My blog and I have an identity crisis. Even though this isn't entirely true. My blog has, but I'm as much clear about what I want as possible.

I have nothing to say | 2012 | mixed media on paper | approx. 30 x 42 cm or 12 x 16.5 inches | 225 €

My dear blog has mostly been about animation and only about very few things next to that which are usually related to my animated works: destuckification, inspiration and I sharing my animation processes.

But with these three major topics I only covered a tiny part of my life.

Over the last six months a lot has changed.
First, I quit most of the jobs that brought some money in but are amazingly time-consuming as well. I didn't quit all, but I now work on my artworks most of the time and on my career in arts. I eventually became a full-time artist.

I learned that I'll probably never a professional animator in the animation industry, like Justin or Nick or Barry, and first I was angry and sad about the fact that my films never looked as smooth and perfect as their films do.

It took me some time to find out what I do want from my life.

But then I learned what my talents are, and my strengths, and now I'm totally fine with what I am: a storyteller in visual arts.

Art

At a party a few weeks ago somebody said to me:

"I wish I had something that I can so passionate about as you are when you're talking about art."

I love art and all its aspects. I love to look at artworks, to create them, to talk about art and to listen to people who love art as much as I do. Art makes me feel whole. When I'm working on my things, I feel alive and in the present. I love to inspire people in museums and workshops, and I love to see the look in their eyes when they feel what I feel.

Animation is only one manifestation of art, and it's one of my favorites.

But while I write these lines, I have a lot of projects going on, and only one of them is 100% dedicated to animation:

• My animated short, Ins Dunkel
  
• Drawings, so many drawings!
• An architectural sound project (that is animating as well)
  
• A temporary off-space gallery project
  
• Three exhibitions that are already settled for 2012, and
  
• A lot of things that exist as concepts only so far.
  

Back to the identity crisis:
I have the feeling that something has to change on my blog, since so much had changed in my life and I want to tell you about it.

Permission

For a loooong time I had been waiting for someone to give me the permission to be an artist who combines fine art media and animation, or to be an artist in general.

I have many old scarves concerning my creativity and my works, it took me several years to understand that I don't need anyone's permission to do whatever I want.

Dammit!

I don't want to wait until someone knocks at my door, and says, "Hey, you really are an awesome artist". – I go out myself.

I write to galleries a lot asking for exhibition opportunities, and from time to time somebody says yes. I apply for art grants and juried exhibitions, and often, but not always people say no. I work on my drawings and animations, and then I try everything again.

It's exhausting, and frustrating and rewarding at the same time. And I tell you what: I don't want to have it differently.

A Living

All of us need one. Right now I live from hand to mouth, but since I don't have children to care for that's okay. I do not need much financial security. But I really want to stay independent from time-consuming-jobs-that-are-not-my-favorites and that's why I opened an online gallery where you can buy original drawings that I made:

Think Trickfilm by Jessica Koppe at etsy.com

There will be more works available soon.
If you'd rather like to purchase a bigger or different piece, have a look at my portfolio and just write me an .

Changes

Next to all the animation-related things I'm going to show you all the other things that I'm working on. I'm going to share all my artistic processes here now, and to tell you regularly what's going on in my studio besides the animation projects. Don't worry, I'll keep you updated on those, too.

Even if you say you're an animator and nothing else, I just want to tell you that art is a huge source of inspiration, and most of its principles apply in animation as well.

– I hope you'll stay with me. I'm glad you're here!

Lots of love and support for your work,
– Jessica ♥

Dear friends and blog readers,

We say goodbye to 2011 today. – Whatever the last year has been to you, I wish you all the best for 2012!

Hallo, 2012!

I hope that all those things that you're ready for will find their way into your life, and I wish you strength for those things you aren't prepared for yet.

No Year's Resolutions!

In 2012, I'll finish my animated short, Ins Dunkel – This is a fact, not a resolution; I'm going to tell you how and when someday in January.

Still here?

If you still wait for 2012 to come, I collected some nice animations for you (since this blog is about animation, isn't it?). Here we go:

• once more, once more about the cycles of our life by Katie Armstrong

• Happy 2012 by Alienatio. This is pretty much WYSIWYG and cute. – With monsters!

• Happy New Year Candy Stopmotion Animation by Joonas Utti. Actually this is from last year, but definitely sweet, so lay back and enjoy!

Again: An animating New Year, and lots of love,

– Jessica ♥

In case you won't be able to visit my current exhibition in Herford (Germany), I made you a documentary video:

The shop window gallery Kiosk24 is a lovely, five-angled room with three windows and two walls. It reminds me of the basic shape of a Diorama, and I wanted to produce an artwork that supports the stage-like character of the room.

Since the exhibition's opening has been close to Christmas, I decided to create an installation which has something to do with that time of the year, too.

The single elements within the installation

There's an animated loop projected to one of the walls in which a character collects a lot of stuff. At first, it looks like he is decorating a room or so, but after some time he becomes more and more obsessive until everything breaks down, and then the cycle starts again.

To bring the world of the animated character into our world, I made life-sized ink on paper drawings of the things the puppet uses in the film, and stuck them onto the glass of the windows.

I also build some prop-like paper objects that are life-sized as well. On the one hand they fill the room, so it doesn't seem too empty, and on the other hand they made of paper and they won't work in our real life.

