Media Designer, Filmmaker, Influencer
My skills
As a professional in the field of media design, I've got all the skills and tools necessary to bring your vision to life. Don't let technical details like CMYK printers, 20 megapixel cameras, or 4K Red Epic cameras stress you out - I've got them all in my arsenal. And with the latest Adobe Creative Suite installed on my trusty MacBook, a full-HD quadcopter at my fingertips, and the ability to double-check line spacing on Retina displays, I'm always using the best tools for the job. So sit back, relax, and let me handle the tech - I've got this!
Responsive web design
You expect a car to drive on all the common roads, to go forwards and backwards, and to get you home no matter what the weather is like. The same should be expected from your website - it should perform just as well on all the common browsers, on mobile phones, as it does on large computers with giant screens.
We live in a time where almost every digital device has a built-in web browser, from gaming consoles to mobile phones, tablets, or in-car navigation systems. Everywhere there are browsers. With responsive web design, I make sure that a layout works well in every resolution and that it looks appealing, whether viewed in landscape or portrait mode.
Responsive web design is a design and technical paradigm for creating websites so that they respond to the properties of the device being used, especially smartphones and tablet computers. The graphical layout of a "responsive" website is based on the requirements of the device being used to view the site. This includes arranging and presenting individual elements such as navigations, sidebars, and texts, as well as using different input methods from a mouse (clicking, hovering) or touchscreen (tapping, swiping). The technical basis for this is the newer web standards HTML5, CSS3 (especially media queries), and JavaScript.
That's my specialty.
Pagespeed Optimization
People have become much more impatient in the digital world. Many websites are loaded with large files. However, when you are on the go in the mobile internet and cannot rely on perfect network coverage, you will quickly realize with some websites that they are much too large in terms of data.
This can be due to various things: overly large images, too much code, too many plugins, ... other websites have thousands of lines of unnecessary programming code. Sometimes external stylesheets are loaded that are full of functions that are not needed on the website at all. The more you have of it, the slower the page becomes. But a slow page will quickly be abandoned by visitors and customers if it does not load completely in a few seconds.
I always make sure to keep the file sizes as small as possible while programming and to program as flexible as possible so that you can make changes quickly later - and of course they look very good on all devices.
Design
A typical trio consists of a website, business card, and letterhead. These are the most common graphic requests I receive. Often, there is also the design of a new logo or a flyer, for example for a trade show.
In my portfolio, you will see some examples of what I have graphically implemented in recent times. Together with my clients, I develop concepts and design the required media based on these concepts. So everything looks like it comes from one source, sophisticated and convincing. This also applies when I work based on existing corporate identities to support established companies graphically in an effective manner.
Video Production
Video production is the royalty of media productions. It brings together many different arts: the visual, the musical, the cutting and sorting of images, and of course language and acting, if needed.
Video production has many aspects: it starts with the screenplay, choosing locations, casting actors, and finally shooting the video scene by scene. But that's not all - because the longer part of the work follows! The film must be edited, the colors corrected, and the sound added. Maybe computer-generated graphics are also needed? Nowadays, thanks to Adobe After Effects, no problem.
After that, it also has to be distributed, i.e. uploaded to YouTube, prepared for a trade show booth, or, or, or...
It's also extremely important to pay attention to the end format. A YouTube video that's watched on a small iPhone screen must be shot differently from a video made for a large trade show TV screen. Depending on the size of the display, more or less details can be seen, and the image composition must be aligned accordingly.
By the way, you can also produce elegant and moving videos with small budgets. There are many tricks to enhance the visual quality of the video, such as using stunning quadcopter shots or slow-motion scenes.
A lot of information can be transported in a very short time with a video, and the audience is quickly captivated. My decades of experience with shoots of all budget classes will immediately pay off if you approach me for a video production.
My biography
The analogue filmmaking beginnings
Jakob Montrasio was born on June 17th, 1982 in Freiburg, Germany. From a young age, he was exposed to various forms of art, including literature, poetry, music, and painting. His father, a philosophy student at the time, supported Jakob's creative pursuits and exposed him to as much art as possible. At the age of 10, Jakob's interest in filmmaking was sparked after watching the film "Blues Brothers." From then on, he used his father's camcorder to create stop-motion pieces using Lego in his nursery in Heidelberg. Throughout his youth, Jakob dedicated himself to filmmaking and spent his pocket money solely on movie tickets.
