yakobusan

Jakob was born on the 17th of June, 1982, in Freiburg, Germany. His father, Paolo, was a student of Philosophy at the time. From very early on, Jakob was surrounded by art in the form of writings, poetry, music, paintings and finally films. After noticing his son’s creativity, his father would expose Jakob to as much art as possible, supporting him in whatever ways he could afford. Seing the BLUES BROTHERS movie at the tender age of 10 spiked Jakob’s interest into films even more. From then on, using his father’s camcorder, he’d spend hours shooting stop motion pieces using nothing but Lego. Jakob did not once spend his pocket money on something else but on tickets to the cinema during his youth.

In 1998, Jakob submitted an short film with a digital spider to a national festival and won a prize. Even though the prize was small, it had a huge impact on Jakob and lead to much bigger things, as it threw him on the track of film making. What followed were internships with photographers and an apprenticeship in Frankfurt focusing on Media Design, where he learned the tools of the trade – from image manipulation over camera aperture to 3D animation. In 2003, Jakob finally saw the film that would change his life, that inspired him to fully focus on films, filmmaking and everything around it – it was Quentin Tarantino’s KILL BILL: VOLUME 1 which is, in Jakob’s opinion, a film in perfect harmony. “Since film is not one but many arts mashed together, it is rare that every aspect is working together as perfectly as in KILL BILL: VOLUME 1.”

After visiting the Festival de Cannes in 2005, Jakob moved shortly afterwards to the New York of the East, Shanghai, China, and started to shoot. Within 5 years, Jakob did not only work for high profile clients such as Porsche, Dell and Microsoft, but also managed to open his own production company, MK Media Productions, write three feature film scripts, work on the big budget production JOHN RABE in the visual effect crew, and shoot his first feature film – SHANGDOWN: THE WAY OF THE SPUR. He is now living in Saarbrücken, Germany, with his wife Sijia and daughter Emily.