Studio Lampion's Berlin office

Studio Lampion is a small computer animation studio with the technical, creative and production capabilities to create independent animated films and fulfill our international client's needs and wishes.
Our mission is to entertain audiences of all ages through stories with soul, characters with heart and pictures with beauty.

Our Vision

Studio Lampion was founded with the vision of combining the natural charm and beauty of traditional hand-drawn animation with state of the art computer technology through our proprietary software tools and developments.

We feel that most computer animation today has a cold, sterile and indistinguishable look. Therefore, we strive to return the timeless beauty of traditional animated films through computer animation technology in order to lend warmth and a sense of personality to our pictures.

Technology

Co-founder Stefan Minning had already specialized in non-photorealistic graphics technology long before starting Studio Lampion. His earlier research and the resulting software and techniques provide the cornerstone of our productions.

Among these tools are Normality, our realtime re-lighting application to speed up the shading and lighting of scenes, Celulight, which allows us to mimic the look of traditional animation, and the PANDA renderer, used to create painterly background images. We continue to research and develop software and techniques in order to further our vision and to refine our production pipeline.

Besides our array of proprietary tools, Studio Lampion builds upon open-source software wherever possible. In particular the free RenderMan implementations Aqsis and Pixie have been used in parts of our productions.
Our productions are managed through a combination of Celtx, ProjectPier and MediaWiki. This site itself is designed around a customized version of the free Drupal content-management system.

The Founders

Both founders of Studio Lampion, Stefan Minning and Matthias Koenig, are experienced in the computer graphics field and were already cooperating on projects such as animated short films and graphic design for clients during their time in college. Ever since then they had been planning to one day open their own shop, which finally came to be in the form of Studio Lampion.

Before coming together to start this enterprise, both of them took the time to independently gather industry- and production experience in Germany and abroad.