There are less than two weeks left until I'll be going home and I thought it would be nice to show you my Vienna animation reel. I didn't work on stories or concepts, I just tested some techniques and solved some technical problems. It was interesting because I worked under a rostrum camera here which is totally different to a camera on a tripod in front of your set. I really enjoyed doing cut out animation, it's a simple but challenging technique. I like such things. It was also important to me to try this because of its further usage in my Orpheus project: there's a part when Orpheus is going down to the Underworld to rescue his beloved Eurydice from death and I'm going to do this part in silhouettes. I was wondering if I should do it by hand or digitally, but now I am pretty sure that I'd like to do it with oldschool cut out animation.

Besides that "classical" stuff, I got deeper into digital keyframe animation which is interesting but totally different with its workflow. I was working with Toon Boom Studio, After Effects and Flash Professinal, not to forget with Pencil and Blender. I think I now have a good overview of what is possible with animation and what's the advantage or limit of each technique and how you might combine them.
One of my most favourite techniques was working directly on film... It was great! Film has such a strong visual quality which is just beautiful, especially if we worked on black film leader and the light shone through the scratches and wounds of the black material during its screening... I loved that!

Maureen Furniss – who is an animation historian – wrote about nearly every possible animation technique. She explains so many things and this book is a good foundation to everyone who is interested in animation generally. It accompanies me during my time in Vienna and I worked my way through it. I found it very helpful. The book also provides exercises at the end of every chapter, lip sync, for example, or Pixelation or Flash animation and is referring to the workflow of animation artists. It's more llike a reference book or a lexicon which you could take out from time to time and have a look at. Have a look at its German Amazon website for details.