This one is about motivation.
If you’re an artist or work as an independent filmmaker, you have to constantly motivate yourself as long as you ever want to finish your projects. The less outside pressure you have (say, other people’s money involved or a tight schedule), the more true this becomes.

I guess the most common advise is to simply get started. But for whatever reason this sometimes doesn’t work. So I wrote a post about being gridlocked some time ago because I know a lot of artists having gridlocked moments from time to time, and so have I.

The other day I read an article in which the author mentioned a very helpful trick. I’d like to share this trick with you because it worked pretty good for me, and for my spouse as well. Hopefully, this will be helpful for you, too. Okay, ready?

Limit yourself

Perhaps you now think she’s nuts. Why should you limit yourself if you haven’t even started yet? The idea is simple: Take any alarm clock, set its alarm a good hour from now, and start whatever needs to be done. You have just this one hour. Nothing more. Do you feel the pressure raising? When the alarm starts to ring, immediately stop. Have a break.

If you love what you’re doing, you’ll definitely want to spend some more time doing what you’re doing right now. You could set the alarm for another hour straight away (though I guess, you won’t need that anymore...). If you’re doing something because you simply have to, just relax. You did a great job so far, you worked on your project for at least one hour, and I’m sure you have some results now. Reward yourself with something nice (nibble some sweets, have a walk, work an hour on beloved projects...). If your unloved project isn’t finished yet, work on it for another hour later (hey, it’s just one hour!), or try to finish it within those initial 60 minutes when possible...

Here’s a list of things I successfully completed during the last three days using this technique:

• a website design for a client
• an illustration layout for a client
• some video editing for my students
• some garden work being absolutely overdue
• some more designs and ideas for the film and
• this blog post.
  

For me, it’s working amazingly well... Let me know when you tried it, and if and how it works for you. I’d love to read your experiences in the comment section.

It took me one hour to draw this draft of the entry to the underworld and by this, realizing some other important things about my set design. Before I did it, I wasn’t sure how Orpheus would know where he has to look for his beloved Eurydice. I hadn’t a clue of what the entry would look like – Tim Burton-esque with screaming colours and a lot of dancing skeletons, or more simple, empty and calm like the rest of the graveyard? I decided to design it the latter way. The skull embracing the door and the crematory-like chimney are the only references to death here.

When I scaled the drawing to the buildings final size, I found out that my set will be much bigger than I believed so far. The final premises are about 40 cm high. Since I’m now going to build the big stuff, I’m getting really exited... It’s fantastic to see what one could achieve in just one hour!

Though most of the tomb stones aren't finished until now, the atmosphere is raising.

I simply love the progress bars... Sometimes I don’t like to talk to much about what I’m doing right now, but the bars show the progress anyway. And today I suddenly realized how much I’ve already completed! I put the cemetery setting together as far as I’ve finished the single pieces and it looked like a real setting... Horray!

I had been to two film festivals as a visitor last week, to the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen and to the Stuttgart Festival of Animated Film. I had a great time there, saw countless numbers of (animated) short films, had the oppotunity to talk to animation artists like Bruce Bickford personally and yet I’m still inspired by all the artworks I’ve seen – some of them were just amazing!

I had a few new ideas for my film there, too, and after having a heavy cold for few days, I spent the last weekend completely in my studio to work on the settings. I made some props for the graveyard: a tree, a pieta-like sculpture of an angel, about twenty graves (which aren’ finished yet) and two picture frames of Orpheus and Eurydice for their home.

The sculpture is about 20 cm in height, and it’s one of my most favourite pieces so far. It’s important for the graveyrd’s atmosphere since I want it to be somewhat like Le Cimetière du Père-Lachaise in Paris which is perhaps the most beautiful cemetery I’ve ever been to. Again, everything is made of cardboard, paper and wire covered with a thin layer of acrylics, watercolours and/or pastels.

Little, little things: the picture on the left is approx. 3,5 cm high. I used pin needles as nails to hang the pictures onto the wall.

Today I finished the very next to last character (re)design. It’s Orpheus, the main character of my film (finally!):

Orpheus: character design 2010

Orpheus: silhouette character design

The re-design was necessary due to my decision for a paper look and feel. And after my successful bird animation, I feel confident enough to make a bigger character with these materials. Orpheus now looks a bit more adult or mature, very sad and somehow fragile...

