Well, I haven't failed... so much. Week 7 and 8 are over now... Time still is rushing by and I wonder what's going on. I overcame a big obstacle with the last weeks' exercise which makes me really feel good. In this exercise we had to deal with any limb object, two characters relating to each other, action cuts or rather storytelling in general and time management. I decided to do an magician doing tricks with his handkerchief. For that I had to understand how a handkerchief would behave. A video reference is a good source but you sometimes try to stay too close to it. I don't use rotoskoping which means copying the movement directly from the life acting. There's a scene from Disney''s Snow White which is often quoted referring on this problem: In the beginning of the movie Snow White is dancing in the garden singing with the birds and so on, and this scene is rotoskoped from life action. It looks like a life acting dance which is nice but doesn't fit to the stylized rest of the movie. And animation mostly is stylized. Rotoskoped scenes could seem to be wrong sometimes. What I did then? I filmed myself several times doing the handkerchief trick myself. And I don't copy the movement of the handkerchief, but I did draw the general impression of every frame freely which seems important to me. I couldn't copy the fabric on every frame because the movement was to quick in the live action, the handkerchief was blurred so much. In animation you normally won't have a blurred movement and to avoid a staccatto-like arc you have to do it in another way than the video shows you. So normally a limb object would react on a force (like a hand pulling it) or things like gravity and wind. In my example the fabric follows the hand of the magician as long as it's moving and after that it follows his own weight and gravity.

My favourite shot is the one with the zoom-in. And then the viewer's reaction on that...
The "fabric" is made of aluminium foil painted with acrylics. It has been broken or ripped about every ten frames, so I had to replace it. I also used replacements when he pulls the handkerchief out of his sleeve, so I had to paint a lot of aluminium foil. I first used mashed wire covered with some real fabric which was sticked to it with Copydex, but it was to thick. That mashed wire is normally used to repair cars when they're getting rusty. But you can animate it easily.
Actually, I'm searching for a nice place to stay next because I got a scholarship for the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. I'm going to go there at the end of September and I'll stay there up to the end of January to study animation again, not the technical aspect again like I'm doing here but the more artistical view on my favourite subject. It's funny what's actually happen to my life, but most of the time I really enjoy it.
By the way, me under a CCTV which seems to make the people feel much safer: