From time to time I'm reading a blog called Zen Habits on which Leo Babauta, the founder and main author of this website, writes about finding simplicity in the daily chaos of our lives, personal developement and accomplishing self-setted goals. With great interest I read Leo's post written to assist his readers to stick to their New Year’s resolutions. I decided to give it a try.

Why? – Well, you know, it's been two and a half year since I began working on the Orpheus project and I now really. want. to finish it. I want to have it done by the end of the year which sounds quite ambitious then, hm? But by telling you this I make sure that failing is a sort of embarrassing which hopefully keeps me away from doing so.

Last week I started working on the puppets again but only for a tiny amount of my day's time. However, I did it daily. This week I expanded the time window and I haven't missed a day which really makes me feel great. Though I always believed I havn't got much done up to now, I learned this wasn't true. After decluttering all the former results I now have a much better idea of how the silhouette puppets are going to be. I get used to the quotidian work in my studio and it started feeling like a job.

I reorganized the production time schedule and I absolutely think it's possible to finish the film within this year. I want to give my own artistic and personal development more room in my life since I want it to be more important than all the other things I do. Hell, that's what I always wanted to do, but for the last six months I just denied it. So again I decided to be an animation artist. – We'll see if I'll stick to this.

As a small foretaste of the silhouette puppets I'm working on have a look at these picuters of recently created prototypes:

Hades is the god or king of the Ancient Greek underworld. This silhouette puppet dummy is made of thin cardboard and approx. 35 cm at full height.

Cerberus is the three-headed hellhound who secures the entry to the underworld. This dummy is made of paper, and its shoulder height is about 10 cm high. I took this picture while the model was lying on my light table to get an impression of how it may look as a sihouette.

Especially the cerberus puppet moves nicely. And I'm really looking forward to animate the finally assembled puppets...

---

PS Tomorrow is the second birthday of einfachanimation.de. Horray! – Though I'm neither in the mood for a party nor for any review this time. But I promise we're going to celebrate next year!

...And Particulary On The Internet As A Tool

This article is more about blogging and internet than about animation. It's full of personal opinions. But perhaps my thoughts may be helpful to one or two people.

Next to all the fun stuff I do like animation and fine art, I also do graphic design to pay the bills. Most of these projects are websites. While I was breeding about some great ideas for a client I ran into a creative dead end and has to reset my head somehow. Well, there are some tricks to do this, doing something completely different, for example. I chose to have a look on already existing and outstanding websites and to find out why those are outstanding. But: how to find them? I googled for "random website" to see what google would show me because google sometimes has brilliant humour (well, its programmers has)... I got a random website which leads me to other sites randomly.

While watching these I learned that most designers use the same parameters as I do but slightly different. Websites normally consist of pretty much the same things like navigation, content, header, footer and so on. I as a webdesigner have some technical limitations, and the chief attraction however is to get out the most possible creative solutions (if the client has asked for it). So far so good. While watching all these nice and fancy websites, I got hooked by the idea of re-designing my blog. As you can see, I haven't yet.

I also googled for "outstanding websites" and got some nice blogs on (web) design where I could find collections of outstanding websites. And authors who write about how to write a blog the good way, for example. I read this carefully because I'm a blogger myself and I thought this might be of interest for me.

I'm not a blogspot or a wordpress blogger which makes a difference to all the others who are already part of these networks. I have my personal web developer who programs the code I've asked for. I questioned myself about my blog's needs and I wanted (and want) to write about animation. I don't do this for any salary and there aren't any commercials on my website. I'm still writing though I don't have hundreds of comments each post. I write because I love to. Then I found suggestions like, "keep your sentences short" as a general hint. I know that the common internet user hasn't a huge attention span but I guess if anybody wants to know something he or she has to do her homework (more precisely, research). I'm not willing to accept that some 140 letter messages and Wikipedia is the climax of our cultural developement. These are tools. Everybody could choose his or her own tools, but I'm offering a tool which needs a bit more of your time. Use it or not. Don't fit your needs on the tools you have. Don't use your fist to push a nail in the wall just because you don't have a hammer. Find out your needs and what you want to do and which may be the best way to do it. Experience is not an instant product, it's a spin-off of activity.

My friend Nils answered with a link to my last post in the comment section. He recommended an article about Kachingle which could be a way of paying artists, bloggers or any (human?) content generator for their work on the internet.
The company has the idea to put medallions on every website which joined Kachingle and you as a Kachingler decide freely if you want to pay for it or not. You pay a monthly amount of money to Kachingle and they give it to the publishers (in the widest sense of the word) depending on the klicks they had on their medallion. Nice idea, though I don’t like the idea of one company collecting data of which sites people want to pay with all their payment data. With this I am totally distrustful. I don’t like monopolism, especially when it’s a world wide one:

"Typaldos [of Kachingle] strongly believes that that's the wrong approach, because it again puts up barriers to contributing. 'Having two systems would be incredibly confusing to users ... and not user-centric which is the big paradigm shift that has to happen for this model to work,' she says."
(quoted from the editorandpublisher’s article written by Steve Outing and mentioned above)

That’s exactly what I mean.
Any other suggestions? I think we’ve just started finding ways to live with the internet... There are a lot of things happening. There is a big change to a virtual way of life which is real because it affects our every day life. We must find ways to deal with it. And ignoring it isn’t a way of dealing with it... Learning from history...