Prologue

A good novel outlines the whole story within the first page. The journey is compressed into a single event at the beginning. In life there are events, so small you won't notice them, when they happen. Later you will see, that these pieces brought you there, where you are.

I saw Jurassic Parc at the age of 13. It was in the refurbished cinema one of the Zoo Palast in Berlin - an original place to watch movies. With 16 years I was ready for a train to western Germany, to pick up nine floppy discs with the first version of Softimage|3D for NT. It was a sunny friday. Unfortunately I've noticed, I'll need a graphics card, which costs 20.000 DM (that's 10K Euros today) for running it. So, no 20K, no train, no discs.

Cut

Today. I hate CGI. I hate it, because if I notice them, it blows me away from the story. The acting, emotions - all gone. Pfsssssst... gone. Unrecoverable. But I don't mean visually bad or not accurate VFX work. Cause there are so many really, really good VFX, which are plain and simply visible. Everybody sees them, even the worst noob. But they serve the story. And that's what's all about.

Good bye mouse clicking, welcome to film making. Some examples: I love "Amelie" (haha, everybody loves that movie, but read on). Did you see the CG work there? Of course! All the small pieces. The clouds, the lamp character and so on. That's the characters world. But did you notice, that all graffitis were removed from the movie? There is no tag or poststicker in whole paris. So important for the movie, but impossible to shot. Or let me get another one: "Panic Room". The never ending camera moves (driven to the cutting edge at "War of the Worlds - the Spielberg one). Fantastic! That's what I love about CG. When it comes a part of story telling. A tool to serve the directors vision.

Computography. CGI contains "Imagery". That's not rendering or comping layers. It's creating pictures. Pictures have statements, express feelings. If you take 24 of them in a second they can be part of a story. That's what I call "Computography". Can you feel the grain on that idea? I do. But cinematographers and computographers don't speak the same language yet. Visions are getting lost, cause of a lack of knowlodge. Stories become unsharp and part of a "can't do it this way" chain. That needs to be changed. Visions need more power - again. That's what this will be all about.