This one is about motivation.
If you’re an artist or work as an independent filmmaker, you have to constantly motivate yourself as long as you ever want to finish your projects. The less outside pressure you have (say, other people’s money involved or a tight schedule), the more true this becomes.

I guess the most common advise is to simply get started. But for whatever reason this sometimes doesn’t work. So I wrote a post about being gridlocked some time ago because I know a lot of artists having gridlocked moments from time to time, and so have I.

The other day I read an article in which the author mentioned a very helpful trick. I’d like to share this trick with you because it worked pretty good for me, and for my spouse as well. Hopefully, this will be helpful for you, too. Okay, ready?

Limit yourself

Perhaps you now think she’s nuts. Why should you limit yourself if you haven’t even started yet? The idea is simple: Take any alarm clock, set its alarm a good hour from now, and start whatever needs to be done. You have just this one hour. Nothing more. Do you feel the pressure raising? When the alarm starts to ring, immediately stop. Have a break.

If you love what you’re doing, you’ll definitely want to spend some more time doing what you’re doing right now. You could set the alarm for another hour straight away (though I guess, you won’t need that anymore...). If you’re doing something because you simply have to, just relax. You did a great job so far, you worked on your project for at least one hour, and I’m sure you have some results now. Reward yourself with something nice (nibble some sweets, have a walk, work an hour on beloved projects...). If your unloved project isn’t finished yet, work on it for another hour later (hey, it’s just one hour!), or try to finish it within those initial 60 minutes when possible...

Here’s a list of things I successfully completed during the last three days using this technique:

• a website design for a client
• an illustration layout for a client
• some video editing for my students
• some garden work being absolutely overdue
• some more designs and ideas for the film and
• this blog post.
  

For me, it’s working amazingly well... Let me know when you tried it, and if and how it works for you. I’d love to read your experiences in the comment section.

It took me one hour to draw this draft of the entry to the underworld and by this, realizing some other important things about my set design. Before I did it, I wasn’t sure how Orpheus would know where he has to look for his beloved Eurydice. I hadn’t a clue of what the entry would look like – Tim Burton-esque with screaming colours and a lot of dancing skeletons, or more simple, empty and calm like the rest of the graveyard? I decided to design it the latter way. The skull embracing the door and the crematory-like chimney are the only references to death here.

When I scaled the drawing to the buildings final size, I found out that my set will be much bigger than I believed so far. The final premises are about 40 cm high. Since I’m now going to build the big stuff, I’m getting really exited... It’s fantastic to see what one could achieve in just one hour!

Today I finished the very next to last character (re)design. It’s Orpheus, the main character of my film (finally!):

Orpheus: character design 2010

Orpheus: silhouette character design

The re-design was necessary due to my decision for a paper look and feel. And after my successful bird animation, I feel confident enough to make a bigger character with these materials. Orpheus now looks a bit more adult or mature, very sad and somehow fragile...

If you’re reading my blog for years now, you’ll perhaps remember that I had a very clear idea of how Orpheus should look like before:

Orpheus: character design 2007

Orpheus: character design 2008

I like the new one much better, it just feels right now. I had never been 100% happy with the old concept, but now I am.

Did you notice the new progress bars on the right, below the navigation (I found them via Shelley Noble’s blog)? I’m nearly done with all the character design. – Unbelievable! Still, there are many things to do but it’s nice to see the progress so clearly...

It’s always a little celebration if I’m going to change the figures... And it’s amazingly motivating to see how much I’ve already finished...

It’s almost two weeks ago since I last posted about my film’s progress. Since then, I not only ordered new materials to continue the puppet making process finally, I also had another breakthrough in the design concept of the world of the living. That took me some time to develop since I wanted a papery look and feel here but didn’t really have clue how to achieve that.

I tested lots of different kind of papers to find something appealing and now I have a beautiful (and probably cheap) solution:

Orpheus’ bedside cabinet is approx. 73 mm high, 53 mm wide and 38 mm in depth. The scale of the puppets and the props is about 1:8 compared to human size.

The bedside cabinet above is a kind of general furniture prototype. Its basic shape is made of different cardboards (frozen pizza boxes, the back of a sketch pad, 2mm grey cardboard… just what I had around). I cut out the single elements and assembled them with wood glue. It dries transparently and is one of my favourite adhesives.

After that I covered each the door, the body and the top panel with bookbinding glue and sandwich paper. Yes, sandwich paper. After some tests I decided to use it because sandwich paper isn’t 100% opaque. It looks a bit feathery and has its own texture which suits well to the look I’d like to have in the house.

I also want some deeper shadows between the door and the cabinent’s body for example, so I added green watercolors and black ink. Ideally, you’d get a slight impression of a house in which nature is at home somehow.

