Sven Pape

Sven Pape was born and raised in Germany and moved to South Africa at age 16 to finish high school. Working as an assistant to commercial producer Peter Gird from Ogilvy & Mather in Cape Town, he discovered his love for film. After three years, he returned to Germany to study film at the University of Arts Berlin. During that time he worked for the Free Broadcasting Service of Berlin and produced TV segments for a weekly live show. Sven is fascinated by the Internet (his thesis evolves around interactive drama) and soon became a founding partner of the multimedia agency Pinuts media+science working as Creative Director for clients like Coca-Cola and the German Investment Bank.

Graduating with a Master's degree and keeping his partnership with Pinuts, Pape decided to head to Los Angeles to attend the film program at the prestigious American Film Institute. In the following two years, Sven produced four films including his thesis project THE WATER GHOST, which stars Hiep Thi Le from Oliver Stone's HEAVEN & EARTH. The film sold to Lifetime TV and also earned him the 1999 Producer's Guild of America Award. After graduating from AFI with a Master of Fine Arts, Pape started a new production company Snowdog Films. In its first year, the company produced several projects for the European and Japanese market, including a Whitney Houston commercial and TV portraits about the Backstreet Boys, Mc Lyte and Neve Campbell.

The year 2000 marks the production of Snowdog's first feature film HOLLYWOOD, PA, a comedy about the Internet. Pape, as Webcast director, presented the first-ever live Webcast from an independent movie set. The Web site at www.hollywoodpa.com was supported by a Microsoft production team and utilized iBeam satellite technology for the Internet broadcast. Co-host Jennifer Ringley from JenniCam.org, as well as several cross-promotional partnerships, brought the small independent film the necessary media buzz to lock in finanzing. Within 15 days, the Web site received four million hits.

HOLLYWOOD, PA led to Pape directing the Barbados annual fashion event FIRE & ASH 2000 (Webcast and documentary), directing a commercial for the clothing line CHANNEL K and a Webcast directing job with James Cameron's company, American Gothic. The broadband full screen Internet project is currently in preproduction and scheduled to go online early next year.