The exhibition is still running!

You can visit the exhibition until 22 January, 2012 - 24 hours a day, 7 days a week:

Jessica Koppe
und selbst wenn…
21 | 12 | 2011 – 22 | 01 | 2012

Kiosk24
Radewiger Straße 24
32052 Herford, Germany
(The gallery on google maps.)

There's also a webcam!

Just wondering: Do you want to read some kind of making-of the exhibition, a look behind the scenes how an artist (as in I) works? Just post your questions to the comments. – I'll answer them!

Anyway, have a great week!

Love,
– Jessica ♥

Christmas is knocking at the door, and beause of that fact I made this animation for you, dear blog reader, to wish you and your beloved ones a

Merry Christmas and A Happy New Year!

Santa and all the props are paper cut-outs, and the animation consists of 536 single frames.

I animated the single elements by hand on ones on my old animation stand, and added a Christmas Carol I found on archive.org.

Recommendations

If you'd like to see more Christmas Animations, I also have some recommendations for you, that are a bit more, well, interesting…

The Christmas Card (1968?) by Terry Gilliam

The Insect's Christmas (1913) by Wladyslaw Starewicz

Peace On Earth (1939) by Hugh Harman of MGM

Have animating Christmas Holidays, whether you celebrate Christmas or not!

Love,
– Jessica

Every year we tend to panic because Christmas again has come so suddenly. – Who would have guessed?!

While most people seek for their last presents in town, I'm going to go into the beautiful city of Herford to install a solo exhibition at the Kiosk24, a local shop window gallery.

I am working on an installation in which I combine an animated video and paper objects. The installation is called und selbst wenn… (engl. and even if…) , and shows an animated character who brings a lot of stuff into the window.

This is an invitation!

If you're interested to see what happens with all that stuff, I'd love to see you there! Since it's a shop window gallery, it will be open 24/7, in case you won't be able to join us at the opening. The exhibition runs until 22 January.

The opening

…is next Wednesday, 21 December 2011 at 6:30 p.m.

I would love for you to join me for the opening in front of the gallery!

Jessica Koppe
und selbst wenn…
21 | 12 | 2011 – 22 | 01 | 2012
Opening: 21 | 12 | 2011, 6:30 p.m.

Kiosk24
Radewiger Straße 24
32052 Herford, Germany
(The gallery on google maps.)

You can also download the German version of the invitation card.

I hope to see you at the opening night!

Love,
– Jessica

…and that it is, in every respect.

I shook off my being stuck because of the refurbishment, and went straight into the basement studio in the morning. Altogether I animated 630 frames for my animated short "Ins Dunkel" ("Into the Dark") today, and 159 of those are so bad, that I'll have to reshoot them tomorrow.

Nevermind.

Some of them work pretty well, and today I also almost finished the turning point of my story. This is one of the last moments before the drama finally takes its course:

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

Orpheus and Eurydice want to leave the Underworld together.

If I'll have a good run tomorrow as well, I probably will finish the Underworld animation at all. That would be awesome since the paper puppets start to fall apart.

I still hear Bristol based model maker Mary Murphy in my head, "It's not the question if your puppet is going to break, but when."

I don't really know why I'm so amazingly motivated right now. Is it the itfs deadline? Is it the now or never feeling that I sometimes have? I don't know, but I really enjoy the progress. I hope you do as well!

Have an animating week!

– Jessica

This is going to be only a small report on how I'm progressing on my Orpheus film project.

Last week I animated 1289 frames in total which means, I have approx. 1 minute 30 seconds of footage. I also reached the turning point of the Underworld scene, and I hope to finish this part as soon as possible.

Here are some stills from the scenes I shot:

More to come soon!

Since I don't want to reveal too much before the film is finished, I'd like to show you something else to jolly you along:

Cut-Out Animation with Terry Gilliam

If you need a quick introduction to cut-out animation, I highly recommend the following video:

Via cartoonbrew.com.

Monty Python animator Terry Gilliam discusses his animation techniques on Bob Godfrey’s Do-It-Yourself Animation Show in 1974. I admire Gilliam's films, and I love his animations. I made a lot of cut-out animations with my kids in previous animation classes, but I learned here something new, too.

Next weekend I'm going to teach an animation workshop to adults, and I think I'm going to use these technique again since it's so simply and having this stunning results at the same time.

Cheers,
Jessica

Since I started animating last week, I animated 1081 frames. – So I already have approx. one-tenth of my Orpheus film finished right now.

During my last shooting session I did a really crappy walk cycle, and I really wanted to change that. I had another look in one of my favorite animation books, The Animator's Survival Kit (a must-have for animators, I suppose).

I studied the concept of the walks again, and finally managed to achieve a kind of walk that I like:

The walk is just a small part of the nearly 300 frames I shot today, but I also don't want to reveal too much.

I have to do some more clean-up work on this sequence, due to stupid technical issues and the hence resulting light flickering. I'll do that tomorrow, I'm too tired right now.

Today's pro tip #1:

Never work tired on your animations or editing. Things get worse, believe me.

Today's pro tip #2:

Always copy your original fils before you start editing/photoshopping or whatever.

Actually I am so happy with the animations. Everything is coming together in a lovely way, and I'm astonished how quick the animation progress bar grows.

Sleep tight!

