Speakers - PIXELvienna4

Michael Schlingmann

Michael Schlingmann left Germany in 1990 to work as an Animator for Richard Williams on “The Thief and the Cobbler”. He has since animated traditionally on feature films, such as “Space Jam”, “The road to Eldorado”, “The magic sword” and “The Corpse Bride”. In between movies, Michael directed, animated and designed TV commercials and TV series for “Uli Meyer Studios”, “Passion Pictures” and “Richard Purdum productions”. He made the jump into CGI by working as Character lead on Vanguards: “Valiant” and later as lead animator on Universals: “The tale of Despereaux”. He has just finished storyboarding for Tim Burton on “Alice in Wonderland”.

  • Talk - Catching mice with small pieces of cheese

    Delivering quality animation on Universals : “The tale of Despereaux”.
    Michael was lead animator on this project that represents the first fully animated feature film for the leading London based VFX house Framestore CFC.

Damian Hook

Blue Zoo

Animation Director Damian has been at Blue Zoo for over five years working a variety of projects including the BAFTA Nominated Stitch Up Showdown, The Basil Brush Show and Get Squiggling, as well as a number of highly successful promo’s, adverts and shorts for clients including the BBC, ITV, Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network. He’s currently directing the second series of Get Squiggling for CBBC.

  • Talk - The Art and Business of Blue-Zoo Animation Studio

    Animation Directors, Damian Hook and Helen Arntsen, have been working at award winning London based animation studio Blue-Zoo for over 5 years. In that time they have helped create a multitude of projects for the BBC, Sky, Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network, and Disney amongst others. They will be talking you through the stages involved in creating the BAFTA nominated and Film Minute award winning, Stitch Up Showdown series of shorts which are currently airing on Nickelodeon UK.

    From initial concept artwork, scripts and animation right through to the final renders and sound design, all aspects of the production will be discussed in detail to provide both a creative and technical overview of how Blue-Zoo approach their work.

Helen Arntsen

Blue Zoo

Animation Director Helen has been animating, directing and project managing at Blue Zoo five years, notably working on many Promax winning animations, plus directing and animating the BAFTA winning The Wrong Trainers. She is currently directing a rebrand for Nick Jr Mornings as well as a new collection of Nick JrBedtime Stories.

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Tobias Mannewitz

KARAKTER Creative Director

Tobias Mannewitz is one of the founders of the design studio KARAKTER (Berlin).<br/>As an award winning creative director and consultant, his work spans across multiple themes and industries, developing solutions for clients such as Audi, Guerrilla Games or Crytek.

Being a frequent speaker at industry conferences, Tobias Mannewitz enjoys sharing his belief in brand identity, authentic design solutions through intrinsic ideation, and a holistic approach to IP development.

  • Talk - Making of ANNO 1404 Cut Scene Illustrations

    Topics covered:
    How to work remotely with a concept art outsourcing studio
    The importance of a style guide
    In-depth look at the illustrations for the intro cinematics

Julian Kenning

Deep Silver Vienna

Julian Kenning has a traditional art background and education and started a career as a painter on very “classical” analog Medias as canvas and oil. Besides painting and doing exhibitions he was also on tour as a life performance painter on stage in collaboration with the modern dancy company PilotTanzt.

At the beginning of the 90s he started to extend his interest in digital media and got in contact with 3D tools. As autodidact he started to work in the games industry in the late 90s, which used to become a satisfying career ever since. Julian specialized in character design and modelling and a lot of his work can be seen in AAA productions on all platforms.

He started as a freelancer, located in Vienna, working for companies all around the world. In 2004 he joined Rockstar Vienna as full employee and after the studio closure in 2006 Julian was founding member of Games That Matter aka Deep Silver Vienna. As art director he is now in the position to develop and control the visual style of all projects. He works closely with suppliers and partners to deliver games with the desired and planned visual and artistic quality and he designs the specifications for partners and suppliers.

  • Talk - The Art Direction of Cursed Mountain

    Julian, art director at Deep Silver Vienna, will outline the creation of art during the production of Cursed Mountain. He will get into details about character concept and design, extensive research to create authentic assets, and design of atmospheric cut scenes. Cursed Mountain was developed with a unique and innovative business model, the so called Hollywood Model, up until now only known from feature film production. This new workflow required new work and communication methods which made this project even more complex and also even more interesting.

Kaweh Kazemi

Team Vienna

Kaweh Kazemi has been working in software development since 1991 and in game development since 1994. In his career he worked as Programmer, technical Project Lead and most recently he spent several years as Project Manager and Producer at Rockstar Vienna. As the team leader of the Max Payne series for Xbox and PS2 he played a key role in the world wide success of Rockstar Games. He has many years of experience developing video- and computergames for a broad range of platforms.

In 2006 he and former colleagues Markus Hajek, Peter Pisarik, and Erik Pojar from Rockstar Vienna founded Team Vienna (www.teamvienna.at), a small independent game developer from Vienna. The last two years they develop a new MMO called 7Million (www.7million.com) which is
currently in beta.

