Jakob Montrasio

I was born in Freiburg in 1982 — my father was a philosophy student at the time, which meant the house ran on books, records, paintings, and film reels instead of furniture. Ten years old, I saw The Blues Brothers and something clicked into place that never clicked back out. Soon after that I was shooting Lego stop-motion in my parents' nursery with my father's camcorder. Every coin I owned went straight to movie tickets.

Code

Building Things

1998 — a short film I made with a digital spider won a small national prize. Small trophy, real consequence: it put me on the apprenticeship track at AD&VISION near Frankfurt, media design, my first real exposure to Photoshop, Flash, and the idea that a browser could be a canvas too.

2003 was the hinge year. Kill Bill: Volume 1 rearranged how I thought about editing — still, to me, a film in perfect harmony. Same year I co-founded the news portal mysan.de, taught myself HTML and CSS because the project needed it, and found out code and art run on the same instinct — structure, in service of making someone feel something. The site grew to six-figure monthly visitors before I'd even started calling myself a developer.

I could have taken a better-paying job at a bank in Frankfurt. I took DIE RHEINPFALZ instead, where I've been building the newsroom's frontend since 2016 — ten years now. Same logic as the Kill Bill line: code is code everywhere, but here the typography matters, the editorial images matter, the reading experience for people who've read this paper their whole lives matters. I went back to school for the theory side of it too — a BA in Design and Innovation through the Open University, four years of evening classes stacked on top of a full-time job, finished in 2022.

• HTML
• CSS
• JavaScript
• Accessibility
• Performance

Cinema

Shanghai, and After

2005, Cannes, and I did the thing people say they'll do and mostly don't — packed up and moved to Shanghai. Under the name 孟亚柯 I shot for Porsche, Dell, and Microsoft, wrote three feature scripts, sat on the visual effects crew for John Rabe, and in 2010 directed my own film — The Way of the Spur, a martial arts–Western hybrid with Jon T. Benn, Bruce Lee's villain from The Way of the Dragon, in the cast. Six years, equal parts film school and boot camp, none of it planned that far in advance.

Back in Germany I joined m&r Kreativ in Saarbrücken as a video producer — concept, script, camera, edit, whatever a project needed. The one that still matters most from those years is Souls of Zen, a documentary I co-directed with my friend Tim Graf about ancestor veneration in Japan after the 2011 tsunami. It got a Golden Eye Award nomination at Zurich. It also reminded me that cinema was never a hobby for me. It's closer to how I see.

Photography

The Frame

The photography kept running underneath all of it, the whole time. Early HDR work ended up at the New York Skyscraper Museum and got picked up by CNN, which was not something I expected from photos I mostly took because I couldn't help it. Microsoft made me one of their Lumia Ambassadors in 2014. These days it's a Fujifilm GFX medium format body and an Irix 45mm doing most of the work, and @yakobusan somehow has 52,000 people watching.

I still won't point a camera at something unless it does something to me first — dramatic light, a face, a building that shouldn't be beautiful and is anyway. Anything less isn't worth the shutter count.

Now

Where I Am

I live in Bammental, near Heidelberg, with my wife Jiajia, our two daughters, and a Corgi named Benji who has opinions about all of it. Frontend developer on weekdays, photographer and occasional filmmaker on everything else — I stopped trying to pick just one a long time ago. Understanding the whole picture is what makes you better at your one part of it anyway.

Künstler? — I still put the question mark on it. Van Gogh and Spielberg get the word without asking. I'll settle for making things I'd want to see myself, and finding out where that goes next.