Due to a lot of other (paid) work over the last weeks I had less opportunity to spend much time in my studio. But whenever it was possible I did research on papercraft since I decided to go for a papery Look and Feel within my Orpheus project.

My most enlighting discovery was a book called, well, Papercraft which is an stunnning collection of amazing artists and designers who employ one of the most simple but yet beautiful materials. The book comes along with a DVD filled with paper toy templates, animated shorts with worlds made of paper and some interviews with featured artists. I didn't regret that I bought it, the book is filled with so many pictures of hillarious works that I guess I might still have missed a few, althhough I crawl through its 256 fully coloured pages daily.

However, it absolutely appelealed my play instinct and I wanted to do more paperworks on my own. So I started to invent a paper toy myself. And because it's christmas I'd like to give it to you as my this year's downloadable Pdf gift here:

Click into the picture to download the Pdf (1,1 MB).

Feel free to download and print it, to cut it out and glue it all together, so you'll have your own jessica-esque Santa papertoy. I publish it under the Creative Commons Licence – share it and enjoy playing around e.g. while you're awaiting your and your family's chrismas celebration. I'd be glad if you'd have some fun with it. So… have fun!

Merry christmas and a happy new 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...

When I went back to soundsnap.com to download some free sound samples, I first was angry and disappointed by not finding their content free anymore. I hadn’t been there quite a while (okay, they changed the conditions in December 2008) and I was really surprised by that. After a few seconds of anger I decided to find the idea of paying someone for his or her work really attractive. It’s nice to earn money for your work, isn’t it? If I got it right, soundsnap pays the uploaders 4$ per piece of sound (read their forum for details). I mean, how much is enough for good work? They have a lot mid quality sounds there as well... Referring to their conditions, they have prices per month and download limitations to „control the amount of piracy and password sharing“ (read more).

This lead me to some thoughts of money and the internet. The idea of the internet is to share information, or more precisely data (whatever the content may be...). Everything is pretty virtual. But to create this virtual contents, we have to work (spending real time and energy)... I have to think about this some more time, I guess. I want to get paid for my work as well as others do, but I want to share my experiences and information, too. Perhaps we have to find another way of work? Actually, I watch a lot of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and the people there work because they love to work and not for a living because food and everything is provided... My blog isn’t supposed to be political but by writing it I have to think about these things. Some more.

It’s good to see other people think about this, too: See the Wikipedia article on the Swedish Pirate Party for more information. There are people thinking about the future of a society depending on information. And they made their way into the European Parliament which means a lot of other people think this is important.
Well done, pirates!

... wtih a huuuge cherry cake:

And a small present for you all, my experiences with a tiny and lovely piece of software: a warm welcome to Pencil... [...] I wrote this introduction to a kind of tutorial I wanted to write. This was before I tested the possibilities of the software in detail. Weeell. No. I'm not going to share my pencil experiences because they were very, very, very annoying. My friend Nils introduced me to this little piece of software and it works fine with his Linux system. He played around a bit and had nice results within short time and I wanted to do this, too.

Okay, I do share them.

It seems as it wouldn't run properly on my Mac system. It crashed for the first time when I had six vector layers and while using the filling bucket, which - following their documentation - is not the best yet. From that moment, it felt like crashing about 100 times, I guess... No, really, it was very often. And although I saved the file after every change I did, it somehow lost my modifications. But I would be really glad if the developers'll go further. The current release is version 0.4.4b, so I think that's an acceptable excuse... But I was so much looking forward to use it... Disappointment can hurt so badly... This wasn't great fun and that's why I had to bake my blog's birthday cake with Flash. And no, there is no dynamite in the cake.... It's just badly animated...

Here is a screenshot I did when it was working with Pencil. (Click on the small image to get a larger view.)

It's too cool to keep it away from you. The basic idea is to have a simple animation software which contains a light table, paper and pencil. You can use the tools in bitmap and vector layers and the whole programme is like a classical and simple 2D environment: drawing, inking, animating with keys. I love the idea of taking my pen tablet and just start playing. It's amazingly sensitive to my Wacom Graphire. I loved that part most... Have a look at their gallery website to see what is possible if it runs somehow stable...

Einfachanimation got one year old today. What has happened? It's a bit of a rhetorical question because you all have read it. But there were some funny things which happened you don't know, like this guy who sent me his CV and his portfolio asking for a job. I didn't know if I should feel honoured but it was a weird feeling... I must seem to be a real professional now. And that's extremely cool. Hopefully, I'm going to be one after my oncoming final exams... That would be great.

My dear friends and all you strangers out there, keep on reading! I will keep writing because I really enjoy sharing my experiences. On the other hand there are so many nice "behind the scenes" things happening since I've started to write this blog: getting in touch with animators from all over the world, making new friends sometimes, bumping into really funny situations, finding penis enlargement comments on my blog (somebody must think the blog could be important...) ... It's like life itself, isn't it?

And yes, you are all allowed and invited to send me animation birthday presents, but no dynamite cakes, please!