Dear creative folks,

tomorrow the Studio Monday will take place for the first time. From March 7, 2011 on I’ll open my studio in Porta Westfalica, Germany every Monday from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. for you to come and join.

I wanted to create an event where creative people of all kind have a space to work together, to get in touch with like-minded people and to take a look behind the scenes of my work. During this weekly open studio event you’re invited to bring your own creative projects to work on, or to join me on my projects if you like to (that could be my Orpheus film project, for example).

The entry is free.

It’s easy to plan your journey with google maps, the studio’s address is Kaanstr. 7, 32457 Porta Westfalica, Germany. I recommend to call in before under +49 (0) 571 38 76 781, especially if you’re going to travel a longer distance.

I look forward to see you! Jessica

Drawing "Companions", sketched with Harmony drawing tool

My dear friend Shelley had that great idea that I'm going to steel and modify: every Friday she invites creative people she met into her studio to join her working on her Halfland project. Which is awesomely inspiring! (I mean both, the project itself and having creative people of all kind around supporting what she does.)

For the last months I was so stuck into paid work that I hadn't the energy to work on my Orpheus film project at all which first made me feel angry, and then very sad. I was thinking a lot about ways to move on with the film in a gentle and guilt-free manner.

My major problem is feeling guilty for not working on the film. I guess whenever a person uses the words procrastination, she feels guilty because she does something else than she was supposed to do. Take me as an example: Whatever I do, I feel guilty because I don't work on the film (even if I work on something creative though). For whatever reason there is a voice in my head that asks reproachfully, "Shouldn't you be working on your film? Perhaps you're not an animation artist at all..." And I kept thinking that procrastinating is bad.

During the last months things has changed. I don't think that procrastination is bad anymore. – I now don't use the word at all. I'll only tell what I actually do, and not what I didn't.

The point is, I really want to finish the film (ideally this year), but I want to do it my way. And I want to find a way to make this possible. First I need time and energy to work in the studio, so I quit a few jobs and commitments, and that was an awesome first step. Second I need some kind of framework.

And so I picked one day of the week as my special Orpheus day. A whole day that is dedicated to film making and animation. From March 7, 2011 on I'll have Studio Mondays.

Studio Monday

From then on I'll open my art and animation studios every Monday from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. for you to join me on my creative adventures. That means you can come in and simply watch my progress, that you could help if you want, or that you you can bring in your own project (whatever it is) if you need some creative companionship, too.

It's free, and I'll even share my materials, resources and knowledge with you. (That also means that I don't have any excuse to leave the studio at all, because you may come around.)

My studio's address is Kaanstr. 7, 32457 Porta Westfalica. (Ask google Maps for help). In case you have a longer distance to travel, I recommend to call in first: +49 (0) 571 38 76 781. – I'm looking forward to see you!

...

(drumroll)

1. Jannis (comment #4)
2. Christina (comment #5)
3. Thorsten (comment #6)
4. Elmar (comment #8)

Congratulations! The four of you won a copy of my first animated short "Ein anderer Traum" in my first Christmas tombola. I really hope you'll like the film and the making of, and please feel free to keep in touch!

(I put five copies in the drawing, but too many of my blog readers seem to have already one or to be too shy... What a shame... I need a new film soon...) ;)

A merry Christmas to everyone, and a sweet end of the year!

Since last week there wasn't much change in my situation: I'm still overworked, and I didn't work at my Orpheus film project so far. But I'm preparing to do so, since there are two weeks of beautiful and relaxing Christmas holidays ahead.

While I'm looking forward to these two long-awaited weeks, I started decluttering my work spaces, my drawing studio as well as my animation studio in the basement, because cleaning up helps a lot when I'm stuck. Actually I'm decluttering the whole house again, since we own a lot of stuff that may be more useful to somebody else.

I then also opened some closets which hasn't be open for a while, and was surprised by what I found: Back in 2007, after the release of Ein anderer Traum I made a small edition of 50 DVD including a making of. And there still were a few copies left!

A Drawing! A Tombola!

So here's the deal:

It's Christmas, and I didn't make something special for you like I did last year with the Santa Paper Toy. I also have a weird amount of unique visitors in my stats, and I was wondering if these figures are really real people like, well, you – or if the software simply doesn't work properly. And so I thought it would be nice to combine the useful with the beautiful.

If you leave a nice comment below this post including your e-mail address1 until Friday 17 December 2010 Thursday 23 December2 at midnight (German time), you'll have the chance to win one of 5 limited edition copies of the Ein anderer Traum DVD including my granny-pleasing making of.

It's a region free video DVD that also contains an English subtitles version (even though it comes without dialogue). I'll contact the winners at the weekend for your preferred shipping address.