The door knob is made of a pin needle with a tiny green ball attached to its end. I fixed a small bead between the needle’s head and the door and painted both bead and needle white with acrylics. The acrylics doesn’t stick to the plastic surface perfectly, so the green of the bead and the needle shines through which gives a nice and fitting effect. At the very end I simply drew the floral design on the door with a fineline pencil. This absolutely is the look I was after, so another problem is eventually solved.

Speaking of drawing, I also finished the boat’s (re-)design in which Orpheus is going to cross the river Styx and the interior’s design as well. I’ll post about the boat soon. Next step is to build the sets. I have one more month to go for preproduction... This week I’d like to finish most of the furnitures... But perhaps this is too ambitious...

Cheerleading, anyone?

Today I finished the concept design of my Eurydice character. She's just a minor one, but she'll have to walk in two directions though. Minor character is a very unprecise description, since Eurydice somewhat like a MacGuffin: she's the reason why the story is going to be told.

The main time she'll be moving to the left when Orpheus and she try to leave the Underworld. But in one situation she'll be moving towards the audience, so that part of puppetmaking (and then animation) could become a little challenging.

Eurydice is an oak nymph, a pure and graceful creature. Nature and wild life are part of her, and she loves to play and dance. She is grounded and lives close to nature, and everything around her is in simple and clear balance. She is married to Orpheus, who tries to free her from the Underworld after she had died.

I assembledd two pictures I shot during my time in Bristol and Vienna to have a nice background. The character's sketch is placed into the picture to get a good impression of what she's like. That tree really exists!

I traced the character's vector outlines by hand, and coloured them black to get an idea of how she'll look like as a shadow puppet. My scale drawing will be based on this picture.

Below you'd see the character design I drew two and half a year ago... I'm much more pleased with the new one, not to say I really like her. I think it won't be easy to build a front-view silhouette puppet but I'll definitely give it a try.

Today was a succesful day, at least so far. I'd given the Hermes charakter design several tries before, but I still wasn't satisfied with the results yet. I decided to go back to the very beginning of his character development, and started brainstorming again.

I swiftly wrote a list of 100 features I associate with him, ancient Greek's Great Messenger. During this process I wouldn't edit myself, and it's very important to do it as quickly as possible. This one is about creativity and I don't want my left brain to question my ideas at this point.

The next step is to find connections between the different catchwords. I ordered them by categories like with regards to content, materials and textures or character's appearance. I then employed these keywords in my research on visual references.

Here's a brief description of what he's going to be alike in my film:

"My" Hermes is a boyish man and the incarnated message or news. He's young and in good shape. He looks somehow birdlike, and his clothing is light and has a lot of feathers attached. He' bright and honest, passive and neutral like Switzerland in WWII. Deep down he's sensitive and lonely.

So I collected pictures of

• Hermes sculptures from several centuries
• ballet dancers
• differnet types of helmets and caps
• travelling cloaks
• angels
• birds, especially raven, and their wings
• silk and
• old newspapers.

From these collection I took single elements and assembled them in a drawing. After a visit to the Photoshop department, I now have a nice concept drawing of the Hermes character (I placed him into a picture of Vienna's Central Cemetery):

Well, this sketch is a lie.

The final puppet will be animated in the Land of the Dead, so he'll eventually be only a shadow of his former self. I'm going to work on his silhouette next.

It's been three weeks now since I've started working on the Orpheus project continously again. I got stuck during the puppet making process and did some research instead to find visual references for the backdrops and for some of the other puppets as well. I decided not to have only one huge reference wall but a smaller one for each setting of the film to find the specific look and feel for every single take, somehow like that one:

My reference walls are collections of photos and drawings I took or made myself, pictures from the internet, and sometimes found materials like little pieces of lace, paper or else. First of all, I collect them intuitively and without editing. Eventually I sort them according to categories like colours, textures or function of their respective kind of stage prop, for example. This mood board gives a nice impression of how the look and feel of the cemetery setting is going to be alike.

I also wrote several to do lists to get an overview of all the things which need to be done before I could start animating. It seems like there is still much to do but I can see the progress more clearly now. Since everything is listed I'm not afraid of missing something important any more. Aaand: Ticking items off the lists is always so very satisfying...

My puppet-making to do list is one out of only six checklists so far, though it feels like several dozens of them. Mhmmm, lists! Lists make progess visible... Progress is gooood!

So... Back to progress. – Back to work!

This doesn't happen often, but yet I am left speechless after watching Going West, a beautiful short film illustrating the hidden worlds in a book by employing papercraft and stop-motion animation. It was designed and brought to life by Line Andersen of Andersen M Studio, and produced by the New Zealand Book Council:

What it makes my this week's favourite is, it

• incorporates papercraft
• is dreamlike, magical and literally wonderful
• also well animated and it's
• simply a beautiful piece of art.