Yours in animating,
Jessica

Is it really Wednesday already?
I got so used to update my blog on Mondays, that it just feels wrong to write a post tonight. On the one hand. On the other I finally have exciting news to share:

I started animating!

This is the scene I shot today for my Orpheus film project, within approximately five hours. I animated 410 frames, most of them (though not all) on twos:

If you can't see the video player here, watch the video directly on vimeo.

Setup

I shot the animation with my Pentax ist *DL2, an Eye-Fi card and Dragon Stopmotion which works but isn't an ideal setup. I had several technical issues over the last two days which are now all solved. I was highly motivated on Monday to start animating but then everything just doesn't want to work for two days.

Now it does, and I am working, too.
Oh, and I used my gorgeous panning tool!

Insights

When I eventually started animating, I instantly remembered what I've had to do. Some Bristol nostalgia occurred because it was pretty much like back in the Three Month Animation Course: My brain, my hands and my body knew exactly what to do.

(Simon, where are you?)

I am not 100% satisfied with the animation, because I'm still not good with walks. But I can live with it. And there are parts that I like pretty much, e. g. when Orpheus is playing the Lyre or when the boat hits the dock.

To me it's more important to animate at all. Today I saw that every tiny movement is another learning experience, and I am optimistic and hope that eventually everything fits together perfectly.

I am tired but happy.
Have a good night, you!

Love,
Jessica

Initially I just wanted to test the animation of the handwriting in the bubble, but then this became much more than my very first idea:

Watch a high resolution version of this video at vimeo.com.

I often feel inspired by the works of my students, but I'm usually too serious about my own work to simply play with animation techniques. This time I didn't care, and just did it.

I wanted to make hand-drawn animation for a long time, and I enjoyed the process of drawing and shooting the images pretty much. Also, I'm quite addicted to any kind of animation, so I thought it would be nice to give one technique after another a try by doing little exercises, or etudes. I get inspired by so many things that happen around me, that I can't really stop working.

For this, I drew about 250 outline images, colored them by hand with pencils and pens, and eventually shot them (mostly on single frames) on my old-school and beloved animation stand, my Tricktisch.

Drawing and planning took me about 7 hours, and coloring another 5 or 6. I worked on the outlines for two days two weeks ago, and colored the images mostly in the late evenings when my brain wasn't able to solve complex work anymore.

There's one thing about the animation I'm not completely happy with: the single movements aren't overlapping each other from time to time. I think I could have planned this more carefully. The animation of the character probably look more fluidly, if there'd be some more variations in overlapping or not overlapping movements.

Except from shooting and editing (includes sound), everything is handmade. – I simply love to work with my hands.
Don't get me wrong: Computers are great tools as well, but there are only few things as lovely as the smell of freshly sharpened pencils, for example…

Have a good week!
– Jessica

Today I did a very quick shot to test my hardware/software setup. You can see that I shot it in daylight which is why the light is flickering so much. – But since this was just a general tryout I think it's okay for now.

Orpheus – Clouds & Background Animation Test from Jessica Koppe on Vimeo. The animation is a bit rough, sorry for that. The clouds could move a whole bit slower, but I guess you'll get the idea.

The background and the clouds are cut out of paper, the structures and textures are all handmade. For this film I try to build as much from paper as possible, and so most of the cemetery setting is made of paper, too. I shot the cloud's animation under my old-school animation stand with my Pentax *ist DL2 and Dragon Stopmotion software.

Since I've finished the sets, I had issues to move on with the puppets and with testing the technical stuff. Today I just want to do anything and so I started this quick animation setup. When I'll start shooting the animation, everything will be arranged a bit more accurately (as I 've learned in Bristol…)

The Move, Paper Animation from Mandy Smith on Vimeo.

It's animation.
It's made of paper.
It has a lovely sound design.

– I just ♥ it!

So I'm an artist again. A full time artist who teaches what she loves to do. That feels much better. School's out since I had my last day on Tuesday, and I feel so unbelievably relieved that I'm not a school teacher anymore... (It was an important experience though.)

The whole week was a burst of creativity: I was working on so many things... Over the weekend I had my good friend Leo visiting, and I talked him into trying some animation, because I really wanted to try a haven't-tried-it-so-far technical setup, and because I haven't animated for years (or at least it felt like this). Inspired by animations I did with a group of kids last week, we set up a little scene on top of my Tricktisch:

We created simple cut-out puppets by using food packaging boxes, color pencils and those cramps for the joints. I simply like the aesthetics of this kind of puppet, and I already applied it a few times (as in my first animated short Ein anderer Traum and in an installation I did in 2009).

Oh, and thanks to the scrapbooking people there are now so many colored cramps available... Horay! See my new box of brass cramps of all sizes:

Things That Make Me Happy – today: sorting boxes...

For the setup I had the animation stand lit by four 75W lights. I used my DSLR, a Pentax ist DL2 (that doesn't have a video feed) with Dragon Stopmotion for framegrabbing. I also had an Eye-Fi SD card which is a SD card (obviously) with an WiFi-Connection to my Mac. Every time I take a picture, the card sends it to a folder from where the animation software generates a video (they call it folder watch mode).

This works nicely despite the fact that I don't have a live preview. So the animation is pretty much intuitive then. I could use rigs and other tools for more control over the movement, but this particular one was just a test shoot, so I don't care too much.