The most beautiful man alive is going to volunteer for the draw and pull the five winners out of the bowl. I'll send the DVD to you as soon as possible but I think chances are bad that you'll get them before Christmas, even though they're my Christmas gifts to you... I hope you'll like that idea, and I'm already excited and pleased to meet you!

Good luck!

---

¹ Your e-mail address will neither be displayed on this website nor used in any other context. It'll only be used to contact you in the case you'll win one of the five DVD.

² Due to the massive amount of comment (say, none, as in zero) I'm extending the deadline.

For the current school year I temporarily work as an art teacher at a Realschule (which is something similar to a junior high school), and since I haven't been trained to be a school teacher it's been fairly difficult to get into the flow. Teaching at schools is completely different to the teaching in museums or workshops, so it took all my energy do adapt to this new situation.

Most of the last weeks' time I've been sooo tired. When I eventually fell asleep in the evenings, I dreamed a lot of school dreams which are even more stressful than the reality. Today the holidays start, and finally I had a nice dream this morning I'd like to share with you:

It was an average school day: teaching, solving student's problems, talking to colleagues, whatever. For some reason there was a recruiting agency who wanted to hire animators at the school yard, and they asked me if I'd like to apply. To make a long story short, they hired me on the spot, I quit the school job and I lived happily ever after…

Nice one, eh?
Well, it fits.
All the time I've been thinking, "This is just wrong!" I love to teach but I am definitely not a school teacher. I am an artist, an animation artist, and I truly don't want to be something else. The school job takes all my creative energy, and there's nothing left when I'm back home in my studio. I got really angry about that. So now I try to remember what I really want to do. I talked to two curators last week to find new ways to show my works, and today I made myself an early christmas gift:

I purchased Dragon Stop Motion after testing it for ten days. Dragon Stop Motion is a capture software, a so called frame grabber. It's a great piece of software which works my digital SLR. It has an folder watch mode, and with my new wireless Eye-fi memory card I can use the preview function without a camera-supported video feed.

Buying the software was good and important, I now have the most important things of my technical setup together. I really hope that I'm able to work on the puppets and sets again soon. The dream was so good because it reminds me of what I really want. In my dream I signed the contract, and it was like doing it in reality. I woke up and thought, "well, then let's get started!"

It's been quiet around here for several weeks now. I got kind of stuck with my Orpheus film project, and it feels like a lack of orientation. I have to sort some things out and to answer some questions before I can move on. But I also can't force it, it's a bit like evolution: one day, the ideas bubble like a spring in the mountains, the other day it feels like I'm digging them from an underground mine. – But hey, that's pretty much the Orpheus theme, isn't it?

A drawing I did a few days ago. The text in English would be like this:
"Really? Your soul for consideration?
Well, how inventive is that?
(Creativity? – Pha!)"

I try to be not too concerned about this since I do a lot of teaching at the moment instead of working on the film. I also started drawing regularly again which is just wonderful. I have so many ideas and things I'd like to try, that I barely have the time to do everything. Currently I feel a bit unfocused, but normally this is temporarily.

Sometimes a project like the Orpheus film is like a leavened dough which needs to rise before moving on with the baking process… So just now the Orpheus dough is rising and while I wait for it to finish, I spend my time writing a tutorial and drawing illustrations for a book for my godchild – stuff I wanted to do for years.

There's another issue taking a lot of energy at the moment, too:
After I passed my final exam in 2009 it was a weird situation. For more than ten years it was my master plan to achieve a degree in fine arts. I didn't think much about what would be after this certain point until I'd been there. When I eventually had my diploma, I decided I need a new master plan, and I allowed myself to experiment on how I want to live for a time period of two years from then on.

One and a half year has passed so far and I don't feel much more beyond doubt. Do I really need a plan? Well, I'm an artist, that's for sure, but from time to time I find it so difficult to stay on that track, and when this happens, I'm not sure anymore what it means, to be an artist. I'm interested in so many things that I occasionally forget on which one I really want to focus. Animation and drawing definitely are my favorite topics, but I also love graphic design, teaching, traditional crafts like bookbinding, or gardening and refurbishing…. So little time to do it all as much intense as I'd like to.

I'm still looking for a way to combine or enlace all these activities but I haven't found a solution yet. My dream is to achieve master skills at least in animation… Art today has become such a wide field that I'm absolutely sure that somewhere there's a niche for me and the stuff I do.

These are mainly internal processes, but I thought it would be nice to share these thoughts with you because for me they're an important part of my artistic and human development. What about you? Do you know concerns like these yourself? How do you solve these problems? And what do you learn from situations like these? Share your thoughts in the freshly designed comments section, I'd love to hear your views!

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!