  • Talk - 7Million Production Workflows

    7Million (www.7million.com) was developed over a period of 2 years. Kaweh Kazemi describes what was needed for a small team to get going
    and deliver a MMO on a relatively small budget. And how they learned he hard way that if you add want “massive” you’ll get “massive”…

Wayne Robson

Wayne Robson is the Author of 6 DVD’s, 2 books, 2 plug-ins for Mudbox 2010 (MudWalker & ReLight), a large amount of digital sculptures and is also a Autodesk Authorised Developer and Autodesk Authorised Publisher. He has taught artists from top films FX houses and games firms from all over the world and his DVD’s on Autodesk Mudbox can be found at some of the top film FX and Game houses in the world.
He is the only person to have released multiple DVD tutorials on both of the major sculpting applications and is the author or Essential Zbrush and ‘Mudbox for Creative Artists’ (Wordware late 09).
Wayne is also the creator of the two highly successful free tutorial series on Mudbox, The Mudbox 2009 QuickStart series and the ‘Mudbox 2009: From the Ground Up’ series. These along with Wayne’s commercial DVD’s have been used as internal Mudbox training by a number of companies all around the world including Sony and Pixar.
Wayne is a prolific digital sculptor who lives with his wife and 2 children deep in the countryside of Derwent Valley in England and can often be found helping Mudbox users discover ways or working in Mudbox they never thought about before.

  • Talk - Sculpting believeable human-esque creatures

    In this workshop Wayne Robson takes you through sculpting a character in Mudbox 2010 explaining how we can twist and use human anatomy while still maintaining believability in a sculpt. This session will cover the creation of an alien human-esque creature.

  • Talk - Traditional aspects of sculpting

    The traditional sculpting world along the techniques used by makeup design can provide new and interesting workflows for all digital sculptors. Many techniques are either not used generally or misunderstood, as such this lecture shows the possibilities we can bring into our sculpts. In this lecture Wayne Robson outlines what we can all learn from them and how we can apply it to what we do regardless of the software that we may use.

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Hector Moran

Hector Moran is a Mexican Freelance Character Artist based in Graz, he specializes in character art for video games, miniatures, statues and toys. He has made character art for games like League of Legends and Fortnite. He made the entire miniature line for games like Street Fighter, Ghostbusters+Men in Black, and others. His clients include THQ, Jasco Games, Schleich toys, Hasbro, Keos Masons, Kingdom Death, King Games and many others.

Taking 2d concept art and matching it up 1 to 1 in 3d is part of the skillset required to be a successful character artist. This can be a bit difficult at first, but with some practice and the right approach, it can be done. I this talk we’ll cover the making of some 2d to 3d projects where the concept art was matched up closely and we’ll talk about the steps of the process, what to do, what to avoid and why.

  • Talk - Translating 2D Concepts into 3D

    In this workshop Hector talk about the process of realizing 2d concepts into 3d objects and characters without losing their essence. In both the games industry and other 3d projects art is often lost in translation, while in some cases this can be ok or desired, there are many cases where the 2d source must be matched very closely. There are many tips and tricks that can help preserve and translate 2d into 3d going from standard processes like model sheets to paint-overs and appropriate texturing approaches. Other parts of the process to be covered will be good mesh flow for animation and balancing mesh and texture detail in videogame projects.

Alvaro Gaivoto

Animator

Born – Portugal
School – Canada (Sheridan College) 3 year classical animation course
Work – Los Angeles – Disney – Hanna Barbera – DePatieFreleng (freelance)
Korea / Taiwan – Supervising Director for Hanna Barbera and DePatieFreleng
London – Hibbert Palph / Richard Williams (commercials)/ Disney-Spielberg (Roger Rabbit)
London and LA – Warner Bros feature
Munich – Feature director
Austria – RedBull “Spielberg” and various ads

  • Talk - Life drawing for Animators

    Everyone knows life drawing, but hardly anyone knows how it can be extremely helpful and important for an animators daily work. Life drawing for animators will take you on a journey of creating strong and believeable poses for 2D and 3D artists alike. Bring life drawing gear.

Ronald Anzenberger

basis

Ronald started his career while he was still in college doing freelance motiongraphics and 3D jobs, for example compositing supervisor on the Oscar nominated Shortfilm “Copyshop”. After graduation, Ronald worked for the Austrian posthouse K-Effects as 3D and Composting Artist on jobs for numerous commercial projects and films. Moving to a more interactive area, Ronald became a technical artist at Rockstar Vienna, where he was responsible for the modular character pipeline as well as the lighting and shading pipeline of nextgen AAA video games. His next stop was TD and Supervisor for MPC London, where he worked on various international high profile TV commercials. Coming back to Vienna, Ronald formed “Basis” together with Christian Stejnar, a studio which specializes in 3D animation, motiongraphics and postproduction for commercials and film.