We didn't plan anything. No dope sheets, no acting-out, nothing. We just played. Even the story evolved while we were animating. But – and this is far more important I think – we animated. Roughly, but playful and enjoyable – and I remembered how much I missed it.

That's the one thing this was is good for. The other thing is that I have some more projects in a folder labeled Thing I really want to make, and this animation test is for one of these projects. I suppose I'd like to buy another camera first because I really enjoy working with a live feed and preview feature... (I'm not sure yet.)

Before I do so, I want to share the inspiring animation I did with the kids as well:

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

For the last school year I taught animation to student groups from two schools within a project called Kultur und Schule. The idea is, that students should meet artists there and try something new apart from all the useful things they learn in schools… The program runs some very interesting projects (which of course depends on the artist offering it), and mine.

No, seriously: I thought it might be difficult to keep them on it for a whole year. But they did a great job. The kids of one of my classes who did the video below are around the age of 16 now. It was their last year at school, and they spent much more time making the film than they should have…

They made everything by theirselves: the puppets, the sets and the lighting, the animation and most of the sound effects, too. At the end we ran out of time so we took a few iMovie sound effects to brush the piece up a bit. They tried to be very professional, and learned quite a lot (all of them animated for the first time). What I really like is the kind of humor they show… They're very influenced by media and have a huge repertoire of ideas and quotations. But see for yourself:

An Igor Gone Astray

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

Here's a small translation for everyone who isn't familiar with the German language:

An Igor Gone Astray

Evil Mistress (from the off): Note to self: I definitely must dissect a clown. – Igooor?

A poster reads: Circus Buttercup at the Land Of Igors/Horror Valley on Remembrance Sundays at witching hour

(Crowd is cheering while entering the circus tent.)

Evil Mistress: Go! Get me the clown! …Go!

While Igor throws the smoke bomb, the audience asks surprised: What's going on?

After the Evil Hand has vanished, the Evil Mistress says: Igor!? …I must follow them!

-----

I think the rest is pretty self-explanatory, but if have any questions about the story, feel free to ask.

Things the kids learned:

• simple puppet and set making from materials like plasticine, paper, cardboard and watercolors
  
• setting up an amateur animation studio
  
• developing stories and planning animation
  
• that animation isn't the biggest part of producing an animated short
  
• it's all about planning
  

I learned:

• If kids like what they do, motivation isn't a problem.
• If you show them how important things can be which they don't like very much, they'll do it.
• It's great fun to work with teenagers, and it can be hilarious.

Thank you Pia, Janine, Maren, Maike and Ilhan for the great time!

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:

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

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...

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.

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

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.

* GALOPP! is the German title; the English one is GALLOP!

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!

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

This one is drawn by Timur, 10 or 11 years old.

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

Enrico is 9 years old and drew an volcanic eruption.

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

Hendrik was our baby being only 8 years old, but I think he did a terrific animation.

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

Bernhard was the oldest, almost 13 years old, and almost didn’t stop drawing again...

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!

This week I'm going to start my in-school workshops. I want the kids mainly to work with their hands.

To get them started I thought it would be nice to learn about the technique behind animation. I don't want to teach them but I'd like to show them how it works. Philosopher John Locke once said,

Nothing is in the understanding, which was not first perceived by some of the senses.

(though I always thought this was an quote of Aristotle, but anyway).

Photograph ©Andrew Dunn, 5 November 2004.

For this purpose (and because I wanted to do it for a long time) I built a Zoetrope. I'd like to do a kind of How to build a Zoetrope here. So:

How To Build a Zoetrope

If you'd like to do it the same way I built mine, you'll need the following materials:

• an defective record player (seen at ebay.de from 1€ plus shipping)
  

• chipboard in the desired size of your stand (mine was less than 0,04 m2 and costed me exactly 0,35 €)

• wood glue, spray mount

• acrylics

• black cardboard in required size (depends on you record player)

• long paper stripes (again, size is derivated from the size of you final cylinder)

Helpful tools:

• screw drivers and whatever you need to disassemble the record player carefully

• a drill and appropriate boring heads

• a brush, a cutter, a ruler

• pencil, eraser

• a calculator (unless you're brilliant in mental arithmetics) to calculate the size of your cylinder

• thick felttips

Please always keep health and safety in mind! Work slowly and concentrated.

I wanted to keep it simple, that's why I took a short cut: I got an old broken record player from my future parents-in-law and completey disassembled it. I just needed the turntable and its mount to make the table again turn smoothly. By the way, there are plenty of mechanical pieces left which I'll keep for future props... You'll never know.

The next step was to construct a stand where I could lay the hinge in. For this I bought chipboard. Bigger DIY stores may cut it to your preferred size and it's very cheap. I decided to make a box of 12 x 12x 11 cm.

First I drilled a hole into the top side with a range of 4,5 cm in diameter (it depends on the size of the parts of your player). This is because the lower part of the hinge needs to move freely. Then I started glueing the chipboard pieces together. Wood glue does a great job here.

I painted the box with black acrylics to hide it a bit and then screwed the bearing on the top of the box.

Then came the trickiest part: Calculating the size of my cylinder and where to place the slots. I cut 12 of them which will be enough. Later, you'll have to draw the same number of pictures on a paper stripe. The space below the slits should be same height as the gaps theirselves.
As you can see in the picture, I cut out tabs on the bottom at the cylinder to fix it to the record player later.