If you’re reading my blog for years now, you’ll perhaps remember that I had a very clear idea of how Orpheus should look like before:

Orpheus: character design 2007

Orpheus: character design 2008

I like the new one much better, it just feels right now. I had never been 100% happy with the old concept, but now I am.

Did you notice the new progress bars on the right, below the navigation (I found them via Shelley Noble’s blog)? I’m nearly done with all the character design. – Unbelievable! Still, there are many things to do but it’s nice to see the progress so clearly...

It’s always a little celebration if I’m going to change the figures... And it’s amazingly motivating to see how much I’ve already finished...

Well, I don’t. But someone else does:
After several posts about other stuff I’m now back working on my Orpheus film project. Last Friday I finished another puppet, a tiny bird. This time it’s a minor character from the world of the living and that’s why it isn’t just a silhouette:

The picture above shows the puppet with rigging wire attached. I used 1.5mm aluminium wire here. The top picture shows the scale drawing. I designed the puppet very small (about 2.5 cm), but it wasn’t possible to build it that size from the materials I’d chosen, so it’s now approx. 3.5 cm in height.
Orpheus is suffering from Eurydice’s death and he plays his lyra for the sake of forgetting his grief for a moment. His music is the only thing he loves as much as he loves dead Eurydice. The bird and one or two other animals are attracted by the sad play and our feathered friend lands on the window ledge and listens to the melody.

I did a small test animation to see if the puppet works:

The bird is made of an armature of twisted 1.0 mm aluminium wire, covered with thin cardboard and paper. The eyes are tiny beads and it’s painted with ink and acrylics. It is the tiniest and yet animateable puppet I have ever made, and I found it a real cutie.

This is what the armature basically looks like.

Though it’s a minor character it was so very important to make it. I was thinking about how to make the upper world character’s design for weeks now, and at the same time I hadn’t any clou. I wanted them clearly made of paper but with a stable armature inside. So, right now: Heureka! I think I’ve got the solution!

Then I checked all my To Do lists for the project yesterday as well, and saw that I finished nearly one third of all sets and puppets which is absolutely great and more than I had expected so far. I’m only a few weeks behind my schedule...

Last weekend I attended a workshop called Vodoo Toys which was meant as an introduction to circuit bending. According to Wikipedia on Circuit bending, it’s

the creative short-circuiting of electronic devices such as low voltage, battery-powered guitar effects, children's toys and small digital synthesizers to create new musical or visual instruments and sound generators.

(Wikipedia’s circuit bending article was last modified on 20 February 2010 at 13:33 when I wrote this.)

Our tutor Stan Pete uses bent toys in live concerts and taught us how to elicit weird noises from electronic children’s toys ourselves. I myself don’t want to do live alien music, but I’m always trying to find new and intresting ingredients for animation. And because sound is as much important as the visuals, I thought it would be great to learn how to trigger weird melodies and sound effects like these.
The pictures below will give you some insights:

The workflow is always similar: open your toy or device, find connections evoking sounds, soldering them together and then do some case modelling.

I just did simple modifications since I’m a kind of newbie to electronic arts. I added

• a potentiometer to pitch the existing sounds
  
• body contacts to change the pitch in a different way
  
• an audio jacket socket for an easy use in a sound recording studio.
  
  

This is what my voodoo toy can do (approx. 11MB):

Of course you could do far more complex circuit bending if you’d have more complex devices than I have here... But for a quick start it was a nice result I think...

This is what others do with their bent toys:

If you want to read more about circuit bending, follow these links:

• anti-theory.com is launched by Reed Ghazala who is the inventor of circuit bending. This website is the main reference for most of the available information of circuit bending.
  
• The German newspaper [taz.de] has an interview with Reed Ghazala about his work. He seems to be an outstanding person and artist. Perhaps you could read it with the google translator if you don’t speak German (well).
  

Important note:

Please be careful if you want to try it yourself. You’re dealing with electricity here and this may cause serious injuries. Circuit benders normally only use battery driven devices since they only have low voltage connections.

I simply love animation.
I love books, too, and I’m especially attracted by pop-up books.
I'm absolutely addicted to books about animation.

And then I found this incredible animated pop-up book called GALOPP! in a local book store a few weeks ago... It’s awesome, and this seems to be the reason why it became a children’s book bestseller. Its author Rufus Butler Seder appears to be absolutely dedicated to animated toys and developed a technique called Scanimation which gives life to the animals in this book.

