For the current school year I temporarily work as an art teacher at a Realschule (which is something similar to a junior high school), and since I haven't been trained to be a school teacher it's been fairly difficult to get into the flow. Teaching at schools is completely different to the teaching in museums or workshops, so it took all my energy do adapt to this new situation.

Most of the last weeks' time I've been sooo tired. When I eventually fell asleep in the evenings, I dreamed a lot of school dreams which are even more stressful than the reality. Today the holidays start, and finally I had a nice dream this morning I'd like to share with you:

It was an average school day: teaching, solving student's problems, talking to colleagues, whatever. For some reason there was a recruiting agency who wanted to hire animators at the school yard, and they asked me if I'd like to apply. To make a long story short, they hired me on the spot, I quit the school job and I lived happily ever after…

Nice one, eh?
Well, it fits.
All the time I've been thinking, "This is just wrong!" I love to teach but I am definitely not a school teacher. I am an artist, an animation artist, and I truly don't want to be something else. The school job takes all my creative energy, and there's nothing left when I'm back home in my studio. I got really angry about that. So now I try to remember what I really want to do. I talked to two curators last week to find new ways to show my works, and today I made myself an early christmas gift:

I purchased Dragon Stop Motion after testing it for ten days. Dragon Stop Motion is a capture software, a so called frame grabber. It's a great piece of software which works my digital SLR. It has an folder watch mode, and with my new wireless Eye-fi memory card I can use the preview function without a camera-supported video feed.

Buying the software was good and important, I now have the most important things of my technical setup together. I really hope that I'm able to work on the puppets and sets again soon. The dream was so good because it reminds me of what I really want. In my dream I signed the contract, and it was like doing it in reality. I woke up and thought, "well, then let's get started!"