Olaf Wendt is a visual effects supervisor, designer and director with a broad base of experience in film, design, music videos and computer games.

Born and educated in Germany he travelled to the UK to read Maths and Computation at Oriel College, Oxford. Soon after college he co-founded one of London’s first multimedia production companies, ZapFactor where he combined his understanding of new technologies with his strong visual design sense to produce innovative and ground-breaking work across moving image and interactive platforms for advertising clients such as Rolling Rock, Reebok, McCann-Erickson and music clients such as Erasure and Duran Duran.

He continued this work on a bigger scale by designing and producing computer games through a new venture, TripMedia Ltd. The first of these, Burn:Cycle, an award-winning tech noir action adventure set in a Blade-Runner style future metropolis, seamlessly fused storytelling with game- play in one of the first ‘interactive movies’ and allowed Olaf to develop a distinctive visual style. In the title Virtual Nightclub Olaf fashioned a cross between MTV and a computer game and he worked and directed recording artists such as Redman, Herbie Hancock, PM Dawn, the Stereo MCs and many others for the project.

This led to Olaf directing music videos for other artists. He became involved in conceptual art projects and made a number of experimental short films. His short film ‘Performer’ was selected for over a dozen film festivals around the world and won several awards. At the same time he continued to work as a designer and vfx artist and became more and more involved with work on his first love - feature films, working with directors such as Mike Nich- ols, Paul Verhoeven, Peter Yates, lending his hand to the ever evolving process of creating new worlds for the screen.

He developed a on-set previsualisation system allowing the real-time display of computer-graphic characters through the camera viewfinder for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Olaf has given lectures on his work internationally; he has been asked to judge awards shows and also has taught extensively. developed a vfx and animation programme for Escape Studios in London.

For this feature film adapation of the Dylan Dog comic books directed by Kevin Munroe I supervised 270+ visual effects shots.
The film features zombies, werewolves and vampires galore. See a trailer at www.dylandogdeadofnight.com

I supervised this national spot for Dell computers. Many of the laptop lid patterns and textures had to be changed in post. The laptop at the end is fully computergraphic.

Currently working on shots for Real Steel with our friends at DNA. Watch this space for updates.

The film required some tricky work, the most complex was a cgi parachute sequence that I supervisied.

The feature Derailed was directed by Mikael Hafstrom. I supervised the train sequences on this film.

For Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix I developed an on-set previz system
This system was developed in collaboration with Double Negative in London.
I used this system on the set to give the director and DP a real-time view of the computergraphic character Grawpand the centaurs through the camera’s viewfinder.
This allowed for the interactions between the ‘virtual’ characters and the actors on set to be much better defined.

The system worked by tracking the positon of the camera on set and producing a real-time view of the scene.

Following on from this I went on to apply this system to key sequences on The Golden Compass (dir Chris Weitz) and Gulliver’s Travels (dir. Rob Letterman).

The system works through mechanical encoders on camera cranes, dollies and heads. This gives it a very small footprint and allows for it to be used on location.

Amongst other projects I have also worked on sequences for Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day (dir Bharat Nalluri), Mr Bean’s Vacation (dir Steve Bendelack) and How to Lose Friends and Alienate People (dir Robert Weide).

shot by Darius Khondji in NY.
All shots inside the car are rear screen projection.

The Australian Pink Floyd Experience are in the process of re-working their live show to incorporate 3d stereo visuals - a world first as far as we know.
Our friends at Rebel Alliance asked us to help out with the live-action component and we went out to the desert with two Phantom HD cameras and a truckload of explosives.

Olaf produced and directed the trailer for the launch of this new book.

Youtube version:

festivals
official selection:
Palm Springs Int’l Short Film Festival
Filmfest Hamburg
26th Atlantic Int’l Film Festival
Australian Film Festival - 35mm Transfer Award
Braunschweig Int’l Film Festival
Sopot Int’l Film Festival – Sopot Film Centre Honorary Award
Moondance Int’l Film Festival
Woods Hole Int’l Film Festival
Montclair Int’l Film Festival
Hull Int’l Film Festival
Meribel Adfest Young Director’s competition
selected for the Brish Council Short Film Festival Submission Programme.

synopsis
A man runs through a forest. Another figure runs in the distance. They chase each other through a series of environments and through ever increasing obstacles. Finally they face each other head-to-head…
intent
“This is a very personal film for me. I wanted to draw a picture of a particular state – a perpetual loop that you can’t break out of. Work – and making work – can be like this.
The particular technique I used allowed me to draw a frame around the action – another way of showing the basic idea.”
download pdf synopsis here

A mix of live-action and animation, I directed this music video for ‘Freq Nasty’, a producer and musician.
He did not want to appear in the video himself, so we used a cartoon character designed to resemble him.

this title is a cross between a computer game and mtv that I designed and directed back in 1996.
It’s still unique in terms of its visual design.

I designed the world and visual look of this ‘interactive movie’ or computer game back in 1994.
Still a very strong piece of visual design - hence it’s inclusion here.