Digital apprentice in media design
In 1998, Jakob submitted a short film featuring a digital spider to a national festival and won a prize. Though the award was small, it had a significant impact on Jakob, launching him on the path of filmmaking. He went on to intern with photographers and complete an apprenticeship in Frankfurt, focusing on Media Design, where he learned image manipulation, camera aperture, 3D animation, web design, and programming. In 2003, Jakob was inspired to fully focus on films after watching Quentin Tarantino's "KILL BILL: VOLUME 1", which he believes is a film in perfect harmony. He also began to take a keen interest in the hardware side of technology.
Databases and designs
In 2003, Jakob co-founded the news portal mysan.de. It eventually expanded to include multiple subdomains with unique content. Jakob initially designed the UI with Photoshop, but later switched to HTML and CSS2, building the website directly in browsers. The website originally ran on PHP, but when monthly unique visitor numbers reached six figures, Jakob and his partner switched to Python. Since then, Jakob has been invested in both graphical and technical UI.
Realization in Asia
After visiting the Festival de Cannes in 2005, Jakob moved to Shanghai, China and began shooting. Within five years, he became known as 孟亚柯 (his Chinese name) and worked for high-profile clients such as Porsche, Dell, and Microsoft. He also opened his own production company, MK Media Productions, wrote three feature film scripts, worked on the big-budget production "John Rabe" in the visual effects crew, and shot his first feature film "The Way of the Spur", a martial arts spaghetti western with various martial artists, stuntmen, and Jon T. Benn, Bruce Lee's villain from the famous movie "The Way of the Dragon."
From smog to Saar
In 2011, Jakob moved back to Germany with his wife and daughter and worked as a video producer in Saarbrücken. He joined the documentary film production "Souls of Zen" as a director and cinematographer, thanks to his friend Tim Graf. Jakob's camera work was later nominated for the "Golden Eye Award" at the Zurich Film Festival. He also produced music videos, television, and cinema advertisements during this time.
Influencing on the internet
It was no surprise when Microsoft approached Jakob in 2014 and asked him to become one of their Lumia-faces. Jakob has been an early adopter for years, his early HDR works in photography led to an exhibition in a New York museum. His Flickr stream has been viewed by hundreds of thousands and his photography has been used on book covers and websites such as CNN. He consistently posts on all of his social media channels, gaining thousands of followers over the years.
Back to the beginnings
In 2015, Jakob returned to freelancing and focused on web design and programming. He gained extensive knowledge in HTML5, CSS3, and UX/UI design, which he applies to his current web projects. He currently resides in Heidelberg, Germany with his wife, two daughters and Corgi Benji.
Since 2016, Jakob has been working for the local newspaper DIE RHEINPFALZ as a frontend developer and UX/UI designer. DIE RHEINPFALZ is a well-established newspaper company in Germany, which has a strong presence in the region of Rhineland-Palatinate.
As a frontend developer, Jakob is responsible for creating and maintaining the website of the newspaper, using languages such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript. He ensures that the website is visually appealing, easy to navigate and functions smoothly for its users.
As a UX/UI designer, Jakob is responsible for designing the user interface and user experience of the website. He conducts user research to understand the needs and preferences of the audience, and uses this information to design the layout, navigation and other elements of the website. This helps to create a seamless and intuitive experience for the users, and also help to increase the website's engagement and conversion rate.
Jakob is passionate about web design and programming, and enjoys the opportunity to work on a variety of projects at DIE RHEINPFALZ, from website redesigns to new features and functionalities. He is always looking for ways to improve the website and make it more user-friendly.
It is a great pleasure for Jakob to be part of the team at DIE RHEINPFALZ and to be able to apply his skills and passion for web design and programming in his daily work. However, photography has always been and will always be Jakob's true passion. He continues to pursue it as a hobby, experimenting with new techniques and capturing the world around him through his lens. Jakob will continue to pursue his love for photography throughout his life, as it brings him great joy and fulfillment. He believes that photography is not just a hobby, but an art form that allows him to express his creativity and capture memories that will last a lifetime.
