Where it all started — compositing for film, series and commercials
Visual effects are my day job and the foundation for everything else I make. Below are some highlights from the film and series work I did over the years. For the commercials I edited and composited, visit the Lukkien site.
From 2002 to 2004 I worked on Peter Greenaway’s The Tulse Luper Suitcases project, a story originally intended to be told through 3 feature movies, a 16-episode TV series and 92 DVDs, as well as websites, CD-ROMs and books. I was working as a compositor at StereoMatrix, owned by Reiner van Brummelen, also Greenaway’s DOP. The three movies I worked on were The Moab Story, Vaux to the Sea and From Sark to the Finish.
Besides Tulse Luper, we created the title sequence for De Tweeling, which needed cloth animation, title animation and lots of colour corrections. The titles were created using strokes — a lot of work, because it was all hand-animated.
Zombibi (internationally released as Kill Zombie! and Zombie Quest) is the first Dutch zomedy, directed by Martijn Smits and Erwin van den Eshof — an over-the-top, visual-effects-heavy splatter comedy. I was the creative & technical supervisor for 196 VFX shots, of which I composited 169 myself. We added tons of blood, gore, flying limbs and muzzle flashes, but also vampire bats and frozen meatballs!
The film went to Cannes in May 2012, had its international premiere at FrightFest and was released by Warner Bros in the USA.
This is the opening title sequence Lukkien made for Ushi Must Marry (directed by Paul Ruven). It was shot in the studios of Lukkien and directed by Martijn Smits. Because of Ushi’s Japanese background, the art of origami seemed a nice cultural reference and a visually interesting concept. We used a hand model who was instructed by a professional origami artist. We prepared “beauty” versions of all the designs, which took a total of 11 hours to make.
We also made a teaser for the movie, inspired by “The One Ring”:
Popoz is a comedy series on Comedy Central created by Martijn Smits and Erwin van den Eshof, about two dirty cops and an intern who wish their job would be more like a Hollywood action movie. For the three pilot episodes Lukkien — actually just me, myself and I — took care of the post-production: VFX, leader and grading.
Popoz became the best watched Dutch show on Comedy Central in 3 years. Season 1 had 251 visual effect shots, season 2 had 245 and the movie, released in the fall of 2015, had 422 — a total screen time of 20 min 51 sec and 19 frames. For the movie we even built a miniature replica of The Night Watch, just to completely destroy it. Popoz was nominated for the NVX Best Visual Effects Award at the 2015 Dutch Film Festival.
Want to see more? Dive into the full Popoz story: the pilot, both seasons and the movie, with before/after sliders and breakdowns.
Willem Wever is an educational children’s show where kids can ask all sorts of questions. This time they got a really cool one: “How do you make a science fiction movie?” Since visitors always tell us our office looks like the bridge in Star Trek, they thought of us. We upped the ante by offering to actually make the movie — the kid had written a script that was pretty much Star Wars Episode IV, but shorter.
De Oneindige Slijmfilm (The Infinite Slime Movie). The story behind this one is coming soon.