Like no other human activity reading opens up our imagination,

New Zealand Book Council states at the Council's website, and if you watch this promotion video you'll feel how true this must be... The clip's name refers to a book with the same title written by Maurice Gee. Extracts from his book's text provides a sort of script to the animation.

I feel helpless and angry with Andersen M Studio because their video is done so beautifully – and because it's exactly that kind of impression I'd like to give in my current project. I looked up their portfolio, they did some other animations at the same level of quality. And now I just don't want to copy their style... These paperworks just make me feel stunned and touches something deep inside me.

I don't believe in coincidences, at least not really. And so I just enjoy getting lovely recommendations from a dear friend while at the very same moment I just turned up and ordered a book on papercraft myself. Now I have to crawl myself through another field of wonderful discoveries... What a shame!

Remember William Ketridge? I wrote an article about him and his work a few months ago.

Today Nils again recommended another videoto me I'd like to share with you because in general it follows the same idea of showing the passing of time through animation. It's a kind of meta animation precisely because it's reflecting the animation process itself.

Perhaps you saw the Muto Wall Animation before, which became quite popular last year around the web. It was made by the same guy called Blu who seems to be a highly creative person. – It's always a pleasure to see his works. Besides, he has a fancy website which suits his artworks very well. Have a look yourself at his film COMBO:

a collaborative animation by Blu and David Ellis | year 2009 | produced by studio cromie | music by Roberto Lange | made at Fame festival 2009

Of course Blu's films differ from those of William Kentridge. Kentridge draws and shoots them in a controlled (and controllable) studio situation with charcoal on paper, whereas Blu is working outside on deserted buildings with wall paint, chunky tools and sometimes capricious weather. Animators love to control lights and to reduce flicker to a minimum so they would have a constant lighting. In this case Blu embeds the changing sunlight and moving shadows in his animation. I love how he includes the building's doors, windows and special traits to literally unreel his organic animation.

And again, the sound design is very supportive to the animation... Animation is purely artificial but in order to build a convincing situation a balanced sound design is absolutely necessary.

Since I decided to work with paper puppets again, processes had speeded up a bit, and they also had been much more focussed so far. During the last weekend I worked on the Charon puppet design.

Charon is a former prince of Arcardia who now owns the great job of ferrying the souls of the dead across the River Styx down to their new home, the underworld. He himself is neither dead nor alive. He's something in between without any chance to escape from his situation. Beyond that he's inconceivably old, has no joy at all and he surely is a pretty cynical and unpleasant person.

Current character design of Charon (2009)

I'd like to share those two pictures with you because they perfectly illustrates a process. The drawing above shows the current design after I had thought a lot how I'd love the puppet to be like. Although this is just a rough drawing and not the very last version of Charon, you'll get a clear idea of him.

The one below shows my first ideas of the puppet when I had started thinking about it two years ago. Plenty of things had happen inbetween – my trips to Bristol and Vienna, for example – and somehow I was bold enough to overcome my wish for realistic puppets and to go for something more stylistic.

Former character design of Charon (2007)

I was totally surprised when I compared the drawings for the first time. But to me, the general idea of the character still is the same no matter how different they seem to be at the first glance. Somehow the new Charon is much more precise. What do you think? I'd love to hear your thoughts within the comments!

Sometimes it just needs a decision to start.

The last weeks, I extendedly stared at my mood board to come up with an idea of how I want to continue with the puppet design. The mood board has grown widely and the more I studied it, the more I want my film having a paper-like look and feel. But I don't want it to look flat like a drawing, more like sculpures made of paper. It all should seem to be light and kind of fragile.

This is a paper house I built at the very beginning of the design process. Now I found it a key to what I want the film look like. It is approximately 15 cm high.

Because a lot of current productions seem to go for clean and almost perfect puppets and animation, I first thought I'd like to do so, too. I didn't and that's obviously because I don't really want to. I want something more artificial becoming a cinematic reality. (Though the animation is going to be perfect, of course... ;) )

While reading my every morning bowlful of news and blogs, I caught up to date with the blog of Vanessa Soberanis of Curious Spoon who had worked on a music video for some time. Vanessa is a Los Angeles based

"animator, photographer, painter of furniture and lover of kinkajous and cats",

as she describes herself. I really like her style and the way she combines different techniques and materials.

Reffering to her posts, Vannessa mainly used clothed puppets to fill the video's world with life. But there's also a memory sequence which she wanted to differ from the other from the video's reality. For this sequence Vanessa employed paper puppets. I asked her permission to use her pictures in this article so you could get an impression of the puppets below.

