When did you start making the Inside Formula animations?

That was in August 2001. The funny thing here was, until this time we didn't have a confirmation that we got the job! All what we knew was that the first show would be broadcast in ten days! At this time our team was much smaller than it is now, we were only three!

A first episode meant: Building the Spa (Belgium) race track with all its trees and kerbs, fences, stands, people... and the Au Rouge curve in high detail. Building a complete FW 22 race car without any blueprints or real models and developing a concept design where you can present and demount a race car without it becoming boring. We knew that if we go the job, we never would finish it if the customer took longer over the decision.

So we began to work - it didn't matter whether we got the job or not. I started to build the race car, Sasha began to model the race track and Torsten painted textures and began to investigate everything - he even went to a the local toy shop, where he luckily found an FW 22 model! I took photos of this model and corrected some proportions of the finished car model. I think it was three days before broadcasting that the customer gave us the OK for the job! Fortunately we already had a lot. I remember it was only about ten hours before broadcast that we finished everything and the courier got the tape. The studio at this time was in Monaco...

How many Inside Formula animations have you already produced?

We've finished 47 animations so far. Each animation is about 70 seconds long.

What were your biggest challenges making the Inside Formula animations?

Very often, research is the biggest challenge. For example, while working on the animation of the F1 refueling system, we discovered the limitation of technical information on the internet and in the Formula 1 books we had. After we finished the animation under these challenging circumstances, I visited Williams F1 in the UK. When they showed me the refueling equipment I saw that we did everything correctly.

We had some 3D challenges too:  smoke (render times), slow motion (detail), time warping (detail and handling), characters and cars (work), a lot of 3D transparencies (render times), a lot of layers (post, organisation). And sometimes everything had be done in less than ten days!

We also have to mention the problems of presentation style. How do we show a breaking ball bearing ring in the suspension without a) offending a racing team and b) having a positive security message and a well-informed housewife watching this TV show?

How did you achieve the fish-eye lens look in the History car park scene?

Pretty easy, I used a mirrored sphere and used the reflection as the rendered result. As a reference in OpenGL of what I could see rendered, I created a second camera with the same viewing angle as it would be when its rendered. The lens distortion was different of course, but other than that it was very easy to "fly" in the correct path.

For this animation I built a Bugatti 35 that we'll give to your readers. It's also been used for the Inside Formula animations. In this episode we showed the development of the racing cars in the last 90 years. Its a medium-detailed but well-researched sub patch model.

It took about eight hours for research and to build and to texture it. Thanks to LightWave and Photoshop, the research was the most work :-)

Cool! Thanks Christof, this is a great present for the readers!

	Windows	Macintosh
	Zip	StuffIt
	2.13 MB	2.13 MB
For non-commercial use only

Why did you create the Making of animation ?

In Germany we have a digital production magazine called "digital production" :-) They wanted to have an article about our "Inside Formula" projects. Because the magazine comes with a DVD we produced a little making of Inside Formula. We've known "digital production" for many years and knew that almost no-one ever shows a real making of. We wanted to change that in this case! The very next day we had a small film team in our company and without any written concept we made these interviews and showed what we could create in one day... We had a lot of fun and some nice slips of the tongue too!