If you’d like to know how it works, have a look at youtube.com where Rufus is revealing the secrets of this simple but amazing technique. You’ll find some Photoshop tutorials about Scanimation there, too.

Rufus Butler Seder also published two other books based on the same idea.

Last week I gave an animation class for kids at a local education center. I teached a lively (and lovely!) group of seven boys from the age of 8 to 12 years. The course was ment to give them a general idea about the possibilities of hand-made animation techniques.

Some of the kids were absolute naturals and we had a lot of fun with all the techniques we tried... We started with moving toys, next plasticine and sand, but since there were a lot of boys who love to draw, we also did classical drawn animation, too. (We finished 12 animated clips that week... They were so motivated!)

I’d like to share some of my favourites of the drawn animation with you, since these are well done for kids of that age. The boys have quite a faible for any kind of violent stories, so if you don’t like explosions and dead stick figures, don’t watch the clips. I simply wasn’t able to encourage them to draw any pet stories... I’m sorry for that!

Violence in Media Projects With Kids

Violence is a big issue in working with kids of that age. I remember that we played cops and robbers or Spiderman against God knows who or any other story about two groups fighting each other when I was a kid. But the kids today see much more violence in the TV, on their computers or on their mobiles than we did when we were younger....

This is not meant to be a forum for kitchen table wisdom but I really wonder how to deal with it. I always try to point out to the kids that violence just for their pure aesthetic amusement is an absolute no-go. But the kids usually don’t perceive it as a problem because violence so often is presented as a pure a aesthetic action and not as a pathogenic version of healthy aggression in movies or video games. The kids often don’t see any difference between those...

Do you have any ideas how to deal with this? Do you have any, and if, what are your experiences?

Should I join Vimeo or Youtube? That’s the question for weeks now...
Or at least, it was until last saturday when I finally joined…

Click into the image and follow the white rabbit... er... the link to my new vimeo homepage.

Tadaaa!

– Yes, of course, youtube is much more popular, and if you want to get your videos out quickly it may be your first choice. But for several reasons I don’t trust a company who collects as much data as Google does for turning user data into money... I like Vimeo better especially for its artistic approach... They have a nice data policy and everything seems to work fine there.

Normally, I’d like to host my videos on our own server, but I thought it would be nice to reach a few more people through a video community website... In addition, I’m finally going to share my animation debut with you, Ein anderer Traum (engl. Another Dream) which I made in 2006:

While I was thinking about which videos I’d like to share I detected that I produced lots of short clips over the last years but no other completed films. But then I decided that I don’t care about this. The last years had been truly educational time and I tried and learned a lot of things... Ein anderer Traum was the very beginning in 2006, when I first thought to give animation a try and then decided to become an animation artist... Here I am now!

Thanks to all of you who came along with me that way!

When do you know you’re overworked?
This time I knew it because I hadn’t any time to work on my film since there were millions of other things to do which seems to be much more important... And when I eventually had the time, I sat at my desk in my studio and wasn’t able to do anything because I was so tired, exhausted and angry with myself...

At this very moment I felt and remembered how important this film project is for me, and how much I want it to be a great piece of art – something that touches your soul while you’re watching it... And yes, I know, that’s what they usually call “high expectations”... But nevertheless, that’s what I want...

After feeling sorry for myself for some time and a huge amount of sleep, I finally began to work again, and I came up with some elements for the graveyard setting: I made several trees and finished the wall which surrounds the cemetry today.

Each part of the wall is approximately 25 cm high, and 50 cm long. I used foam board to build its main shape, and different kind of cardboards for the details. As I did with the furniture, I covered the piles with sandwich paper, and the stones with a thin layer of white acrylics. Finally, I added some more drawn details with a pencil and ink to achieve an impression of depth between the bricks and the stones.

I sometimes just like the atmosphere these pictures have....

The hinges are simply made of curved aluminium wire I plugged into the soft foam board. I literally had this wall in my head for weeks now, and I’m so glad I finally build it. I still need some graves, the entry to the unterworld, perhaps a few more trees and I also need a nice background landscape. Altogether I already finished nearly 50% of all the graveyard pieces...

However, today I have no idea how I’d be ever going to finish this film... But I remember former projects: there’s always this point when I think it was a stupid idea to even start such a project. In the majority of these cases, it was nonsense. Each time simply moving on worked best as an antidote...