Then, finally, I glued it together with spray-on glue and fixed it to the plate.

Very last step is to draw a stripe at the same length of the inner circumference of your drum. I took mine and divided it into 12 frames of the same size. My "story" is a jumping fish. It's very helpful to draw a tiny storyboard here, and the last frame has to be followed by the first one again. Every cycled animation of 12 frames could do a great job here.

Keep the drawings simple and use a thick pen. You won't see delicate lines.

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

This is my strip as an animated gif:

I want the kids to experience how we perceive moving pictures generally, and to do their first steps in animation without a camera. So they're going to draw single frames on paper stripes. I'll let you know how it works.

Had anyone build a zoetrope before? What are your experiences? If anybody did by the help of this, I'd love to see how it works for you.

From time to time, I stumble upon the works of William Kentridge which I just admire. They're beautiful and balanced in every respect. I also like him and his work because he builds a bridge between fine art and animation in a succesful way. And we share our love for theatre I guess.

Today I was in the mood for playing around and I wanted to do some animation again. I did this without any plan, very spontaniuosly, just with charcoal on paper and a rubber. I just wanted to try this technique to find out if it'd work for me either. I really like this way of animation, you simply can't go back. And the results often are very suprising... I also like the impression of seeing time passing by. If I erase the charcoal, there'll always be some particles left which gives you an idea of what has happened before. Sometimes the timing isn't very well in the clip. But have a look yourself:

I’m back.
And I’m grown up.

In Germany it’s very important to be certified and that’s why I did my diploma. Having a piece of paper here is often more important than what you really can do.

I’m a certified artist now and a certified animator as well. Last weekend I talked to a professional and animation related job inhabitant about animation job perspectives. The girl I met works for the industry and told me that all their animation is done in Asia because it’s cheap, cheaper, the cheapest. It wasn’t the first time I had a chat like this and that’s why I decided to get work myself. I am officially a freelancer now. Horray! According to my good friend Simon of freelanceunbound it must be real fun. No, seriously, I did some freelance work over the last years next to my studies but now I decided to do it on pro level. The first thing I did was to find people who’d love to spend money for an artist (me) with focus on animation. I did find some and hopefully start teaching in a few weeks. This is really exciting and I’d love to find out how this may work out for me. I’m also applying for several school projects to teach animation there, so fingers crossed. This is a reason for a tiny website relaunch: there’s a workshop’s section now and another one with my show reels, but they’re completely in German because I’m still located in Germany though I’m sharing my experiences on this blog in English. Anyway, if you’re willing to pay me coming to France or England or wheretever to teach animation or do a project, I’m sure we will find a solution...

Well, this is the first time I'm embedding a youtube video. But this one is so amazing that it's worth a post. I'm always thinking of new connections between both old and new media, and how to translate stop motion in a way which is more than just animation. Like the Muto Wall Animation, for example. But this one is absolutely extraordinary and I'm glad to see people going further with the media, reflecting the media by using it. Lovely! Have fun!

Thanks to Nils, who sent me the link to the video. But now: back to my work... Exhiition calling...

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!

At this point I'd love to recommend an amazing book to you:

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.

At the university of Applied Arts in Vienna, I attend a lot of courses on subjects which are not animation related at the first glance. I do font design and typography here as well as book binding next to flash animation or media theory. To me, Graphic Design is an important part of Screen Design as well. I often don't want to use already existing things and that's why I'm learning how to do them myself – not always on a pro level, but enough to understand what'd be necessary.

Due to the font design class we had to develop a display font while we were also learning about the history of using fonts and typography, how to digitalize it and finally, how to do some kind of final presentation. I made a small book (because now I can... hehe...) containing a disc with the True Type Font file generated with Font Lab software and a tiny piece of animation to show how it might me used.

Referring to all the other things I'm currently interested in, I call the font Styx, like one of the rivers of the ancient greek underworld. And while doing so, I remembered my character's concept drawings and came back to work for the Orpheus project. A part of the story will be taking place in the underworld, and I had the idea to make this part a silhouette film like i.e. Lotte Reiniger did, or Anthony Lucas in The Mysterious Geographic Explorations Of Jasper Morello which is a beautiful steampunk silhouette film made in 2005. They combined traditional puppet animation with computer generated backgrounds and compositing.

Doing the font presentation was also helpful to me to understand that I certainly wouldn't do the silhouette animation digitally but definitively animate the puppets by hand. I did some silhouette animation on a lighttable under a rostrum camera in the studio here before which are supposed to be posted next week. The advantage of software is, it's clean and easy as long as you know what to do. There are a lot of disadvantages to, like a hurting neck after several hours in front of a screen, cold feet, slow machines rendering even tiny pieces for ages, and software which is not doing what you want because you both truly speek a different language...

And CG keyframe animation simply isn't as great fun as animating with my hands. I love working with my hands which is one of my reasons for doing the book binding course. And I can control the animation so much more if I don't have to think of these abstract things like a timeline and keyframes... It's much more natural to me to simply move things further in time. With the software you can go back and forward and you doesn't have to care about your next steps since all is removeable... It always seems to be weird to me, although I sometimes really like to spend several hours in front of my computer until my neck is hurting.

