Freelance motion Designer, Heerko Groefsema

Utrecht, the Netherlands
HeerkoGroefsema.nl
I'm a freelance Motion Designer.

You can contact me at info@heerkogroefsema.nl or send me a

message on Vimeo.

I mainly work with Cinema 4D and After Effects. I'm also available

for large scale animations. I'm part of motion design collective based

in Utrecht (Netherlands).

 

 

 

 

Some early shots of the Resonance piece

 

 

I wanted to show some early shots of the Resonance piece in which you can see more in detail what is going on without the heavy post FX.

 

 

 

 

Resonance Collab

 

 

Resonance is the vision of SR Partners; a collaborative project with over 30 independent visual and audio designers / studios. The aim was to explore the relationship between geometry and audio in unique ways.

This is my entry for the project. It follows an abstract form's life span. After it is being born, we can see it evolve into different states. It being influenced by external factors and repelling this. After which the final transition will take place.

For the audio I have collaborated with the talented Ben Lukas Boysen of Hecq.

The piece has been premiered at the OFFF 2011 festival in Barcelona and is also featured on Stash 81 as the Bonus Film. The film will also be played at Sonar, Pause Fest, Playground festival and Cutout fest.

There are limited BluRay's and DVD's for the entire project at cargocollective.com/​resonance#1198096/​Get-the-film

Details for the complete project:

SEE || Displace Studios | Esteban Diacono | Heerko Groefsema | Jean-Paul Frenay | Jr.canest | KORB | Kultnation | Mate Steinforth | Matthias Müller | Momentary People | MRK | Murat Pak | onur Senturk | Physalia studio | Polynoid | SR Partners | Thiago Maia | Tom Waterhouse | Tronic Studio | Spatial Harmonics Group

HEAR || Audionerve | Combustion | CypherAudio | David Kamp | Echolab | Hecq | Michael Fakesch | Mutant Jukebox | Radium Audio | Studio Takt | World Gang

 

 

 

 

Heineken / GCU by Heerko Groefsema

 

 

Client: Heineken International
Producer: Claire Van Der Poel
Music & Sounddesign: Studio Takt
Direction: Artibite (Kevin Megens) & Menno Fokma
2d: Artibite, Soulbase & Menno Fokma
3d: Heerko Groefsema

Claire v/d Poel asked us to design & produce a given script from Heineken. The GCU is Heineken's internal education for marketing managers worldwide. The movie gives an insight on the e-learning courses and the master classes that will be held in Amsterdam.

With only 3 weeks production time, including a shoot, it was a quick production. We decided to combine forces on our studio. Four of our members worked on it to finish it on time.

 

 

 

 

 

Heineken Halu Bottle

 

 

Director Ruben van Leer of Westframe asked me to make an animation for the launch of the new Halu bottle of Heineken in America. This bottle is different than the 'regular' aluminium bottle. When it's being lit with a blacklight, a new design will light up out of the bottle. The animation has been screened in all the big clubs in America.

My part was doing the creative direction together with Ruben van Leer and I did the animation, modelling and texturing. Audio for this piece is done by Joris van Grunsven of Studio Takt.

 

 

 

MTV Activate

 

 

Menno Fokma asked me to join him in creating a package design for a new upcoming show, Activate. The show is about young people worldwide, facing the difficulty of growing up. How they deal with problems and share knowledge to each other to become stronger. The chosen treatment uses the metaphor of kites to visualize rising out of problems together. The package is created for a pilot and contains a 7 sec. bumper, logo design and lower thirds. My part consisted out of modeling, texturing and animating the kites with dynamics and deformers.

 

 

 

 

Flesst - roof security

 

 

Flesst is an innovative roof security system. For the construction fair and website we made a short video which explains the benefits and workings of the system in a nutshell.

The animation is created and rendered in Cinema 4D. I wanted to create a GI look but not have the increased GI render times. So with some tweaking with lights, ambient occlusion and focussing a lot on texturing I managed to do so.

The concept of the animation I made in cooperation with Hugo de Haas van Dorsser of Kunst Van Het Weglaten. We managed to distill all the important information after a few interviews with the inventor of the product; Hans Borra. We then put everything in the right order to get a logic and flowing product presentation for the target group.

Most of the 3D model building blocks were created in SolidWorks by Stefan Hamminga of Engit.nl. We managed to get the files imported in Cinema 4D after which I could build and texture the roofs.

