What are you working on at the moment?

We just finished a very complicated animation about Ralph Schumacher's helmet. We are now in the third year of our Formula 1 animations. During the Formula 1 season we have to make a lot of Formula 1 animations in a very short time. Right now we have two big projects:

Inside Formula: We are currently making animations about rebuilding famous race tracks from times gone by. How they've been made safer and more interesting. You see whole tracks from a kind of helicopter view. Using morphs we visualised all the improvements. A flight close to the track often shows two Williams´ FW25 (Montoya and Ralph Schumacher) driving fast through noteworthy curves.

MSS: The other project is a HDTV (2k) production. It's a 10-minute short movie called "My singing secret" Everything will look as if it was made as a 1:6 scale puppet movie. The puppets seem like they are made of silicone and the camera has a very short range of focus... It not will look like a typical 3D animated movie.

What was complicated about the Ralph Schumacher helmet animation?

When you make animations for Formula 1 there is always the question: "How does it look in real life and in detail?" We can not call Shuberth Helmet and ask for a real F1 helmet from Michael or Ralph Schumacher. Time is too short and also anything in Formula 1 is a big secret and very, very, very expensive! After long and hard investigations as to how the helmet looks inside, outside and in-between we started to animate. But how can we cut a helmet into pieces when it is on Ralph's head? It was especially difficult to develop an idea that pleased everybody. We decided to have the helmet discarded on the air intakes on the car while it is standing in front of the pits. Then we have the customer's branding in the background and it doesn't look like a typical industrial animation.

Onto MSS now. Why HDTV?

We chose HDTV for many reasons. We see more marketing possibilities when we produce for the big screen. Also HDTV beamers are becoming more and more popular and digital HDTV material is still rare. The challenge is much bigger, specially for render times. "My singing secret" has absolutely the quality in its story and arrangement to become a movie for the big screen.

Who's behind MSS?

Linus Foerster wrote the original screenplay. He is a film student in Hamburg and "My Singing Secret" originally was intended to become a student project. Then the script fell into the hand of Roman Gonther, who now is director of the film and also does the production and character design. In 2001 Roman was working as a writer and assistant director for the "Augsburger Puppenksite" (a puppet TV Show for children that's probably more famous in Germany than the "Muppet Show") and he knew that in order to preserve the beauty and simplicity of the story MSS could not be done in live action. He envisioned some kind of a puppet animation film but for various reasons none of the classic techniques seemed to be right for this project. So he came to us.

Once we heard the story, we instantly knew that we wanted to do it. Not only was this a great tale with laughs and tears and a wonderful ending, it also seemed to be a great challenge, both artistically and technically. Now our company is developing the whole project. We do all the 3D work from modelling to animation and postproduction. At the moment MSS is produced by digi mice GmbH and Roman Gonther but we are constantly looking for financiers, sponsors and co-producers in order to make our vision come true, for this production is also a great economic challenge for a relatively small company like ours.

If you want to learn more about "My Singing Secret" and the men and women behind it, go visit our website: http://www.mysingingsecret.com!
You'll find more behind the scene-information, images and the first teaser.

MSS demnächst? Coming soon? But when? :)

We are almost finished the trailer. Still there is a lot of post to do. There are so many layers we have to compose, so it will take a while more.

The trailer is more than two minutes long and is part of the film, so it's also a kind of a short movie. The whole film will be finished in about one year.

There's so much more that I would have liked to put in this story, but thanks Christof - for the Bugatti and details on MSS and Inside Formula.

For more info on just how much digi mice do, visit their website.