Sofia International Film Festival's blog

Sebastian Leutner creates animated worlds, which combine reality and fiction. 34 y.o. VFX producer from German Pixomondo received an Oscar for his work on Martin Scorsese’s Hugo in 2012.

In 2008 Sebastian Leutner co-produced Boris Despodov and Andrey Paounov’s German-Bulgarian co-production Three Sisters and Andrey.
The animation won many awards, including Jameson Award for Best
Bulgarian Short at Sofia International Film Festival in 2009. Leutner is
also among the co-producers of Paounov and Despodov’s latest feature
project, Mexican Express, presented during Sofia Meetings in 2009.

Mr.
Leutner, winning an Oscar is a paramount achievement in the film
industry. Since the beginning of 2012 you and your colleagues are also
part of the club of the privileged filmmakers. What has changed after
the Oscar?

For our company, winning the Oscar means
above all more work. We receive many more offers for films and
advertisements. We are being approached by production companies that
haven’t heard of us before the Oscar but now want to work with
Pixomondo. Everybody expects that the quality of our work on their
projects should be as high as it was on Hugo. With regards to
this I try to always explain that there is a connection between the
budget and the time we spend of a certain project. Not everybody has
Martin Scorsese’s budget. Personally, I receive now more inquiries and
offers for participating in seminars. But I must assure you that my
colleagues and I are grounded and nothing in the way we work had
changed, because so far we were also successful.

Pixomondo
is a German company with five offices in Germany and international
offices in Europe, North America and China. What is Germany’s place on
the international market of digital images editing and special effects?

I
should point out that Germany made a huge step ahead and now is among
the international A-list in this market. Our main competitor, Scanline,
was nominated for an Oscar for their work on Hereafter. In 2010, Pixomondo worked on Iron Man 2,
which was also nominated for special visual effects. This proves that
we are moving ahead and now Pixomondo is among the world’s 20 best FX
companies.

Read the whole interview on SIFF's website.