Team

Katja Schmid is an award-winning filmmaker and full professor for Visual Effects and Post Production. With extensive international teaching experience, she serves as Minor Coordinator of the Minor Experimental Film and Mixed Reality and teaches in both the Bachelor’s program in Audiovisual Media and the Master’s program in Audiovisual Media Creation and Technology. Katja holds an MFA in Cinematography from Babelsberg Film University and has contributed to over 50 film and television productions. At Studio Babelsberg, she served as a Post Production Coordinator on numerous projects, including Beyond the Sea and The Bourne Supremacy. She is a co-founder of the Visual Media Lab and has curated conference tracks for VeGA Camp, FMX, and the VMLaB Conference. Her current research focuses on the use of color in storytelling.

Full CV

Stefan Grandinetti started his career as camera-assistant in international feature films ("Enemy at the Gates", "Resident Evil", "Luther",...) and graduated with summa con laude in "Cinematography" at Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen "Konrad Wolf",Potsdam-Babelsberg in 2003. He worked as a freelancing cinematographer based in Berlin in the fields of documentary, feature film and commercial. His films got numerously awarded on international festivals „Testimony": Prix Europa, "Life Goes On": Emmy International, "Rain is Falling": worldwide festivals, "The House is Burning":Cannes Certain Regard,...) In 2010 he was appointed as Professor for Cinematography at HdM, Stuttgart in the department Electronic Media to teach arts and technologies for cinematography and to supervise student's filmproductions (documentary, fictional film, research projects). He is the founder of the "International Cinematography Days, Stuttgart", the HdM-institute "Visual Media Lab" and its conference aiming at researching fine arts and technologies of cinematography - his fields of research are cinematic "High Dynamic Range" and "High Frame Rates". Stefan Grandinetti is member of the german society of cinematographers (BVK) and a active member of the IMAGO technical committee (ITC), the educational committee (IEC) and is an editor of the scientific journal for cinematography CITO.

Full CV

Prof. Ursula Drees has been Professor of Media Design with a focus on Event Media at the Stuttgart Media University since 2008. Her research interests lie in the area of interaction and play in the event media experience space.

After graduating as a master student with Joachim Sauter and VALIE EXPORT and receiving a degree in visual communication with a focus on new media from the University of the Arts in Berlin, she worked for renowned companies such as Pixelpark AG, Berlin, Unified Field, Inc. New York and artemedia AG, Filmstudios Babelsberg. Before she founded the creative multimedia art agency plusinsight in July 2001, she was creative director of the multimedia and event media department at the Filmstudios Babelsberg - Special Effects Center.

She has won several international awards including The 42nd New York Festival Finalist Award, Gold at the 8th International TV Awards Festival in Cologne, The Communications Award of Excellence in New York and the Print's Magazines Winner of Digital Art.

Prof. Boris Michalski has been Professor of Media Production Management at the Stuttgart Media University since 2012. Prior to his professorship, he produced numerous national and international cinema and TV films as a film producer and was awarded numerous prizes for his film projects. Boris Michalski is a member of the German and the European Film Academy.

Prof. Jan Adamczyk is a german VFX Supervisor with more than a decade of experience in the visual effects industry. Since 2006 he worked on numerous international feature film and tv productions.

His credits in visual effects include The Dark Knight, Sherlock Holmes, Star Trek - Into Darkness, Hugo Cabret, Atomic Blonde and Jim Button and Lukas the engine driver. Prof. Jan Adamczyk has worked at VFX Studios based in Stuttgart, Munich, London and Berlin and received national and international award nominations and wins.

Prof. Jan Adamczyk is an active member of the Visual Effects Society, the Deutsche Filmakademie and the Deutsche Akademie für Fernsehen. From the winter semester 2018/19 Prof. Jan Adamczyk is part of the visual effects team at the Stuttgart Media University and will enrich the Courses with his know how, practical experience and artistic talent as well as the connections to the local and international VFX industry.

His teaching areas include Visual Effects (VFX), Computer-Generated Imagery (CGI), Concept Art, Studio Production for Computer Animation, Studio Production for VFX, FX Simulation, and Virtual Production. Additionally, his research focuses on Digital Locations, Virtual Production, and interactive work methods for animation films.

Prof. Dr. Jan Froehlich is Professor for Motion Picture Engineering at Stuttgart Media University (HdM). His research focus is high dynamic range (HDR) and wide color gamut (WCG) image encoding, color rendering, camera metrology and HDR Workflows. Before becoming a professor he worked as Senior Image Scientist at Arnold & Richter Cinetechnik GmbH & Co. Betriebs KG (ARRI) Munich and for Dolby Laboratories contributing to the development of the ITU Rec.2100 ICtCp color space and the Dolby Vision HDR and WCG content distribution platform. Before starting the PhD he was Technical Director at CinePostproduction GmbH in Germany. Jan is member of SMPTE, IS&T, FKTG, and the German Society of Cinematographers (BVK)