VFX Voice - Fall 2017

“The VES puts us on the world map. But the next problem is
also how do we get the people, the artists, who had this great
German training, who originally went to Wellington or London
or Vancouver to work on the bigger jobs, to come back home?”
—Florian Gellinger, VES Section Chair,
VFX Supervisor/Partner, RISE
awesome for everyone on the team. It
was a Hollywood project, and we felt we
had to do our best. There was really great
team spirit.”
More work followed, and 2012 was
the year when the world took notice after
Pixomondo’s Ben Grossmann and Alex
Henning won the Oscar for Hugo and
Pixomondo’s Sven Martin won a 2013
Emmy for Game of Thrones Season 3. That
same year Cloud Atlas showcased significant
work by RISE, Trixter and Scanline.
Before the thought of a VES Section, people
in the VFX scene were already expressing
a need to get together, if only on a local
level. Semi-regular hangouts and meet-ups
were being independently organized in
Stuttgart, Berlin, Munich and Cologne, but
there was no interaction between the cities.
FMX was a major nexus for the industry, but
that’s only once a year.
Germany already had some VES members,
but the point of it seemed abstract.
Landgrebe, who’d already been a member
for two years, says, “It was cool to get
the newsletter and know what was going
on and receiving the screeners. But we
were paying our dues and weren’t able to
benefit from things like having screenings
and organizing events because it was all
happening somewhere else.”
In March 2016, Florian Gellinger, VFX
supervisor and partner at RISE in Berlin,
was thinking that the German VFX scene
needed some kind of organization to
represent them and realized that rather
than start something new it would make
more sense to have a Germany Section
of VES and benefit from the connections
and infrastructure already in place. “At that
point I think we had over 40 members in
Germany,” Gellinger explains, “so we could
build on that. But,” he discovered, “Munich
and Berlin at that point were completely
neglected, with almost no members at all.”
At FMX he met with Tim McGovern, head
of outreach at VES, who came on board to
help expedite the membership process and
endorsement letters. “That was pretty much
my hobby last year,” Gellinger continues,
“to get people to sign up to become a
member, and then helping them organize
paperwork. By November 2016, when the
new members came on board, we had the
biggest push of any country, getting 27 new
members in one go.”
After the May 2017 meeting of the Board
of Directors there were a total of 91 VES
members in Germany. Plus, now anybody
who lives or has their permanent address in
Germany automatically becomes a member
of the Germany Section.
The next step was to elect a board.
With Gellinger taking the Chair, the idea
was to spread out the board members
across Germany.
Comments Gellinger: “You’ve got
Benedikt Niemann, Animation Supervisor at
Ambient Entertainment in Hannover, who’s
our secretary, and we’ve got Urs Franzen,
who’s a visual effects supervisor from
Munich, as treasurer, which is great because
Munich – surprisingly, being a major
center – still does not have many members,
but we’re getting there. And then we’ve got
three board members from Stuttgart, five
from Berlin and one from Cologne. So, all in
all, it’s representing the membership from
each part of Germany.”
The section’s first official get-together
took place this May at FMX where a
gathering of about 20 people, including
principal board members, met with VES
Executive Director Eric Roth and FMX
organizer Andreas Hykade. Board member
and partner in Celluloid, Holger Hummel,
remembers: “We all met for the first time in
one room and got to know each other. And
TOP to BOTTOM: Jan Fiedler from Pixomondo
welcomes Stuttgart’s members to the VES
Germany’s first-ever screening event for
War for the Planet of the Apes.
Jonathan Weber and Oliver Hohn from
RISE enjoy drinks at the Eiszeit theater’s
bar in Berlin.
Michael Wortmann, VFX Supervisor on
Atomic Blonde, enjoys sharing experiences
beyond company walls. VES Germany
screened Atomic Blonde with a live Q&A
with Wortmann in August.
FALL 2017 VFXVOICE.COM • 105