Bertelsmann-Springer

CeBIT Hanover 2001

After we had done a video for Bertelsmann-Springer for the Buchmesse 2000 in Frankfurt, spanning 4 - for the time - very large plasma monitors (last image in the gallery), we were asked to create an animation for the huge video wall of their 2001 exhibition booth at the CeBIT in Hanover.

The wall covered the whole front of the upper floor of the booth, was semi-transparent and three massive projectors mounted to the top of the booth delivered their combined power via a large mirror in front of the booth to the screen.
Behind the wall was the V.I.P. lounge, that was bathed in the strong, ever changing colours of the video and had mirrors at the end walls, so it felt really huge.

tecton in Berlin did the booth design, Markus Helzle did the fantastic 4-channel sound and also worked on some of the animations. Susanne Kohl also worked on animation and helped a lot with bringing the project to the big screen sucessfully. She also filmed the documentation which ATM seems to be lost in time.

Most other work was done by me in Cinema 4D and Lightwave 3D and other tools. After Effects was the main compositing application and a DPS Velocity with four raided SCSI 10000rpm Atlas HDs did the uncompressed video encoding and playback - I can still hear them spinning up in the morning... ;-)

All 21000 frames (* 3) of the animation were something like 80GB, at the time filling our largest harddrive completely and taking more than 24 hours to be transfered over the network to our DPS Velocity.

We hit a lot of walls, but thankfully were able to deliver in time and with perfect quality.

The booth won a Red-Dot award.

The full animation with sound can be viewed on YouTube below.
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BMS CeBIT Animation