problems of communication and workflow between
art department and post-production have to be
adjusted. firstly, a standard for communication has
to be established. the art department produces
technical construction drawings. post-production
artists are not educated to fully understand these
documents and it can result in misinterpretations.
secondly most of the digital work happens in
post-production, executed by companies spread
all over the world, when the
production designer has usually left the film to work
on his next gig. there is a huge local and temporal
disjunction that needs to be filled...

as I am trained in both languages, the design
language of the designer and the technical language
of post-production. I fill out the role of a mediator or
translator. I take the designer’s design intention and
develop the sets with him. once that is finished I
prepare the data for post-production in a way they
can easily understand. that includes modeling the
sets in different degrees of detail, preparing texture
samples, illustrations and animations and communicating
what our design intentions are. afterwards I act as
a design consultant or supervisor for post-production
representing the art department.

charlie and the chocolate factory: TV Room
the TV Room is a huge set built on stage using
computer driven fabrication. this was my main set
on 'charlie and ....'. It was fully conceived on a
computer using 3D modeling and animation to
be later put out to computer numerical control (CNC)
milling. we decided to go this way with the set
due to its curvelinear surfaces. to achieve the
TV Room’s clean and abstract look demanded
perfect precision.

following concept drawings that I was given
and talks with alex mcdowell I mocked up the
main volumes and then produced several
atmospheric renderings and animations to study
lighting, textures and surface qualities. other
studies were done on the 'oompah loompa'
(characters in the film) gadgets and control stations
that are located in the room. once the direction was
clear and approved by tim burton we started
with the final modeling working out all the
construction details. I modeled one cross section
of the wall panels with the tiniest detail. then
modules were milled out of dense styrofoam
sealed with epoxy resin. from these prototypes
casts were made so that the rest of the panels
could be produced through injection moulding.
these panels were then fitted into a suspended
steel construction.

during the construction phase I was quite often
on stage to check with the construction workers
to address certain problems that arouse during
this phase, very much like an architect supervising
construction. I find that the dialogue is much more
constructive than on a ‘real’ construction site since
there is no liability issues involved. this set was my
first big scale built set and I am still really excited
when I think about that time and how stunned
I was to be in the finished and fully lit set.

charlie and the chocolate factory:
chocolate river ride doors
the doors are interesting in that sense that
they were fully digitally generated. that accounts
for their creation as much as the design process…
even the communication was digital. the set
was kind of forgotten set and alex mcdowell just
realized towards the end of shooting that none
had really taken care of the design. there were
a few conceptual illustrations but nothing worked
through. at first alex tried developing the design
with a post-production artist but quickly came to
realize that that was too time consuming.
so he handed it over to me.

I had already left the production and had
moved back to berlin. so we used all kinds
of digital communication tools that allowed us to
send sketches back and forth and communicate
at the same time. It was actually quite fun in
retrospective. we first discussed proportions,
because the door had to integrate three smaller
doors of different sizes into one: the ship scale,
the human scale and doors for willy wonka’s
little helpers 'the oompah loompas'. once that
was settled on I modeled the door in 3D with
the focus on the design details. there was a
lot of detail to discuss, as alex is great like that.
he is very focused on even the tiniest aspects.
I continuously generated quick renderings for
alex to check and to discuss various parts.
once the design was finished I handed it
over to the post-production company and
who put the final touches on it.

video game ‘deliverance’: deep sea stadium
I was asked by software developing company
natural motion based in oxford, UK – to make a
design proposal for the look of a futuristic american
football game they intended to develop.
following the ideas I had in mind, I first defined
the concept of the idea to have a guiding line.
It was important for me to manifest a concept that
ties all stadiums into one coherent context while
allowing enough artistic freedom for each
stadium design.

I first blocked out the overall volume of one
stadium based on my sketches. next step was
to animate cameras simulating the perspective
of the players, since this was the anticipated
perspective of the people playing the game.
I used a technique we employ a lot in film,
called previsualization. this means low-cost
digital 3D animation aiding the filmmaking process
by creating rough versions of the shots in a
movie sequence. this helped me to plan out my
moves and edits and determined what parts of
the design I would have to focus on and which
could be left with less detail.








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tino schaedler portrait