I recently came across this wonderful picture from Gerhard Hahn Film in 1988. It was posted on Canadian animator Nancy Beiman's Facebook page last month and shows the staff at the West Berlin animation studio as of April that year. Thanks Nancy! I hope you don't mind my stealing the photo, I just had to have it.
From left to right: Michael Hegner, yours truly, Nancy Beiman, Stefan Fjeldmark, Andy Knight, Børge Ring, Gerhard Hahn and Jody Gannon. It even has the NAC Quick Action Recorder, a very early (and fantastic) animation test computer, sitting there on the right! So retro.
The crew at Gerhard Hahn Film, April 1988: Michael Hegner, Dan Harder, Nancy Beiman,
Stefan Fjeldmark, Andy Knight, Børge Ring, Gerhard Hahn and Jody Gannon.
This picture really stirs up a lot of memories. Forgive me for tripping a bit down the ol' lane. If you're not into that, please skip the rest of this post.
Among the VHS tapes in the old boxes in my attic I came across these two TV commercials for a special savings scheme with the chance of winning a grand price of millions of Danish kroner. The ads were done way back in 1990 for "Postgiro", a branch of the Danish postal service which has long ago been gobbled up by one of the big Danish banks (which was in turn swallowed by an even bigger one).
The two films were produced by Nielsen & Nielsen, a small company in Copenhagen which had just purchased a very expensive high-end computer system (from Silicon Graphics), and so they were among the very first in Danish animation to be colored on a computer.
I did the animation, and in order to utilize the new exciting tool, I grabbed the chance to do something which was normally way too expensive for our small budgets: colorseps. That is, a border between two colors without the black line.
In the old days of hand-painted cels the colorseps would also have to be inked by hand, which was extremely time-consuming. In this case I simply had the cleanup artists draw the separation line between the two orange colors on a separate level, and then we colored it in the paintbox so it would be invisible. The same goes for the red triangles. It's a simple effect, but it does look nice. And with this new computer technology, it was done at almost no extra cost.
As a curiosity for the Danes among the blog readers, the speak for the ads was done by none other than the late actor Axel Strøbye, whom we all love for his roles in Olsen-Banden and Matador (the latter is the best TV series ever done in the whole world - you should check it out!).
Along with the video tapes I also found the original storyboards from the advertising agency. This is the board for film #1.
Here's the board for film #2, and below is the final film.