So here is the final font animation and with this, my CG silhouette test:

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

For all of you who don't speak German, there are to pieces of text in the clip, which could be translated like this, "River Styx. It cycles Hades nine times." The text is very small and due to the extreme bastard type I designed, hardly readable in this size. I copressed the original PAL standard format video to the web size and .flv format, so you may excuse this.

I did the keyframe animation in After Effects. The problem is that the software would interpolate the keys in a linear way. But natural movement, however, would never be just linear, it always has an ease-in and ease-out, speaking in software terms. For example, an arm moving starts slow, getting faster to its highest speed and then slowing down until it stops again which is determined by how our muscles working. Spectators often don't really know but have a unconscious awareness that a linear animation would always seem to be unnatural or to us. So I changed the software settings to interpolate the keys with bezier curves which is a more natural way the things would move. The music was composed by Felipe Vila, a friend of mine who is going to be responsable for the Orpheus soundtrack.

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Supplemental: The Styx clip in higher resolution is now available on my vimeo website.

The cinemas in Vienna are wonderful, especially the film museum Vienna which offers a fantastic programme on the history of cinema. Recently I saw Billy Winder's Sunset Boulevard and on Friday I went there to see Häxan (Witches) directed by Benjamin Chistensen in 1922. It's a silent movie (of course) but the music was live performed by the Panoptikon Orchestra which was just wonderful. Cinema could be so great. Next week I'm going to see there a whole evening about the question "What is film" on the early beginning of this technique. They're going to screen the experiments of Étienne-Jules Marey, William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, Lumière and Marie Menken. I'm really looking forward to this.

We've gone further with drawn animation in the course after doing some experiments with flip books and a zoetrop which is a 19th-century optical toy which consists of a cylinder with a series of pictures on its inner surface. The cylinder has slits so the rotating images give an impression of continuous motion. After that, we worked directly on 16mm film. First we painted on clear film and after that we scratched on black film. They were sticked together and screened by a 16mm film projector. The animation isn't good but it was quite interesting as an experiment. And sorry for the unfocussed video, I shot it with my digital still camera in very low resolution.

Sadly, the course only runs once a week... This last week we started drawing which is a lot more difficult than moving a puppet in my opinion. You can see the first second of drawn animation in the video as well as one of my flipbooks. The order of the clips is painting on clear film – scratching on black film – the flipbook – the drawn animation (both recorded with my web cam). For the drawn animation we built some simply pegbars using a thin piece of cardboard, three pins with flat heads (about 1cm in diameter) and some cellotape to fix them. This worked unexpectedly good for those simple animations we did.

A long, long time ago... It has been left from week three I think when we were supposed to create out own character containing a spring somewhere in its body. I designed Loli, a fat bird which is so fat that it actually can't fly. And because it can't fly, it has to carry his nest with its babies on his head to have them in secure. I thought it would be nice to have a character who has a "reason" for the spring. This was the character design from week 3:

The final model is made of plasticine with a foam core to avoid much weight. Its eyes are glass beads and the spring is made of aluminium wire to be animateable. And for whatever reason I didn't animate it up to last week. First I was afraid of that and later I just forgot it. But now I finally did it and it was quite fun although it's just a small animation.

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I was also able to improve the matte of the reporter video just by using the uncompressed tiffs in the after effects composition instead of compressing them first into a FotoJpg sequence. Now there's less flickering at the puppet's edges, but I still didn't find out how to make the flash-video work propperly.

Our tutor extended the deadline because nobody of us had been finished on friday when we normally have our presentation. So we did the presentation yesterday in the afternnoon and it was great fun to see the puppets come to life again, but perhaps for the last time of the course. No more animation then, because now we have to edit our showreel for the very final presentation on Friday of next week. The last exercise was lip sync, and with this also much more character animation. We got several small pieces of spoken soundfiles which we could use. We also could record our own things, but that would have taken much more time. Because then you have to do the breakdown, too. So we could use already finished dopesheets for the spoken words and just have to work out the acting. My idea was to animate a news reporter who is so bored by his job that he's not really interested in what he's talking about and that's why he also is badly prepared.
The spoken text is,

"Well, we got a pretty serious sitaution here... Our peripherals are a bit edgy and our centre is equidistant... And an... ah... Oh well... why... I don't know what I'm talking about..."

This is one of the original frames:
I did a kind of greenscreen to cut the puppet out and combine it with some hurricane video:

EDIT: I just have seen that the is a problem with flash and the audio, because the image seems to be quicker than the audio. Stupid Flash! So, if you'd like to see the quicktime (8,5 MB), follow this link, until I find a solution for this problem:

reporter320x240.mov

My animation is still improving and I really enjoy that. But the acting of the puppet could be a much more precise, the eyebrows for example could be used more intensively, I think. But the general idea may come along. Please ignore the moving hair, not ist wavy behaviour but its location changing... ;) I animated it on ones. You could have done it on doubles but The hair waving is nicer that way. What did I do then? I tried to have a plain background with flat light and any seen shadows. I animated the puppet in front of the screen with my framegrabber, in this case StopMotion Pro and DV Pal camera with a normal 720x576 resolution. Then I took all the frames as footage into After Effects Pro and used the Keylight effect which works pretty good. I also could have combined several colour keys to get a good result. Because they all works well but not perfectly, I used another effect to improve the matte (hope, I have the right vocabulary here, because I'm using a German version of AE). Then I did some colour and exposure correction on the foreground to fit it together. For the backgroud I used a internet movie from a hurricane just to have a look how it might look, so it's not my footage in the background. After this, I put it together in Final Cut Pro, adding the sound file and the stormy sound, too and exported it. Tadaa!

