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Born in Lebanon in 1986, Mehmet Özdemir moved to Malmö, Sweden, with his in 1991. With an interest in computers going back to high school, at the time, Mehmet had little knowledge, but a great supply of ambition. During one of the web design courses at Boland School, he was introduced to Photoshop and was immediately hooked. Spending all his time working out various techniques to portray his ideas using Photoshop, Mehmet became involved in various art communities on the web. In 2005, he and a friend (who later co-founded the company MiniStudios) moved to a little town called Skellefteå in northern Sweden to attend the Digital Graphics program at Luleå Technical University.

“Living in a small town far up on the northern hemisphere, in retrospect, might be the ultimate boot camp for learning 3D graphics. We lived on the outskirts of town and the only thing to do, when not listening to lectures, was to watch tutorials and experiment with Maya,” says Mehmet. “After graduation, I decided to do my internship at Fido Film in Stockholm, and later, I was employed at Interactive Solutions in Uppsala where I worked as a 3D supervisor. Today, I am freelancing and mainly concentrating on learning new tools and methods in order to take my art to the next level.”

His last short movie Rocketman is a little jewel.

The story begins when a little girl sneaks out of bed, sits down in her bedroom and opens her favorite popup book. When the book opens, a yard unfolds with a tree, a house, a crane, a garage and a wooden fence. The front door of the house opens and a tall man walks out followed by a little monkey

”While creating the first concept-arts for the project, we discovered that the story we all agreed upon was viewed differently by every member of the team, so we spent many hours discussing various details like camera angles, lengths of scenes, colors, moods, stylistic choices etc. After the concept stage, we gained a lot of momentum. While the yard was being built by Olov, Tim and I modeled, rigged and did animation tests on characters while Michal modeled his vehicles and Johannes prepared documentation. Of course, as in all smaller productions, many of the team members had secondary-responsibilities such as rigging the book flip, creating additional concept art, blog-updates, VFX tests. As with any other project, production had to speed up and it became stressful. We decided that some comic-relief scenes and camera angles were of less importance to the story so we cut it down a bit. The animators took over the main production while Olov and Michal went into VFX-research and Johannes tracking-research. In the end, everyone had to work on the last night before the viewing and help with the postproduction process. Our first showing ending with a standing ovation and some people were surprised that we completed it in time.”

Credits:

Johannes Lindberg : Project manager, matchmoving, rotoscoping, compositing
Michal Marcinkowski : Vechicle artist, VFX, storyboard & concept art, compositing
Mehmet Özdemir : Character animation, modelling & rigging (monkey), compositing
Tim sundin : Character animation, modelling & rigging (Rocketman), compositing
Olov Jacobsen : Environment artist, VFX, compositing