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Erik has written short films like Vent, The Phantom Of The Cinema and Under The Apple Tree, feature film screenplay Hieronymus, a series of animated film noir opera Sausage Dog Titus, television formats like Outside, Piece Of Cake and This Or That and several promo's, leaders and bumpers. A lot more in development!

More often than not Erik's finished films closely resemble their initial storyboards, which means the boards are pretty much wizzywig blueprints. An animatic ia a rough sketch of a movie. It plays as smooth as a movie, complete with well acted voices, sound effects and temp music; an entertaining glimpse of what the might be. Creating animatics is a fast process to discover which scenes actually work and which ones need more work.

Storyboard Under The Apple Tree

A character should fit the project. A face should fit it's dialogue, as well as the world it lives in. In turn, the world should fit the characters and the style of framing, editing, and coloring should fit the story. The tiniest prop should be in the right place, at the right time. Period. A lot of thought goes into a coherent production design. Everyone should work together in order to get everything to work together. 

Design work for Under The Apple Tree

Animation is not a genre, for any genre movie can be done in animation. Animation is a bunch of different techniques to create moving images, other than live action shot by a camera. We can animate drawings, clay, 3D computer images, tableware, human beings, sand, puppets, food... ehr... anything really.

Well executed animation relies on good animators, creating the right movements to move the audience. One has to be an artist as well as a technician. Erik is a hands on filmmaker, often animating himself. On larger projects collaborations were established with companies like Pedri Animations, Frame Order, Beast Animation, RockNRoll Animation and Sergio Lara Jimenez.

Animation: Erik van Schaaik

Erik on editing:
The audience never gets to see the tricks done in editing, simply because it doesn't know the quality of the raw material. In other words: hopeless material can be cut into something watchable or good, great material can be cut into shit. Speaking of shit, a colleague of mine once said that I can turn a turd into something beautiful, of which I'm very proud.

Erik enjoys the process of combining different layers of video, adding effects, tweaking light, color and focus. It's like sculpting with scraps of video.  

Erik composed and performed the music for his television shows i.a. Sausagedog Titus, Outside, This Or That and Piece Of Cake. On his movies Vent, The Phantom Of The Cinema, Pecker and Under The Apple Tree he worked with renowned musicians Martin Fondse, Ernst Reijseger, Eric Vloeimans, Claudio Puntin, Miguel Boelens and Racoon.

When Erik grows up he wants to be a popstar. Colonel Chopka!

Communicating the grandness of a project, creatively drilling for cash flow, scouting, planning, negotiating and marketing the hell out of a good idea.