Probably anybody of you already saw some if not many of their works, just consider Pirates of the Caribbean, Transformers or, my favorite, Zodiac, as well as a hunk of US commercials and, most notably, the Gears of War commercial trailer that was “shot” in the game engine — high-end machinima if you will.

But why Digital Domain? Extensive story: Nearly ten years ago, in the first grade of the high school, I was trying with two fellow students, Fabian Rüdisser (who is now in Vienna at the Film Academy) and Thomas Hirtenfelder (in Konstanz studying film studies), to realize a “short” computer generated animation.¹ It was called “Thinkers” with a down-to-earth plot and an out-of-reality-schedule: Scientists bred a special kind of reptiles for the military who act as “thinkers” for combat-strategies and tactics. But one day they escape into space and the government decides to shoot them down again — I don’t remember the details. And we wanted to finish it in three months so it would be ready for the Prix Ars Electronica. Needless to say that we only finished a short teaser.

During research for this little project we gathered in the school’s computer lab where I copied crappy 1 megabyte sized video clips of space shuttle launches from the NASA website on my floppy disks as references for our animation. Then we would surf the web for some cool demo reels and two corporations came into focus: Rushes and Digital Domain. I’ve learned most of the visual-effects jargon back then from a long MS-Word file at Rushes² which explained everything from an A/B-Roll to dailies to Visual Effects. And then, of course, there was Digital Domain, famous at that time for Titanic and their great animated short Tightrope. It was also the time of my first Digital Production magazine.

“Wouldn’t it be great to work for Digital Domain?” Thomas asked Fabian and me as we were scrubbing through their ridiculously tiny QuickTime demo reel which took ridiculously long to download in those days. “I bet they are already working with 3D Studio MAX 2.5!” I naïvely pondered. “When I finish school, I’m going to work there!” I said then, not even really knowing what would happen the next semester. “Be serious! None of us will ever go there apart from Baustädter!” Fabian said. None of us ever knew Peter Baustädter personally because he had finished school before we attended there, but we knew, thanks to the propaganda of some teachers and newspaper snippets on the walls, that he was responsible for the sky in Titanic and, as the rumors say, the right toe of the T-Rex in Jurassic Park³. “Well… you never know.” Thomas said and I nodded absentmindedly.⁴

And here I was: Typing the words of my application at Digital Domain into my gMail web interface, proof reading it over and over, changing the word order again and again and finally, shaking, pressing “send”. I don’t know if they really get back to me, thanks to my incomplete portfolio site, but a man can dream, can’t he?

1. I know, I was a total geek, especially in my early years. [back]
2. It was the time long before PDFs, baby! [back]
3. which is disproved thanks to the eternal and all-knowing IMDb [back]
4. Once I even got my hands on Peter Baustädter’s email address, something with “loki”, but I never took the courage to really write him. [back]