about team

Before we introduce ourselves, we thought we'd make you aware that the team photo on this page has been generated using MidJourney AI. Why? Because we were too lazy to have an updated picture taken and the old picture was from 2007. That's why. Now on with the show!

Sven Pannicke opened his own animation studio in the 90s, creating stop motion films with a custom built camera. Today Sven is one of the managing directors at RISE and able to bank on a wealth of experience from traditional animation, producing animation and VFX projects at the Film Akademie Ludwigsburg to working for two facilities as VFX producer. While also having supervised and produced VFX work himself, Sven is now focussing on his role as CEO and CFO across all sites as well as being involved in all productions of our sister film production company RISE PICTURES.

Robert Pinnow is one of the managing directors at RISE. Robert has been working for Softimage in the late 90s before he became head of production and IT for several visual effects and visualization companies. While he is more focused on CTO work like server and network development utilizing various high-end techniques only found in supercomputing centers, he is also still pursuing VFX producer and supervisor duties from time to time. And if there is still time left, he will get his hands dirty rewiring and soldering to improve how we work.

Markus Degen studied Visual Media Art at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, Austria. He is a classically trained designer with an enormous knowledge in film and broadcasting hardware and software, compression algorithms (codecs), data and colour look-up formats. Markus won the prestigious Prix Ars Electronica award and started working in compositing in 2001, soon moving on to supervising digital effects work on several films. As one of the four founding members of RISE, Markus is focussing on his role as CCO overseeing every pixel we touch.

Florian Gellinger has worked extensively as a visual effects designer in both compositing and 3D. After co-founding RISE together with Markus, Robert and Sven, his work as visual effects supervisor and some of the radical new techniques he used for the German film This is Love directed by Matthias Glasner received overwhelming feedback from the VFX community and made RISE known across the globe. Since RISE has grown substantially, Florian is now focussing on being executive VFX producer on almost all shows at RISE as well as curating our marketing efforts.