Leszek Plichta ist CG-Artist und Kurzfilm Regisseur. Nach seiner Ausbildung an der Fachhochschule Augsburg begann er an der Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg, mit dem Schwerpunkt Animation, zu studieren.
In diesem Interview berichtet er über seine Erfahrungen die er während des Erstellens seines Abschlussfilms “Dreammaker” an der Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg gemacht hat. “Dreammaker” wurde weltweit auf Festivals gezeigt und erhielt unter anderem die “Special Jury Honors” bei der SIGGRAPH 2007…
Hi Leszek, please tell us what your short-movie “Dreammaker” is about.
CGheute: When and how did you develop the Idea to “Dreammaker”? Is it a story you had on your mind for a long time or did the story change/develop, especially during the production process?
Leszek: I began developing “Dreammaker” as my diploma at the Filmakademie Baden Wuerttemberg back in 2003. I had a vague basic concept based just on the word “Dreammaker” which I stole from the song
“Moonriver” by Johnny Mercer and Henry Mancini. With the basic setup and some character descriptions I asked a fellow student, Dominik Steffan, who was studying screenplay at the Akademie
to write the story. We went back and forth for about half a year and I guess i annoyed him a lot to rewrite it a couple of times until we had a version which I liked.
CGheute: What was your part in creating “Dreammaker”?
Leszek: I didn’t do the Music and the Sounddesign. Does this somehow answer the question? 
CGheute: The Character-Design. Where did your inspiration for the design of the characters come from? Can you please explain us the creation process of your characters, maybe at the example of your Main Character?
Leszek: At first, the character design was inspired a bit by a comic book by Massimiliano Frezzato. Back than I wanted to make a story about an old pilot. As the story idea changed dramatically so did the design, though the idea of an old grumpy man remained. I guess in the end the inspiration for the design is a mix of many many comic books, mangas and movies. After struggling with the 3d interpretation of the 2d drawings I’ve made, a fellow student (Anja Perl) proposed me to do a sculpey maquette of the little girl. I liked the result so much that I decided to do the same for the old man. I even got some 3d scans of the maquettes but they lacked the necessary details and I just used them as proportion references. For creating the 3d models I took front and side photos of the maquettes and put them in the background during the modeling process.
All modeling in the movie is poly modeling and to save rendertime I even went without any displacements.
CGheute: The Set-Design. Your set-design is full of little details. Was the design fixed early or did you add /remove details during production itself?
Leszek: Being not so smart and making a story about a guy in a crowded and chaotic Laboratory makes it quite hard not to add lots of details (and spend a lot of unpaid long hours) as it’s important to explain the Dreammakers character and backstory.
So the design was quite story driven, but maybe with sometimes too much attention to detail. I tried to reuse objects like books, piles of paper etc. as often as possible though, to give the impression of mess and chaos without too much additional work. For example, I think there were not more than 3-4 books in the movie, which were just scaled a bit differently. This was enough to fill all bookshelfs. So, it’s quite important to concentrate on essential parts and try to be as efficient as possible.
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