Things I would to different the next time: If you extend the distance between the puppet and the background you would avoid shadows more and you would have less green reflections on the puppet. The more separated the colours from the background compared to those in the puppet, the better you key is working. And I also would try to find a more saturated background, this one was just improvised. I would use a better camera. One of the problems I had during the keying was the low res pictures. The better your resolution is, the better the key could work and the better your final matte would be. That's why the puppet's egdes are moving a lot. Feel free to learn from my mistakes.

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:

...was to make this ball and socket joint puppet walk.
At the End of the week I managed to coordinate the legs and the torso sometimes. I tried a few times to let him walk but it was really hard work. Even a normal walk is hard to archieve. Sometimes I think I'm too analytical while trying to understand how it might work. I made the experience that sometimes my instinct is more right than the left side of my brain: if I trust in my intuition the walk got better. And that's reasonable and makes totally sense: I know how walking works, because I'm doing it every day. If I tried to remember that my animation got better. But I have to practise more, I guess. I have to practise how to get that knowlegde about movement into the puppet.
Some of the results may be seen in the flash file below. Arril said, one thing could be to give the head something to do, so that he might have a reason for moving in a special direction. This could make it easier, when he has to be on which point. I'll have to keep that in mind. Another good thing is blocking the movement out. Bringing the puppet into the key poses of the complete movement and pointing it out on an acetat put on the screen. After that, you would normally have a curved line your puppet could follow through the animation process.

This week, we're going to animate a quadruped character....

For the run, I helpend myself with a rig to support the puppet, it was bound around the puppets waist and hidden unter the jumper. It's a simple supporting rig, there are hundreds of possibilities to use (broken tripods, self-made wooden ones, helping hands, ...). This is cheap and easy: just a hinge joint screwed on two blocks of wood, for flipping it back when you only use it for measuring. The wire is a squared one which is harder to bend than aluminium for example because it has to keep some weight in place.
You could use it for supporting the puppet like I did but also for measuring the position of one point you'd like to keep for a whole shot. If you'd like to keep the puppets head in position while his hands and legs doing something crazy, for example, you would spot the end of the wire to the puppets nose or any significant other point, flip it back, take your shot, move your puppet, compare it to you rig and flip it back again, capture you frame... If you use it for supporting your puppet, be aware that every time you use it, you have to remove it in post. You could try to hide it in the backdrops. It's always good to take one shot of the situation without puppets and other moveable things because then you have a picture without shaodws and so on. Sometimes you need to remove bigger parts of the frame and then it's good to have a kind of placeholder. Be careful with the shadows, too, because they sometimes evolve a life of thier own....

So this is the final animation of the last week. The tutor's comments are those: The nodding at the beginning looks as grandpa's view is following something. That was not my intention, I wanted him just to sit and nod like old men sometimes do. The problem is the long distance, I guess, from the very left point to the very right point of the nodding. For the next time I would change that and make the way shorter. But animating it was a hard thing because I moved the puppet in very tiny steps (0.5 mm perhaps). The other thing was when granddaddy falls back I could underline the pose with another frame at the top of the movement. So he falls back, his torso stops and his head overtakes the torso for a few frames. At its climax I could have added another extreme point of the head to give it more weight. And then, grandpa could really be shocked. In general, the animation could be a bit smoother then, but it seems to be okay so far. It was a hard piece of work this week. But I really like my blinking and what he does with his eyebrows.
One thing I really found out is about the importance of leading the audience's attention. If you are going to animate your grandpa, for example and you want to make sure everybody will see his eyes moving, then you must not move anything else. If one thing is moving it would be sure of the audience's attention. If there are two things moving like the left hand and the head, one of those would be missed my the audience. I think there must be a kind of hierarchy with movements, like head movement would be more attention catching like eye movement when they're happening at the same time. But I'm not sure yet on what this hierarchy may depend. Intensity perhaps, or human relexes caused by evolution.
Last week I also get the final confirmation from the university of applied arts in Vienna for my exchange scholarship I had applied for at the beginning of 2008. There will be another big journey this year then. After finishing this course, I'll be going to visit Germany, have a short pause of three weeks there, taking a deep breath and then starting for studying in Austria. But I don't have relocate all my stuff again, that's really nice. Just packing my suitcase again and getting to the airport....

Well, after a bad start this week I changed course and limited myself a bit to get a better start. So I try to keep it very simple. This week exercise is ablout making a charakter think. We were given two characters, a professional one with a ball and socket armature and a semi-professional one made from wood and wire which is very stylized. This one I'm actually animating. On Tuesday, I did some research for the whole day about movement and in some way I became that character for a day. I acted out the timing in front of video camera and today I tested some of the general movements I want to do with that puppet. See the tests on the flash video below. Tomorrow I'm going to animate the big shot where all of this is going to be included. And if there's some time left, I'll do the character design of a third charakter which should have a spring somewhere to have two different kind of movement in one puppet. That would be interesting I guess.

