BEHIND the SCENES with MORITZ SCHWIND
We talk to the Aixsponza art director about his inspirations, Houdini side projects and why working procedurally is often the best practice
The Aixsponza art director gives us his expert insight
Moritz Schwind is the kind of artist who ruminates on every little detail. The Munichbased designer is currently the art director at Aixsponza, whose clients include everyone from Nike and Red Bull to Nescafe and Fendt, and it’s his concept-driven process that ensures his work jumps from the screen.
Like a lot of artists, Schwind first became interested in motion graphics when he was in school. He explains that the first time his work was shown publicly was in 12th or 13th grade, when his friends asked for his help in creating an original film. “Making a decent movie is really hard because you have to find actors, good cameras, set people etc, so it's really overwhelming for someone – especially when you're 16 or 17 years old,” he says. “I started out by making titles for those movies and realised that as a one-man band I could make decent titles in After Effects.”
After he caught the motion graphics bug, Schwind went on to study a mixture of graphic design and digital media. Then, through various internships – including one at Sehsucht – and jobs as a motion designer at büro bewegt and as a technology consultant at RTT/3DEXCITE, he decided to revert back to his one-man band and stick it out alone in the freelance world. “I just quit without really having another job,” he continues. It was during this time that he got to know Manuel Casasola Merkle, the creative director and partner at Aixsponza, and began working on the narratively driven, abstract film Seed.
“It was a rather abstract movie, a rather long project which was unusual for the business actually,” Schwind says. “But I was lucky to get on that project.” Seed tells the story of a protagonist and antagonist caught in an eternal struggle. Schwind worked on the research, concept, layout, lighting, shading, rendering and a bit of modelling and simulation. “The project was extremely unusual in that we tried something that I think everyone tries at a certain point in their career and ultimately fails at,” he adds. “We tried a democratic design process. So we tried to incorporate as many people's ideas and visions as possible into it, which comes with its own set of problems because you are constantly discussing, you are constantly confronted with difficulties. It's difficult to implement changes.”
The team worked with real-life actors on Seed, scanning their faces to ensure a realistic effect when it came to the film’s execution. “It was the first time for all of us,” Schwind says of the process. “One of the founders of Aixsponza happened to have
a friend who was building this giant rig out of 64 x 80 DSLR cameras which are used to scan actors, so Seed was kind of a test run for that. We were very lucky actually.”
Schwind said that through this often difficult, diplomatic process, he learnt to not be so precious about his own ideas. “I'm not sure if you can say there's an overall vision but it's certainly a very organic vision. On the one hand there is a focus on being able to come up and iterate on your ideas and organically adjust your ideas to the overall idea of the image, of the movie.” Technically speaking, Schwind was mostly using Cinema 4D and he spent most of his time trying to come up with “at least somewhat credible skin shaders”. “It’s really a nightmare when you work in a tool that is not developed for skin shading, which was Octane Render at the time,” he adds. “So you come up with your own shader trees with your shader setups and try to match what human skin is doing, which is the science in its own right. It's amazing. But it can be difficult to match.”
Another stand-out project for the studio this year was their print campaign for Nike, starring Portuguese footballer Cristiano Ronaldo and his branded soccer shoe Mercurial. It was all about ‘explosive supernova power’. “When you're working for Nike the nice thing is that, on the Nike side, you have an art director that speaks the same language as you do. So you figure out the style, the concept, the narration of the piece by just going through piles and piles of style frames.
“We try to create the style frames purely in our 3D package; we try not to use excessive Photoshop so we can be sure we are able to reproduce these images in our 3D app, which is kind of important when you're aiming for motion pieces,” he adds.
Part of the reason why Schwind has found such success with his work is his ability to make very technical projects artistfriendly. He focuses on concept, working procedurally to ensure the best result in his motion graphics output. “You can get along amazingly well without a concept and I think many people try to, but it just helps to make a plan and to make up your mind,” Schwind says of his creative process. “It keeps you from fumbling around while you're in the project, which can rid you of lots of time and energy which sometimes, you plainly can't afford. When you're not sure where [a project] is heading it can be exhausting. So it's a way to plan ahead and protect yourself from derailing yourself and the project.”
And while he doesn’t necessarily have a patterned recipe when it comes to embarking on new projects, he explains that having a fundamental understanding of the concepts and their requirements is key. “When you're working procedurally, you won't be extremely successful when you don't have a grasp of the fundamentals – I truly believe that. The same thing goes for a concept, so if you don't understand where a client is heading with a given project or where they’re coming from, you might misinterpret briefings, you might misinterpret feedback. So I think understanding of the client’s goals on the one hand if we're talking commercial work, or understanding your own goals if we're talking freelance or private projects. The same goes for just understanding the basic principle behind a given technology. It’s really helpful.”
He also attributes his experience in portrait photography as something that has helped him out along the way. “Photography was one of the most crucial aspects when it comes to my design education,” he explains. “We had a photography course in the second or third semester and it didn't seem like much to us then, but now it's really clear just how much you can learn by examining and executing real-life studio workflow when you've learnt to light things with flashlights or photographic equipment; it makes it so easy to see or light in your 3D render engine and to actually shape a design with light. It was definitely a cornerstone of my design education.”
A personal project that Schwind embarked on this year was Entagma – a collection of tutorials, example scenes, tech notes – created by both Schwind and Aixsponza partner Manuel Casasola Merkle. The motivation behind the project was simply pushing themselves to learn something new and to share it with the wider motion graphics community, publishing a new video tutorial every second Monday. “When we started it was kind of hard to find Houdini tutorials that were focused on the design side of things, not purely the effects,” Schwind says. “We wanted to see if there was other people that are interested in this sort of thing. Amazingly it just worked and we're still really blown away by that side of it.”
Technologically speaking, Schwind says he can’t pinpoint the best thing he’s learnt, but he does think that since their exploration into the design aspect of Houdini, there has been a more open mind from the community. “I think until about one or two years ago, people tended to use Houdini primarily for the effects, but I think the focus of most people has shifted a bit. We suddenly had designers that are popping up, who hugely relied on this generative art approach, so it kind of became fashionable. More and more people started looking into how to create those types of designs and setups and I think we've just been lucky concerning the timing.” As for whether generative art itself could continue to grow as a trend? “It's difficult to predict the future but I do think there is a big chance this could happen,” Schwind says.
While he can’t give anything away about current or forthcoming projects, Schwind sounds excited for his future at both Aixsponza and Entagma. “I can't say too much about anything like that, I'm sorry!” he says, laughing. “I will say, just watch Entagma. We have lots of exciting projects lined up for the new year.”