It's the last weeks before the summer holidays, and there are so many things that want to be finished this week. I have less time to work on my Orpheus film, and this annoys me pretty much. I really want to start the animation now, but I suppose this have to wait another week.

Plus: my equipment has worked fine over the last few months, but when I wanted to use it today, nothing worked. Grr.

Nevermind.
After last week's shaky panning attempt I started another approach to build a panning slide, this time with less gaffer tape and less cable straps, too. Robert Lyons (I met him at vimeo.com) recommended to get

[…] some drawer slide at a hardware store, sandwich them between two pieces of wood and mount the camera to the upper board. Ive used this method as a cheap but smooth and incrementable camera mover for stop motion,

he said.
And this was a damn good suggestion.

My new slider looks like this:

I screwed the drawer slide onto a rectangular block of wood, and attached another board on top. I created a small support on the board to fasten the top of a tripod on it (to hold the camera in place). The drawer slide creates a smooth movement and I don't need much force to move it just a bit. – Awesome!

This is how it works:

And here I tried another test sliding animation:

It looks so much better now, and is much easier to handle.
Success!

– Have a successful week yourself, and thank you so much for sharing your ideas! All the best,

Jessica

Film still from the Underworld.

Often I have a certain idea for an animation, but I don't think too much how it could be done at first. It was the same with some of the scenes for my Orpheus film project: I want to do some fancy camera movements for my oncoming animated short, but I don't own a professional equipment to create those movements easily.

So I just built an animation panning device from my old-school animation stand, a miter-box, a lot of gaffer tape and also a lot of cable straps today. (Everything is held in place by loads of gaffer tape and cable straps.)

It looks crappy, but it works:

The "back-bone" of the animation stand serves as a guide for the cameras. It has scales printed on its surface which make it easy to animate fluidly. Both cameras are taped to a miter-box that is used as a slide. Altogether it's a bit shaky, but I can control the animation through the life feed within the software.

My highly professional panning in animation setup. There's a larger version of this image on my flickr photostream.
– Highly professional, as I said!

I use two cameras here: I take the high res pictures with my digital DSLR, a Pentax ist DL2 which (sadly) hasn't a video life feed. To control the movements and to rearrange things (if necessary), I use my Panasonic NV GS-90, a simply digital camcorder that is connected to the computer.

Okay, I admit: It's not a bit professional. It's all pretty semi-professional, probably.

Whatever professional means…

I think, it is okay so far because it's working, but perhaps you have another low-budget idea?
Thanks for sharing!

– Jessica

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:

... is the German word for an animation stand which I hereby announce to finally possess myself. I wanted to own one of these for a very long time and last week I was able to buy a used one (though I think the guy who sold it thought I must be totally nostalgic and beyond help).

My new Tricktisch which seems to be a tiny bit old-fashioned nowadays.

On this animation stand you're able to film any kind of animation that is placed on a flat surface, including cel animation, graphic animation, clay animation, cut-out animation and silhouette animation as well. I worked on one more sophisticated stand in Vienna but this one is nice, simple and working.

According to Wikipedia on animation stands,

the vertical positioning of the animation camera, always shooting down, is the main component that defines an animation stand, as opposed to a stop motion set-up, or other equipment arrangements for animation production.

As you see in the picture above, there are four lamps attached to the stand's surface which lights your setting evenly and ideally from an angle of 45 degrees. The camera is panable and moveable up and down the column. All parts move smoothly and could be fixed properly.

You wonder why I wanted to have an animation stand for my studio? From time to time I'd love to animate cut-out puppets – it's much easier to do this with this device than with a camera on a tripod fixed by the help of some strange constructions... Oh, and there once had been a time when it wasn't old-school to use such an animation table: the Popular Science magazine featured an article about these new so called cartoon cameras in December 1940 when they seemed to be pretty astonishing. Ocassionally I absolutly enjoy putting my computer away and get fascinated with old and manual techniques...

If you got hooked and want to build one by yourself, I'd like to share a website with instructions how to do so: On saunalathi.fi, film and animation artist Jan-Erik Nyström offers a great overview on animation stands and a how to construct one.