  • Talk - Making of “Bacardi – born in the sun”

    Bacardi wohin das Auge reicht. Ronald geht auf die unterschiedlichen Prozesse wie Lookdevelopment, Flüssigkeitssimulation, Shading und Compositing ein.
    Diverse Baccardi Spots wurden von Basis Wien gemeinsam mit MPC London umgesetzt.

Florian Satzinger

The Austrian animation designer Florian Satzinger was a student of the legendary Disney, MGM and Hanna-Barbera animator and animation director Ken Southworth. Recently, he was awarded the prestigious Nemoland award 2009 for his contribution in character design (former Nemoland winners include animation stars such as Don Bluth and Gary Goldman). At the present, he is working on the first”StarDucks” graphic novel and the “Toby Skybuckle” books series and a range of art books for the French publisher Soleil in parallel with doing visual development work for different British, US and Canadian film and book production companies. Besides his industrial work, he teaches character design, analog animation and animation history at the University of Applied Sciences, Salzburg.

  • Talk - “Character Design” Workshop

    Teil 1 (Einführung)
    “Negerlein, Schlitzauge und andere Unsinnigkeiten im Character
    Design”. Über Stereotypen in der Animation.

    Teil 2 (Praktischer Teil)
    “Line follows shape to create form”
    Entwurfstechniken für Figuren und Spielorte.

Maryam Laura Moazedi

Since 1995 project supervisor at Satzinger & Hardenberg, University lecturer for management and communication at the Karl-Franzens-University Graz und lecturer for media analysis and animation history at the University of Applied Sciences, Salzburg.

  • Talk - “Character Design” Workshop

    Teil 1 (Einführung)
    “Negerlein, Schlitzauge und andere Unsinnigkeiten im Character
    Design”. Über Stereotypen in der Animation.

    Teil 2 (Praktischer Teil)
    “Line follows shape to create form”
    Entwurfstechniken für Figuren und Spielorte.

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Toni Weiss

StoryInc

Toni Weiss is a live action & animation director, screenwriter and story consultant with a career of more than 30 years.
He has directed on feature films, tv- and web series, documentaries, short films, and hundreds of music videos and commercials. As a story expert, his consulting clients range from international brands to entertainment projects to games, novels and apps. He has worked for clients as diverse as the Walt Disney Company, Studio Babelsberg, Arx Anima, Vienna Tourism Board, SKY Germany and brands like Nestlé, Ferrero, Mazda, Nissan or Pampers.
As the founder of STORY INC. – a high impact story academy and consulting company – Toni is on a mission to train & teach creatives, brands and entertainment companies to tell their story with maximum emotional clarity.

In his workshop Toni will help you master the basic elements of story with complete clarity: Theme, plot and character arc.
In today’s world, those who can tell great stories unstoppable. We need storytelling skills to define our own brand, to change the world we live in, to create entertainment that matters und to get our own story straight.

As digital artists, we need to understand story profoundly to contribute our best work to the projects we choose.
This workshop is for you if you have ever struggled to understand theme, plot and character in clear, workable terms. It is especially for you if you want to write screenplays, novels or any story-driven IP and have struggled with getting your story straight.

My seminar will give you tools that you can actually use in your projects, in your work and for your own life story. Story can be learned. There are a few things professional writers do to differentiate themselves. And there are a things amateur storytellers do that cost them respect. Understand story like a pro, not an amateur.
Know how to tell a story with impact, and join professional storytellers who are changing the world.

  • Talk - How to tell stories with a Camera – Camera Blocking for Emotional Impact

    Einer der meistunterschätzten Aufgabenbereiche in der relativ jungen Computergrafik Branche, ist die relativ alte Kunst mit einer Kamera umzugehen.
    Wie setzt man das Bild am besten in Szene? Welche unerschiedlichen Aussagen haben unterschiedliche Kamera Winkel und Schnitte? Eine hoch interessante Reise in die menschliche Psychologie Bewegtbilder wahrzunehmen.

Christoph Quas

Sproing

After having finished his studies of MultiMediaArt at the University of Applied Sciences in Salzburg, Christoph Quas started his career in the games industry as game designer at Rabcat Entertainment in Vienna, Austria. After having joined the team of Sproing Interactive, also located in Vienna, he is now Head of Design, working mostly on console titles such as the award-winning Panzer Tactics DS and Cursed Mountain (Wii). Parallel to his work he is lecturer for game design at the University of Applied Sciences Technikum Wien.

  • Talk - An inside view on practical Game Design

    Christoph will talk about his work as the Head Game Designer at Sproing working on award-winning titles such as Panzer Tactics (DS) and Cursed Mountain (Wii).
    Was ist Gamedesign, wie definiert sich das Handwerk der Kreation und Umsetzbarmachung eines Spielkonzepts und wie gestalten sich die Berührungspunkte zu Art und Animation? In seinem Vortrag wird Christoph Quas anhand von praktischen Beispielen die grundlegenden Prozesse des Gamedesigns von Videospielen erläutern und im besonderen auf die Schnittstellen und Spannungsfelder zwischen Design und Art eingehen.