My Date From Hell was my thesis film at the Filmakademie Baden Württemberg, though I already started it as my second years project together with Tom Bracht, a fellow student and good friend of mine.
We had ambitious plans as we wanted to make a short film that matched the quality and detail of a state of the art 3D feature film. At that time we wouldn`t know that the journey we just had started would take us four and a half years to the end.
Never ever would I want to do such a complicated short film project again, as it is like painting the Golden Gate Bridge. If you just think you have finished it all over, you have to start at the beginning again! At one time we noticed that our shots at the end looked far better than the ones at the beginning. So we reworked the look of the settings and the animation of these shots. That work made the production time naturally even longer. There were times when I thought that I would never be able to finish this project. In such a long time of work your style and your feeling for storytelling advances and you begin to think about new films you would like to make. It is very hard to stay focused for such a long time.
Another problem on working on long time projects is that you don`t want to take risks anymore. As you already have invested so much time in a film, you want to please every critic and every viewer who sees first excerpts of the film. You start to take away the parts of the film that made it a bit edgier and stand apart.

Nevertheless I had a great time working on this film and learned so much about film making. On midway Patrick Wachowiak enforced our team to create all kinds of digital particle and fluid effects for My Date From Hell. Patrick and Tom are wonderful team players and brilliant artists.