The entire animation is made together with the great help of Menno Fokma. We spent many hours tuning and perfecting the animation and managed to get it all done before the start of the construction fair.

The voice over in the video is done by Job Boot of Job Boot Communicatie. And the sound design and music is created by Joris van Grunsven of Studio Takt.

 

 

 

 

Chiller Rebrand Ident

 

 

Onesize (onesize.nl) asked me to join their ranks on the Chiller (chillertv.com) rebrand. They asked me to do one of the idents in the new style.
Every other ident has its own thriller/horror related metaphor. Shattered glass is the metaphor carried throughout this piece.

Audio is done by Echolab (echolab.tv)

 

 

 

 

360 Skin

 

 

In commission of Categorie1 I made an animation for Weijers Eikhout explaining their new product; 360 Skin.

With a simplistic approach, the concept of the product is explained in a nutshell. The animation is being displayed on computer screens at exhibitions giving prospects easy access to information about the product.

 

 

 

 

Nike - Make the Difference

 

 

Early 2009, Nike asked onesize to pitch a treatment for a short film in which still photography of football athletes were the key images. onesize asked me to join their ranks in creating this piece.

Being famliar with 3D camera projection technique on geometric shapes, we now took it a step further and tried to map photographic stills on human characters in 3D. With succes. The job was awarded and delivered shortly after.

The challenge here was to model the characters and position them in the same way the athletes in the images did. We wanted it to be a photo-realistic still in "3D motion", not just an image in 3D layered space.

The film is a "mood film" that had to set the tone and introduce Nike's campaign for the 2010 World Cup. It was meant for all the Nike employees world wide, meaning it is for internal use only and not meant to be a commercial.

Now, more than one year later, we have implemented and improved the technique. The Playgrounds film was the first film with that same technique after we did this film for Nike.

A few more commercial projects followed.

At this moment we are still improving it and experimenting with all the possibilities.

Credits:

For Nike:

Producers - Penny Pijnenburg, Bas Verwoerd
Creative Director - Andy Walker

Onesize:
Director - Kasper Verweij
Animators:
- Kasper Verweij
- Reinier Flaes
- Harm van Zon
- Menno Fokma
- Heerko Groefsema

Copy by Wieden+Kennedy Amsterdam
Sound Design by Massive Amsterdam

 

 

 

 

Qfund

 

 

In cooperation with advertising agency Categorie1.com I created this animation for Questore. They wanted to use an animation which would explain their fund in a nutshell. This can be used as an intro for a presentation or as a standalone animation in a stand. A voiceover will tell you all the main things you need to know about the product.

The story is told in an abstract and metaphoric way. Simple forms are used to symbolize certain aspects of investments. They purple/magenta object can be seen as the investment. This investment gets eaten by a black blob which represents the so called 'black box' etc.

 

 

 

 

FX's Justified Promo 3D projection

 

 

Thearsenal.tv the multimedia production company representing Onesize.nl handled the large-scale promotional campaign for FX’s new show "Justified", based on an Elmore Leonard character.

Onesize was asked to direct, supervise and post-produce the promo in close co-operation with the talented people of FX networks. They asked me to join their ranks in the 3D camera projection of the characters and surroundings. You can see the seperate visual effects shots and animatic on my vimeo page here: vimeo.com/​11658369

In this promo we applied the same technique that was used in the Playgrounds titles film. The big difference in post production (compared to the Playgrounds film) were all the detailed backgrounds we had to put in 3D as well. Quite a challenge.

 

 

 

 

Sonos S5 multi room audio device

 

 

The Sonos S5 is a multi-room music system. In cooperation with Jisk Film and Menno Fokma, I produced an animation explaining the features and benefits of the Sonos S5.

The video is used on a in-store display to give more information about the product besides it. The display is used in portrait-mode. This was the first time I had to produce an animation in portrait. This was really something you have to get used to, because compositions are completely different than on a landscape orientation.

 

 

 

 

The Windmill

 

 

Check out the rest of my work on heerkogroefsema.nl

For local tv station Omrop Fryslan we made a movie re-acting the story of Don Quixote. But this is no tale of misplaced heroics; it’s an updated metaphor of youth vs. the establishment told in compositing and break-dancing. The movie is being used as a interstitial in between programming.

This movie ranked in the top 3 of the Dutch online Film Festival.

