Germany: Sehsucht

It’s no good having the tools and vision to create advanced campaigns with immersive VR or faithfully rendered dinosaurs driving Audis, if users’ tech is a bit on the Jurassic side. Hans-Christoph Schultheiss and Mate Steinforth, CD and ECD of animation studio/post/production hybrid Sehsucht, tell Selena Schleh about blending creativity with tomorrow’s tech and racing into the future with no manual

Labels: invaluable when distinguishing bleach from bubble bath; less helpful, it seems, if you’re a shifting hybrid of animation studio, production company and post house. shots struggled to define Sehsucht when we last spoke to them in 2012, and we’re not the only ones: five years on and its own creative heads are still bemused. “We’ve been trying to figure it out for the last 10 years!” laughs Hans-Christoph Schultheiss, CD of the Hamburg office. “We’re like an octopus, with many arms.”

His Berlin-based colleague, ECD Mate Steinforth, takes up the baton: “I’m not good at perfect definitions… but design and creative thinking is the core of what we do. Technologies come and go, we adapt to them; we pick up on certain trends and try to interpret them in our own way, but ultimately the one [constant] is applying our constantly evolving idea of design to moving image, whether it be animation or film.”

Set up in Hamburg in 2000 by Martin Woelke and Ole Peters, Sehsucht made its name as a pioneer of motion design, diversifying into more elaborate 3D animation, VFX and live action over the years. 2011 saw the opening of a Berlin outpost, led by Steinforth, a former creative director at Psyop New York, and the company has since grown into a multi-disciplinary model boasting an extensive roster of designers, directors, producers, and animation specialists, enabling them to make 95 per cent of work in-house. “It’s a very integrated approach,” says Steinforth. “Everything is under one umbrella, which allows for a very cohesive vision.”

Nonetheless, there’s a clear distinction in the output of the offices: Berlin specialises in 2D and 3D design-based work while the larger Hamburg, office does more live-action projects, combined with visual effects animation. Or, as Steinforth puts it: Berlin does “unicorns shitting rainbows” and Hamburg does “the car stuff”. The latter might sound duller, but as a recent, comic, Audi spot proves, it’s anything but. The Comeback features a depressed T-Rex struggling with low self-esteem and stunted arms. Enter Audi’s piloted self-driving system to give him a new lease of life. Creating a photo-realistic CG dinosaur required a combination of specialist techniques, with the end result demonstrating Sehsucht’s technical flair.

Turning the world upside down

But, Steinforth points out, the increasing democratisation of software and tools means creative vision is now as important as, if not more important than, craftsmanship – which is where Sehsucht’s hybrid status offers an advantage over ‘pure’ post houses and VFX specialists. “They are very service-oriented, and while we also provide services to our clients, we always try and maintain our perspective and fight for the best approach.”

A case in point is Pure Ecstasy [above], their CG/live-action launch film for the new Lexus LFFC. The team had to photo-realistically render a car they’d never seen, and place it in a hyper-real, futuristic environment of eye-popping colours, sinuous human shapes and organic forms evoking the orgasmic emotion of the title. “We literally turned [the client’s] concept upside down,” says Schultheiss. “We really brought our own vision, going back to the grain of the client’s idea and forming new art direction out of it.”  

“…ultimately, the one [constant] is applying our constantly evolving idea of design to moving image, whether it be animation or film.”

Experimenting with new technologies is another major driving force for Sehsucht. With VR dominating the tech conversation, it’s no surprise that the Berlin studio space is littered with Vive headsets and VR paraphernalia. Having “played around” with the medium for several years, Steinforth recently directed the studio’s first VR project – a 360° immersive promo for German electronic act Moderat, which mimics being inside a video game. Set in a dystopian world, Reminder follows a renegade hero’s rebellion against monstrous overlords, the user’s haptic harness shuddering with every impact. It has done well on the European VR festival circuit, but no client commissions have yet materialised – something Steinforth attributes to practical constraints such as limited availability of VR devices.

“On the one hand you have all these crazy sky-high projections of a US$1.5 billion market, which everyone is totally excited about, and on the other you have clients saying, rightfully, the concept needs to be a good fit.” He reckons it’s similar to the internet in the mid-90s. “There were early internet cafes, video conferences, webcams etc, but it was alien to most people because they didn’t have access to the technology. Now everyone uses Skype and YouTube – but it took 10 to 15 years to build up a big user base.” 

For the moment, Sehsucht is keeping its hand in with self-initiated projects, including a ‘true’ VR short film where users will actually interact with the animated characters. “There’s no manual, that’s the scary part, but also the exciting part,” says Steinforth. One thing’s for sure: it’ll be easier than trying to sum up Sehsucht in a sentence