 where I modeled and then 3d printed a keychane. Because of that experience I thought that 3d software were all equally complicated, while they are complicated there is a clear difference between blender and CAD software. As my english level was not sufficient at that time I watched a german blender beginner tutorial, missing out on the doughnut series. So my first blend was a ring which was rendered on the blender render engine (the first and last time I didn’t use cycles). This first success felt great and motivated me to keep going.
Blender Era
YouTube was a great resource for getting better at using blender. I went on the computer first thing when I came home and would stay there until late at night. My parents would force me to go to bed and said I could wake up early, which I did many times. Here you can see some of my work during that time around 2017 to 2018.
When I got my first phone for high school I also created an instagram account. After the 6 months exam period I got kicked out for having insufficient grades but this only motivated me more to use blender. The reason why my grades weren’t good was because I did not really study for any exams. It was a fun time which I will not forget but It was also good that I then changed school because I could focus more on interesting things. At the same time I created my instagram account where I started posting some of my renders. This was a fun time because I did not give a single thought to school and focused my energy on blender. I entered a small blender comunity and exchanged messages with many fellow blender users. Here are some renders from my instagram.
Some of my highlights from that time were:
- Clinton Jones (pwnisher) from Corridor commenting on my render
- Some other user posting my work on their account (very flattering)
- A local politician messaging me …
[image of clinton jones comment]
Making Movies
Most of my renders where static images. I did create a short fake trailer, which you can see here but . My mom saw an ad for a swiss wide film contest and we went to see a screening. It motivated me to start making my own movies with vfx. At the same time one of my friends started to work on vfx too on a cracked version of adobe premier pro. We went into the woods and filmed some things, sometimes also using bb guns, and then we added muzzle flashes and other things.
During that time I made many different kinds of movies, mostly just individual shots though. For example I made these spaceship shots on my phone using videoleap or I also just filmed my familys travels.
When the time to send my movie to the film contest came closer I had to find an idea for a movie to shoot. I ended up filming my brother in the woods and my towns suroundings and then freestyle narating over it. The end product was a very weird film that deserved not being accepted in the contest. On top of that, two days before I had to submit the movie I saw the vfx behind the scenes from blade runner 2049 and was annoyed I didn’t have the time to put some vfx in my movie. I ended up creating a subversion of the everything was a dream and had a spaceship land at the end of the movie which was never explained nor made any sense in the movie. You can see that part of the movie here, the full movie is too embarrassing to post here I’m afraid.
Two years later I wanted to make a movie for the film contest again, this time I said I would take more time and be more careful. I started working on the movie five months before the submit date and it was fun doing so.
Present
Now I’m free from the mess that was school and I finally decided to improve the way I live. This website should be as a sign that things are changing for the better but also as a motivator to keep me working on projects even when they get harder. I also intend on posting more on my YouTube channel.