I asked an acquaintance to pose for portraits. I am a bit rusty, but it was big fun. We met in the Café of Museum Ludwig in Cologne, she read a book and I drew. Brilliant Sunday afternoon. If there is anybody out there who wants to be drawn please contact me. And I need a little more practice and I am working on it….
These are preliminary sketches for my short film Captain Bligh from 2003. There a lots of small ideas that had to be left out of the film (…what a pity). The drawings were exhibited at the Filmakademie for quite some time.
A new book I have illustrated about pirates will be available in august. I have just found the announcement on the Arena homepage. Work on this project proved to be more difficult than I thought, because the more I read about pirates the less I liked them. The thing is that you start realizing that our image of pirates is 3oies Hollywood Kitsch.
http://www.arena-verlag.de/artikel/pirat-voraus-kaepten-klaus-978-3-401-60016-1
But on the other hand I had fun. I love drawing ships and reading Patrick O´Brian novels is one of my great guilty pleasures ever since I have finished my animated short Captain Bligh in 2003. (For those who haven´t seen that:
Imagefilm
An Imagefilm I did for Asseco Germany. Most of the work was spent on the design. I like it. Music by Frank Schreiber, script Susanne Decker, voice artist Christian Deutsch.
Here is the youtube link:
Another Film for Planet Wissen, this time about Cookies. I did a variation on the simplified style I normally do, because I was starting to get bored. This was done in about 5 days which was only made possible by the help of Cologne based animator Kerstin Unger (http://kerstinunger.com/). Thanks to her. It is a little rough but it works quite well.
Here are two book I have illustrated in 2011/2012 for Arena. I like the sidekicks especially- the small mammoth and the dinosaur. The cooperation with Volker präkelt and Bärbel Müller was very pleasant. I am working at another volume of this series about pirates at the moment. 
http://www.arena-verlag.de/helden/derek-roczen
I made 5 new films for Planet Wissen
Sozialversicherung (Social Insurance ), Vegetarismus (Vegetarianism, Risiko (risk taking), 2 for Existiert die Welt (Does the worl exist)
Risiko is probably the most funny one. I am gonna post a link as soon as it is online, although I am afraid you need to know some German to get some of the jokes. I will post a link as soon as it is online.
Vegetarianism:
Risk:
Social Insurance
SWR Planet Wissen
One more chapter in the works I did recently. This is for a German TV-show about science. I did several episodes during the past year (wind, primitive times, urban gardening, social insurance, vegetarians). I developed this style for limited budget animation, and it works quite well.
They can be found on the Planet Wissen homepage:
http://www.planet-wissen.de/index.jsp
This is my scribble about life in primitive times:
http://www.planet-wissen.de/sendungen/2013/09/24_oetzi.jsp
Unfortunately the quality of the video isn´t particularly good.
Here are some stills
This is a project from 2011 I did for the Landtag Baden Württemberg for Taks Film and director Dorothea Künzel. The process was a little protracted, because I had participated in pitch the year before. In retrospect the design I did back then was a little to lame, so I lost to Angela Steffen, but got the job when she decided to work on Andreas Hykades Tom. I was first supposed to use her design, which I didn´t like. I am a great fan of Angela but this case was different. So I did a complete redesign, which I like a lot.
The film explains the mechanics of the regional parliament and is often used in schools. It is a pity, that I haven´t found another use for this style so far. By the way thanks to Annette Schneider of Taks Film and Dorothea Künzig for her advice….
I uploaded an edit of the animated scenes. I don´t have the sound files so they are without sound, but I hope you will get the idea.
These are some drawings from the first pitch and a link to the animation test I did back then.
The next chapter in updating my blog. This is also an older work, which dates back to 2010. I did this for a small museum in Nagold dedicated to Eduard Mörike. Mörike is a well known German poet with strong ties to his Swabian home country, and is dearly liked there because of that. He once visited Nagold and I was commissioned to do a short film about that. That was difficult, because very little happened on that trip. But I quite like the film. These are film stills and sketches and at the far and there is link to vimeo, where you can watch the clip, but I am afraid it is in German….
If your interested in further information or visiting the place:
http://www.nagold.de/de/Unsere-Stadt/Vereine-und-Gruppen-?view=publish&item=club&id=60
Eduard Mörike, Schwaben, Swabia, Poet, Dichter, Animation, Zeller, Nagold, Mörike Zeller Garten, Derek Roczen
https://vimeo.com/23478555transcode_complete-finished-20120100&utm_source=email
The latter are sketches from a small moleskin sketchbook. I decided to vary the traditional silhouette style for the animation in the end.
Derek Roczen's Weblog 
