Featured Artist

<<< 20.06.2011 >>>

Location

Wiesbaden
Hessen
Deutschland

on Portfoliopool

Member since: 12.04.10
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31 year old Sven Sauer is specialized in visual productions. For him, the major stimulus is to blend digital media with real surroundings. In 2005 he became the Art Director at 'Brand Competence', with focus on the interactive tangibility of brand environments. Topics are the development of dramaturgical experience concepts and space stagings. In 2007 Sven became Creative Director at the game developer 3D-io in Wiesbaden. Numerous games and short movies were created that are also renowed internationally.

Nowadays Sven Sauer works as visual developer and mattepainting-artist for international movie productions.


What was your main reason to sign up on Portfoliopool.com?

I don't know exactely how I got to Portfoliopool. But I assume that I discovered the platform because of the 'Perry Rhodan' series...
The reason why I signed up very quickly was Portfoliopool's simple user interface. I am oftentimes struggling with html-scripts when I just want to upload a picture and a quick upload becomes a timeconsuming annoyance. Awful. But these times are slowly but surely over anyway...


How did you become an effect designer?

The road to a VFX-artist was, like so much in life, a coincidence. First, I started working in advertising, These times were not bad. Good money. But that was not what I wanted to do after all those years of studying. Something was missing. And one day I broke with advertising and began to focus on my passion, on film. In retrospect I have to admit that this withdrawal was very actionistically oriented. The first years were just water, bread, and packet soup...
Reduced like that were my first productions. Because of the tight budget I built sets only with the computer. In the beginning this was just a temporary solution. I just couldn't affort anything else. Anyway, after I released my first short movie, people started to ask me if I could think of building those digital sets for other productions as well...
At that point everything went very fast. I got passed through from production to production.


What equipment do you work with?

I specialized on a segment within the field of effects: matte paintings.
This term was pretty unknown a couple of years ago. Matte paintings are pictures that are woven into the movie backgrounds. This way they make the space look more extended, the cities seem bigger, or whole parts of backgounds can be replaced. For this I only need Photoshop.
The next step is to get the matte paintings into the movie and for that more programs are required. From 3D max to Nuke to AVID. At this point other artists take over.
Big movie productions call matte paintings the invisible art. If we are doing our job right, the viewer does not realize that the scene was adjusted. It is a very unusual job in the entertainment business: our goal is to remain invisible!


What do you think is fascinating about your job?

I have to improve myself all the time. Inevitably. On day I am bulding New York in the 20's and the next day I have to create a detailed knight's castle from the 16th century. Every matte painting for every job is required to look as real as possible. Therfore, I have to learn how the architecture of New York looked like back then. It is the same for the castles: every job is accompanied by lots of research.
The same is true for sci-fi-developments. For one job I had to make two planets collide. How does something like that look like? To get the exact idea for that we invided a physicist, who explained the essentials of such an enormous collision to us. And these scientific studies were the basis for our design. In the case of matte paintings nothing is left to chance!


What was your most exciting/challenging job so far?

The most exciting job was the visual support for the computer game „Perry Rhodan“. A vast sci-fi world that had to be created for the first time. In the beginning we did not know how big this project really was. Perry Rhodan is from the 1960s and up to now, more than 2000 novels were published worldwide. It's one of the biggest sci-fi series in the world and the circulation is even wider than Star Wars or Star Trek. And up to then there was never a movie version or computer game. We entered new ground with the first realization of this world. A phantastic task: the development of a whole universe. But under the rigid observation of the huge fan-community. Every drive train of every spaceship had to be at the correct spot. Partially we built the models after fictional construction plans. A detailed map forms the basis of the city „Terrania“. The project was great – although sometimes a little tough.