Both pictures above: ©2009 Vanessa Soberanis of Curious Spoon, for more read her article.

"I drew and water colored them on watercolor paper, cut them out, reinforced them with cardboard from a Cereal box, then glued and taped rubber bands onto them at the joints",

Vanessa writes. And that's pretty cool and encouraging because I often take packaging materials for such a purpose as well. You see, there's no magic. Only creativity and solved problems.

I decided to work with paper puppets again this time as I did in my first animated short Ein anderer Traum (engl. Another Dream). At that time I made the puppets of thick and painted packaging cardboard because I wanted them to stand upright (see above) and attached the limbs with these split pins. I love to work with light and shadows and spatial depth. With paper puppets lying it's much harder to archieve a good lighting though you can archieve interesting effects by shooting through several layers of glass or cel material like, for example, Yuri Norstein did.

After this decision I went straight back to character design.

Did I mention, that it sometimes just needs a decision to start?

Pilobolus. As often, Nils recommended a youtube link to me and I was just stunned.

Discover Pilobolus for yourself:

There's also an interesting interview with them on their work which was very inspiring. Artistic Director Robby Barnett says,

"Shadows are a kind of mask that people wear and you know that it represents a […] facette of nature but not its whole. […] There's something illusive I think about shadows, you know, the real work is hidden and you see an overflection of reality."

I totally agree to this. I like the idea of a part of us which is dark and unexplorable, which cannot be defined. This is why I'm going to use shadow animation or silhouttes to show the underworld part of my film. It's a pity that I can't stick a movie to my mood board which is becoming bigger and more precisely all the time. But I wouldn't miss the movements of the dancers...

How about you? What feelings do shadows evoke? What do you associate with them?

Just because animation is such an labour intensive field of work, animators tend to plan as much as possible. As in normal film productions, at first I have an idea which turns into a script which again turns into a storyboard. In best case I'd create an Animatic to check the story's developement and credibility. When I did this to the Orpheus script and storyboard, I found the story sometimes too slow and according to this, I deleted some ...well, 30 frames. This was very helpful and now I found it much clearer. Thanks to Celtx again.

When I did the first character designs I wasn't very happy with them. In fact, I wanted something completely different. But what? I had made this lovely Orpheus puppet and now I don't want to use it anymore. Then I my dear eFriend Shelley, Queen of Halfland reminded me of another helpful tool, the mood board or reference wall. The world is full of helpful tools...

"A mood board is a type of poster design that may consist of images, text, and samples of objects in a composition of the choice of the mood board creator. Designers and others use mood boards to develop their design concepts and to communicate to other members of the design team. The mood board may be used as a frame of reference during the design process in a variety of abstract disciplines.
[…]
In short, mood boards are not limited to visual subjects, but serve as a visual tool to quickly inform others of the overall 'feel' (or 'flow') that a designer is trying to achieve. Creating mood boards in a digital form may be easier and quicker, but physical objects often tend to have a higher impact on people because of the more complete palette of sensations physical mood boards offer, in contrast with the black & white or color-prints of a digital mood board."

Read full article at Wikipedia, this text qoutes the page which was last modified on 2 June 2009 at 01:23.

Normally I collect my references in a small A5 scetchbook. After reading one of her posts and watching the related video I cleaned up my studio and emptied a wall to spread the visual references. I sticked the storyboard to it, too:


It's not as huge as Shelley's is (hers is stunning!) but releasing it from the book liberated my creative energy. Doing so I got a much clearer vision of what colours the different settings should be kept in, for example. And I found out how I would like to design the real world part which has bee an unanswered question so far. I decided that I'd like to combine a graphic look and puppet animation. I'm not sure if this'll work, but I'd like to give it a try.

A book could be hidden and ignored but it's hard to ignore a wall. So hopefully this would rise up the production speed a bit. Aunt Google's scrapbook is very helpful, as always. I also collect my ideas from books and magazines, from nature, from art catalogues and self-taken pictures as well.

There are a lot of different techniques to enlarge inspiration and your creative output, the mood boards are just one way. How do you do your research, from where do you get your inspiration from? I'd love to read your comments!

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.

I'm doing a bookbinding course at my university this term and we made marbeld paper there to cover the books. But I thought it would be nice to have the coloured structure as a backround for the underworld scenes because the foregound and the actors as silhouettes will be plain. I didn't want to have a plain background, too, and this seems to work in the scetch.
So what I did: I scanned the paper, did some photoshopping and combined it with the silhouette scene. It is much more then the picture had before in my drawings. The drawings was made with felttips and they looked to clean. Always the same problems...
By the way, finding a room in Bristol seems to be done. It looks like I would stay in a victorian villa. I really love the victorian style...