Hi there

As you know, my name is Yanik. I live in the Austrian countryside, surrounded by fields and forests. I currently attend a higher technical college 1.5 hours away from home, so a lot of my time gets wasted on travel. Nonetheless, I manage to do lots of cool stuff in my free time. My favourite projects are outlined on the main portfolio page. On this sub-page, I talk a bit more about my life experiences and hobbies.

Filmmaking

In 2020, I started my education at HTL Leonding for IT and Media Technology. At that point, I was already interested in image editing, design, and various creative work. In my second year at HTL, I was introduced to video creation and was admittedly not very interested. The teaching was very theoretical, and the cameras we were provided were old camcorders—worse than our phones. What got me hooked was a LEGO stop motion I did with a classmate. We went much further than was required by the task: we created backdrops, a lighting setup, simple digital animations, and the highlight—custom music created by Rik Pfenniger. Additionally, that year we dubbed the first Harry Potter trailer as an audio exercise. These two projects sparked a fascination for storytelling in me. The following year, I started planning my first short film with two friends. We convinced the teacher to give us a better camera and a gimbal, and created the 8-minute action short Revenge. In the fourth grade, we again tried to one-up ourselves and wrote a proper script with extensive dialogue, many different locations, and an overall much more complex storyline. After countless hours of work in pre-production, production, and post-production, we created the 20-minute short film No Tomorrow.
Nowadays, I am in love with filmmaking, dreaming of one day directing a big production feature film. Obviously, I have a long way to go, but I started at a very young age, and I will keep working on this dream until one day you see "written and directed by Yanik Kendler" on the big screen.

Web Development

At HTL, the main focus of my branch was web development. In the second grade, I started my first side project that allowed me to create and play custom gameshows. I worked on that project for about a year, constantly updating the technologies and adding features. For school, I created various projects like an open canvas note-taking app, an interactive, animated advent calendar, and the animal shelter app Pet Pal. I went on to work on more side projects like a small library Popup Engine, an app for counting dart scores, a web-based puzzle game with a friend, and an Electron app for creating fantasy world wikis: World Manager.
In the fourth grade, we started a 1.5-year-long project for the school itself: an app for digitalizing the renting of video equipment to students. Sadly, we were not allowed to use a proper framework for this, so a lot of time was wasted rewriting systems that would already be present in most web frameworks. Nonetheless, it is my biggest and most complex project to date, with a multitude of features and a complex backend.
To complete the school and get my Matura, we need to create a project for a company, usually as part of an internship. We made a learning platform that allows the company's customers to learn and understand the features of a complex ERP tool by watching videos and answering quizzes. Now, all that's left is to write my diploma thesis, successfully complete the school year, and pass the Matura... and then I can start working a real job. I will probably do web dev and/or UI design for a while, fund a few short films as a hobby, enter a few into film festivals, and hope for the best.

Outdoors

Ever since I can remember, my parents took me hiking. As a little kid, I couldn’t stand it sometimes—I used to sit down next to the footpath and refuse to move another centimeter uphill. But as I grew older, something slowly clicked. I began to appreciate the beauty of the mountains, started to see the benefits of exercise, and actually started to enjoy hiking. Nowadays, I go on hikes with my mum all year round—in the wintertime, we just use spikes or snowshoes.
With my appreciation for hiking grew my general love for nature. I’ve always liked spending time in forests and crafting things. My parents took my brother and me on many camping trips—sometimes just with a small tent in a national park, sometimes by car to a different country altogether. In the last few years, I picked up two new hobbies.
Firstly, I bought a telephoto lens and started getting up early in the morning to take pictures of animals. Then, in 2024, my family and I spent a month in Norway, where I could put these skills to use—most notably, I managed to capture elk and puffins.
Secondly, I got myself a tarp, packed a sleeping bag, and spent a night out in the forest. I already had various outdoor knowledge like fire-making, knots, knife handling, and such, so the experience was overall a very pleasant one. I expanded on this again in Norway, where I spent several nights in national parks and cooked many meals—or at least some tea—over a campfire next to our van.
Since then, I’ve picked up wildlife photography as a hobby and now camp out in the forest or the mountains every couple of weeks.