While cleaning my hard drive I found this 3D animated commercial from around 1996. It was my first job as a freelancer. It shows a little love story on a virtual space station called CyberCity and advertises a modem from the company Elsa, which was quite well known in Germany at the time.

The backstory of how I got this job is quite something. We were living in Aachen in a student flat share. One day the doorbell rang and a stranger introduced himself as a previous tenant of our flat — he wanted to revisit the place and refresh his memories of student life. We invited him in, got talking, and it turned out he was the founder and CEO of Elsa. So a random doorbell led to my first freelance gig.

For those who don’t remember — a modem was the device that connected your computer to the telephone line, and the telephone line was how you got online. At 28.8 kilobits per second you could download about one megabyte in five minutes. Elsa, based in Aachen, was one of Germany’s leading manufacturers of modems and graphics cards in the 1990s. Their founder Klaus Langner was deep in the scene — he ran the “Solaris” node on Fidonet, a global network of bulletin board systems that linked computers via modem long before the internet became a household thing.

Fidonet was basically the social network of the pre-internet era. Thousands of nodes worldwide, each running a BBS (bulletin board system) on somebody’s home computer, exchanging messages and files by calling each other up over the phone line — usually at night when the rates were cheaper. I was calling in daily to poll and sync messages, which was the way to get the hottest nerd news at the time. It was also quite expensive — every minute on the phone line cost real money, and my telephone bills were something I preferred not to think about too much. But that was the price of being connected before being connected was normal.

The movie is about 4 minutes long and I made it with the DOS version of 3D Studio. Everything was modeled and animated by hand. It took me about 10 months to finish this video clip. For the final rendering I had to borrow computers from all my friends — it took about a week of continuous rendering across multiple machines. The video was created around 1996.

Looking back at it now, it’s a time capsule of early 3D animation — before GPU rendering, before motion capture, before any of the tools we take for granted today. Every vertex placed manually, every keyframe set by hand, every texture painted pixel by pixel. The DOS version of 3D Studio (later renamed to 3ds Max) was the tool of choice for independent 3D artists at the time, running on 486 and early Pentium machines.

It was also the beginning of a career in digital media technology that continues to this day.