Last week was an annoying one. For our exercise, we had to animate a simple flexible shape to get a feeling for its internal movement. And I didn't want to do it in a complicated way and so I decided to take a worm of clay and to start with it. See the larger Storyboard version by clicking the smaller one. That was the way how it should have been at the end of the week.

I learned so much by that: First, if you do a lot of good research you won't be so frustrated because you'd archieve much better results. So the caterpillar walk is much better than the sniffing of my worm for example. OBSERVATION is the name of the magic spell. To qoute good old Aristotle, things won't be in your mind, unless they had a sensory perception. (Okay, it's not a quote actually, but it's in the sense of our old greek friend). So Arril, our tutor told it to us a few times and I thought, "right, got it!" ...and no: I havn't. So I had to find out that by the end of this week.
The second thing is the camera's white balance. Our eyes may not see white but our brain says "that's white for sure!" to keep it simple for our perception. There is a German word for perception, Wahrnehmung, which means something like "accepting something to be true" which is a good description of what's happening behind your forehead. So I did three of five sequences without any white balance, which look amazing as you'd guess. I wanted to edit the sequences to a small story but now I first have to find out if I could do some colour correction, only two of them have a white backgorund. Trust the camera, not your brain... A classical beginner's mistake. But I think I'm going to remember that now every time I touch a camera.
Then, third, I didn't smooth the clay enough. There was a kind of wobble during most of the frames. So many things I now have already forgot to write about like some frames should be cleaned out for smoother animation. Perhaps I'm going to post the results during the following week, but today I never want to see them again. Fortunately, I'm not a nostalgic person and so I must not look back but forward to the next week. It was a frustrating week at all, but I'm also convinced that these moments are more important than those when you'd get copliments on a job well done. If you do something well you could keep it. If not, you have to develop your skills. So I'm going to grow next week.
One good thing of last week really was the life drawing class. We had a fantastic modell who also lectures arrabian and african dance. And our course on wednesday was all about movement. Yes. Movement... Surprise! We hadn't much time for thinking of what we are going to draw because the modell danced and then stopped. We had 10 to 30 seconds for each drawing, not much I think. See one example below:

It was great fun and at the end she taught us some african dance movements. You'll always take your complete body while doing African dance which was hard to learn for me as a donnish German... Getting your spine and your head connected with your feet and your arms... Interesting, but possible! After a small rehearsal we had lots of fun dancing all together... I'm learning so much during these wonderful weeks.

If you can dream it, you can do it!

...Walt Disney said and I thought so, too and applied for that course and now I'm in Bristol. Time rushes by and my brain has a small delay. Things happen so fast... It's just one week ago that I had moved out my house in Münster and said my friends good bye. And today I'm sitting in my new room in Bristol, trying to remember all the last week's stuff to report it to anybody who might be interested in it.
I'm now doing this Three Month Animation Course at the Bristol School of Animation. The aims of the course are to introduce student's to industry standards, to work on the student's timing for animation and to produce a student's demo reel. I myself am mostly interested in the timing for animation because it normally gets a raw deal during everyday life. Life drawing and lectures and theoretical advises are also part of the course but the practical work is the main part of our week.
We get those weekly exercises to work on. The first week's exercise was to move rigid objects and to give them personality only by animating them in the frame of our camera. We had to think about composition and about performance. I decided to use two boxes made of cardboard. My initial idea was the smaller one is being afraid of the bigger one which seems to be very heavy and mean. But then they'll get to know each other better and become friends. Because the course also deals with time management, I tried to keep it simple. I really want to concentrate on the animation. But thinking about performance and becoming these boxes literally was so time consuming that I had just finished the first half of my "story". But I guess it's okay. It's the first week and I learned my lesson well, I think. For a bigger version of the storyboard just click the picture.


I worked out my timing on a dope sheet for the first time which was difficult at first because I didn't have my own "code" to fill it in. We got dope sheets from our tutor and I wasn't very familiar with its structure. I myself perhaps would do the dope sheet in a slightly different way. The one we got is also for drawn animation and I'm not sure if it's better to keep one for stop motion simpler than that. For the course I'm going to use this. I'm not sure of the template's copyright so I won't post it here. But see the picture for all the paper I used just for the bigger box' walkcycle:

And after breaking down the movement into smaller steps and into a rhythm I build myself a kind of rigging tool to have always the same distance. With that I hoped to archive constancy in movement which has worked well I think. See the animation here:
So these are our tutor's notes on this: At the beginning, the intention of the small box isn't clear so one isn't really sure about what's happening there. The beginning was a bit more slowly before but I cleaned out some frames to get a better understanding. I shot the incoming on threes to get it very slowly but there has been a flicker on the right edge of the box then because of the high contrast. Now it's on twos. The walkcycle seems to be okay although the key poses could have a bit more time to imply the heavy weight of the big box. We agreed on the second shaking is better than the first one because it's more steady than the first. This consistent shaking is clearly readable as a being-afraid shaking.

Actually, I'm sorting all my stuff like photographs, letters and artworks. I rediscovered this picture of a painting I made in 2002 or 2003 at the beginning of my studies. It's an abstract picture of an animater, isn't it? (It's acrylics on canvas.)

My headline today suggests I haven't known that I wanted to do animated films but this isn't totally true. In my 2001's school year book I wrote for career aspiration "doing animated films". I forgot about that for five years and now it seems to work.

Amazing.