Andreas Hoess

Andreas Hoess was born in Salzburg in the mid 60s, a small town with a big attitude, because by accident it was also the birthplace of a guy called Mozart. Because it was the birthplace of Mozart and he had parents who both played music by themselves he came in contact with fine art pretty early in his life. So he started with music when he was not even four and ended up with playing eight different instruments till he reached the age of 20. But when he turned five he came into contact with the real thing. His grandmother gave him an old Zeiss Ikon box-camera and he started to waste rolls of film on a large scale. It was this same grandmother who took him on a journey to former Yugoslavia when he was six where he was deeply touched by the love of live all the people had he met, despite the fact that they were totally poor by every means and in the eye of a six year old. An experience which inspired him all his later live. With the age of 12 he won a national photo competition which fueled, with the first Starwars Episode, which was released the very same year and he was watching stunning 17 times, his teenage wish to make movies. Funnily enough somebody trusted his talent and provide him at the age of 18 with some funding for a film project. A story about a 16 year old runaway from Berlin, who flew to the US to steal a car to fulfill his dream to drive the rout 66 all the way through the US to Santa Monica to see the pacific. So Andreas hit a plane to New York bought a 30 year old Ford station wagon, a 16 mm camera, close to 3000 meter of film and he and three friends drove from New York to LA. This first project was shown on some Student Film Festivals, and received mild but by no means enthusiastic acclamations. Because there was no film-school in Salzburg he started with mass communication which offered courses in camera-work and directing and switched to Bowling Green State University USA/Ohio State, where he finished Masscom with an Master Degree and started in Computeranimation. One years later he moved to Los Angeles where he took courses in scriptwriting, and special FX and computer animation, as well as making a degree in Graphic Design. There he got to know John Frankenheimer, Stanley Kubrick, and William Gibson which all of them become very influential for his future work. He worked for some time in the US for some FX companies till he came back to Europe to start his own company in Berlin by 2000. Although being quite successful from start, (his company became Germanys best startup in 2001, working for Sony, Disney, Bertelsman, Deutsche Telekom, TMobile, being an advisor for the German Bundestag, he missed working creative. So he sold his company 2004 and became a creative director for the company who bought it. There he concentrated on developing storytelling techniques and graphical concepts for Cross Media Projects. 2008 he came back to Salzburg, only to start to work for Red Bull and their ambitious Media strategies, first as an Art Director, later on as Creative Director for the whole project.