In cooperation with: 10voor2.nl

 

 

 

 

YellowBird 360

 

 

For the launch of revolutionary product Yellowbird I made a promo explaining the concept. Yellowbird is a Google Streetview-like camera, a system with six lenses, not as a photo but as a video camera, an all-encompassing picture is captured. This 3-D video can then be played online on any computer. An example can be found on the yellowBird website at yb.nl. The viewer will experience total immersion in a film, an event, or a special environment. From the point where the images were recorded, the viewer can look in any direction, let his eyes wander through the crowd, or stare at the ground or the air, which makes viewing a video an experience without boundaries.

 

 

 

 

Volkwagen Efficiency

 

 

In cooperation with onesize I worked on Volkswagen Efficiency and BlueMotionTechnologies interactive movie. While taking a thrilling ride with a roller-coaster all different efficiency and BlueMotion technologies are explained to the viewer. The viewer can decide on which subject he wants more info. This meant making a lot of different movies which will seamlessly blend together. In the movie above you can see some excerpts from the whole interactive movie.

 

 

 

 

Playgrounds Opening Titles 2009

 

 

Working together with onesize we created the Playgrounds festival opening titles. Basically it are two guys beating the shit out of each other. It was very important to give the movie a high end feeling. While there was a small budget it looks like it was created with a big budget. It has the look and feel of a movie filmed with an expensive high-speed camera. But actually the complete movie is build up out of photographs only.

Quoted from onesize (with whom I created this piece with):

The film was created in little over 2 weeks.
Playgrounds director Leon van Rooij asked us, like 6 months ago, if we wanted to do the titles for this years' fest.

I quote: "Playgrounds is a two-day festival in Tilburg, the Netherlands, where you can see the best digital audiovisual art in the world, such as musicvideos, animations, commercials, character design, VFX and games AND you can find out how it's been made during artist lectures and Q&A's."

Of course we said yes, because doing titles for festivals like these are rare opportunities. So we welcomed it with open arms.
Next to that, we've been involved in the festival for 3 years now and we are the first ones to design a title sequence for this festival. What a burden... ;)
With no creative brief and even less budget, we slowly started thinking, concepting, designing, thinking of how we could create something impressive, something new, something with a lot of production value but produce-able within 3 weeks and of course something we had not done before with our team, to challenge ourselves even more.

We ended up with the idea to have 2 fighters fighting over whatever on a children's playground. Kind of a metaphor for a creative process, which can be a battle sometimes.. kill your darlings.. etc.. etc... Anyway, this could become visually very interesting, so we thought. We focused on the image, look and feel, a bit more than we used to this time, simply because we wanted to.
We did some research, especially on the visual style in photography, the air we wanted the film to breath.
Initially, the film needed to be very slow paced, almost like a dance on classical music in ultra slow motion, this was still the idea at the time when we shot the images.

Just ultra slow motion, shooting with a phantom camera would not do the trick for us. We wanted to have more control over the slow motion in post production, still be be able to decide camera angles and motion. To do this we used the camera mapping technique in 3D.
The production was made fairly simple compared to live-action shoots with high speed camera's shooting on location. By using this technique, simply because we only needed still images, we wrapped the shoot in 3 hours. Our photographer, Jasper Faber did an outstanding job by using only 2 flash lights, a camera and a macbook.

In post production we changed the direction a little, we wanted more action. Jasper took a bunch of photo's which I found out could work just fine in a quick sequence. The contrast between the ultra slow-motion image and super fast paced short sequences made it more powerful and dramatized the impact of the slow motion sequence.
Joris, our sound designer did what was necessary to enhance the impact even more.

For the production of this shoot we contacted rotterdam based production company Revolver and asked them if they wanted to help us out producing the shoot.
Luckily they said yes They just contracted photographer Jasper Faber who was willing to shoot the images and help us out with the production, since we knew that post production would be very time consuming. Revolver helped us out producing it, so we could focus on direction and post production.

The people who saw it thus far, all responded to the film equally, asking the same question "... how did you shoot it, with a phantom?" .. no, it's all 3D.

Credits:

Direction & Post-Production - onesize (onesize.com)
Sound Design - Studio Takt (studio-takt.com)
Production Company - Revolver (revolver.nl/​)
Producer - Dijana Olcay-Hot
Photography - Jasper Faber (jasperfaber.com/​photography.html)
Fighter #1 - Jeroen Roos
Fighter #2 - Cesario di Domenico
Make-up - Elseline Hokke (elselinehokke.nl/​)
Location Scout - Hans v/d Berg

Playgroundfestival: (playgroundsfestival.nl/​)