The end came quickly. The final screening took place almost two weeks ago and now I'm back in Germany. The time in Bristol seems to be like a dream, it's totally weird. I learnt so much and I had such a good time, and when I came back, everything was like before. Was it? I still feel jetlaged and I haven't arrived mentally I think. Less than to weeks left until my flight to Vienna and I still don't know how to talk about that time propperly. I want to keep it some more.

I'm really glad that I had done the Three Month Course. All the frustrations during the course had been overcome and I had such a great learning curve... I actually miss that feeling most. This had been the three best month in my education ever...

Here is the final reel:

Three Month Animation Course Showreel (Quicktime, ca. 6MB)

The good thing is that you can't go back in time, so I have to deal with the oncoming situation, the scholarship in Vienna. I changed some eMails with a former aniamtion student who is now in the photography course. She told me that there are not the best conditions to do animation. But that doesn't matter so much because I have all my materials with me, my cameras and my iBook. I really want to have the more artistical view on that subject now. How do artists deal with animation? (I differentiate here between fine artists who use film as a medium ("artists") and film makers (who are also artists, but with another and sometimes commercial focus). I don't know which category I belong to, but perhaps I'm going to find that out in Vienna.) Animation is an art, a craft, a tool and also a language you could use. How do artists use it? There are so many ways...

The Brothers Quay impressed me as much as Jan Svankmajer did referring to the content and the design of their films. Another good example is Jochen Kuhn (German website), an artist and film maker, or more: a multi talent. He paints his films directly under the camera and the moving and changing paint fits perfectly to the mood of his more or less absurd and dream-like stories. I really like those. They're only avaible in German, I think. 1

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:

A very late Week 6 report. That Week 6 exercise was about changing the speed of our animation a bit. We had to deal with the same puppet, one time as a small and quick character, the other time as a large, heavy and slow giant or something like that. As a reference we could use a flower and a truck with a box made of aluminium foil. I decided to do a bee which was much easier than the big one. The problem with the bee was that I had to use a wire rigging to make her fly. This was actually not a real problem so far. But because I like dramatic lighting, the rig was sometimes crossing the shadows. This became a problem because I tried to repaint the shadows on Photoshop, which looks a bit messy now in the video. I'm actually not glad with it, but at the moment I don't want to redo it. The lesson I learned from that: use always a fitting rig and/or flat lighting. The part of the video I like most is the last part when the giant hits the car. I was so frustrated because I couldn't make the puppet behave like a giant. I tried it two times and after that, it was nearly 2:30 on Friday when we normally have our presentation. So I thought I had nothing to loose and just put all my anger into that giant hitting the car. It looks good, I think... No: I think, it was one of my best animation so far. Find out yourself:

Week 7 is over and as you may have found out, I didn't post the week 7 animation. There is a reason! No, seriously, week 7's exercise is also the one for week 8. We have do tell a small story containing two characters, a limb object like a rope, fabric, whatever and action cuts to have a closer look on storytelling. I really like Stop Motion. But at the moment, I like it best if somebody else does it. I'm going to show the results next week. If I would not have failed gloriously. And then lip sync... We're growing on our challenges, aren't we?

Edit: Here you can see the original shot from the footage with the rig, if you're interested in it. It's the same rig I used in the run I did in Week 4. I glued some pennys on it with the glue gun (the newer english pennys contains enough metal for that) to use it with the magnets to tie it down.

Four legs are very complicated... It needed three days to get into my head, how it might work. And it's always the same: keep it simple and it's going to work much easier. It was a short week because we had live drawing on several days and we went to a studio to see how the professionals work, which was very informative. But we also had to deal with four legs. I decided not to do any fancy and specific animal work, I decided to do a very basic quadrupedal walk. It was annoying because in the mid of the shoot I had to change a cable and somebody kicked my tripod (so I did with himthen). And it was hard to understand at all, this four leg walk. But now I get it, I think. I could do smoother animation, really. It makes me angry to see all these small jiggles there. But I'm glad to make this puppet walk. And I really learned something about animation. For this, it was a good week.

Some things you couldn't teach. A good example might be drawing: you can teach somebody how to hold a pencil and how to use paper, but he must draw himself. Learn, how the pencil scratches over the surface of the paper and leaving marks. And then, how to use a eraser without destroy the drawing or the sheet. With animation it is the same: you really have to live through it. If your teachers tells you about arcs, you have to find out, how to use them. There is still so much to learn....

Yesterday I saw "The Dark Knight" at the big screen and I still don't know what to think of this movie... I found it a bit confusing that you can't really see a time structure. So the storyline is jumping forwards, backwards and sometimes they're showing some things at the same time. And I got a bit lost because I didn't know how long the narrated time was. It could have been a few days, a week, a month... I don't know. And beside this, it was a long movie with its two and a half hours. And it was so exhausting, because there had been one climax following the other for several times: I always thought, oh, now it's leading to an end, but no! They had just managed to sqeeze another subplot in which wouldn't be necessary.... One could have made two films of that easily... One other thing is that it was so brutal. The character of the joker was totally ill. He's so crazy and Heath Ledger acted very well on this. But I also think just a bit more humanitiy, just a tiny bit, would have turned him into an absolute plausible character. Now he's just mad and evil. And Batman... I really miss the hero of my childhood. It's a lot about morality. Using criminal methods to catch the Evil Boy, due to a good intention. Weird. And very brutal. I can't identify with Batman anymore and I think, that's the biggest problem od the movie: you can't really identify with the characters, no matter if they're good or evil.

...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....

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.

Only one and a half week left up to the start of the course in Bristol. My nervousity is rising but it's still okay. I'm still not aware of moving to England next week, it seems to be a bit strange, like it happens to another person who is not me. I stand beside and have a look at my life like at somebody else's. I'm going to Bristol? phew
The good thing is this outstanding situation also is an everlasting wellspring of inspiration. I'd like to work over and adapt my previous results. Artistic work contains the work, of course, but also its perception and its analysis by the artist. That's what actually happen to my Orpheus project. I'm thinking of redesigning the Orpheus' puppet.


I searched a long time for a good (working) title and and now I found one, I guess. I'm not completely satisfied with it because it's a bit too general. But it's not much and I feel much more pleased now. The baby has a name now, although this is not a final decision.