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:

Now that I'm freelancing I use lots of my spare time for thinking about self-marketing and stuff. I want to become einfachanimation.de a bit more famous or popular or whatever, but at least more attractive. Anyway, I thought it would be lovely to re-design its header and insert an animation there because, well, it's simply about animation. That's why I started to play around with software again. I don't like Flash so much because it offers no free standards and there are those annoying websites full of flash animation which need a beeping long time for loading even with a broadband connection. It seems to be a kind of anachronism to go back to animated .gifs. Maybe it is. But as long as I am not familiar with Canvas I'd like to give it a try.

Sometimes I just miss technical archievements and so it happened that I had never made an animated gif before. I asked Aunt Google for a tutorial on animated gifs in Photoshop and I found a nice one through which I digged yesterday. It was very easy and I followed the instructions straightly. So, here is my little rocket:



Today I tried something more fancy and to do that I wanted to use the transformation tool to change my character's size. But: if I try to transform a group or layer, it'll be transformed in every frame of the animation where I used an instance of the original layer in. So I had to adjust or better, design every single layer containing transformation. Which is nearly as much work to do as in any other 2D animation. But it was great fun. I guess if I would get tired of animation, I already had. The walk animation is a bit crappy but apart from that I just like having all the resources of Photoshop.



Though gif files are of very small size, they'd get bigger and bigger the more fancy your design is. Gifs are limited to a maximum amout of 256 colours but if you're playing around with the options of the "save for web" dialogue you'll see how it works. They're tiny if you only use black and white or a few colours and it depends heavily (as it seems) on how many frames the animation consists of. My little rocket is made of fifteen frames with 256 colours and 100% Dithering, while Mr Männeken is made of 43 frames and 256 colours and 100% Dithering. The size of the canvas of Mr Männeken is twice the size of the small rocket. The rocket is 48 KB, Mr Männeken almost 250 KB. By the way, a lot of software is capable of saving images as gif. A nice (and free) alternative to Photoshop is Gimp.

Questions, anyone?

From time to time, I stumble upon the works of William Kentridge which I just admire. They're beautiful and balanced in every respect. I also like him and his work because he builds a bridge between fine art and animation in a succesful way. And we share our love for theatre I guess.

Today I was in the mood for playing around and I wanted to do some animation again. I did this without any plan, very spontaniuosly, just with charcoal on paper and a rubber. I just wanted to try this technique to find out if it'd work for me either. I really like this way of animation, you simply can't go back. And the results often are very suprising... I also like the impression of seeing time passing by. If I erase the charcoal, there'll always be some particles left which gives you an idea of what has happened before. Sometimes the timing isn't very well in the clip. But have a look yourself:

Well, I managed to feel a bit more home in Vienna, it was just a decision and a kind of cleaning up in my time table. And I showed all my previous years work to the guy who runs the studio and convinced him by this letting me use the studio without finishing the course before. I haven't worked much under a rostrum camera by now but last friday I did some experiments there. I had a DV camera, iStopMotion on my G4 Laptop and two 150W lamps there as hardware. Some heavy paper was sticked by some gaffer tape to the table.Then I started painting with acrylics without any planning what you would see in the video. I just wanted to know what I could do with this techique and how other people may have done their films with it. It was cool because I came into a kind of paint rush, I painted for about five hours. Acrylics normally dry very quickly but it was too slow when I had been in the 'zone' so I just used a hair dryer to dry the colours more quickly. I was painting and overpainting the scenery on doubles and here are the results, or, more precisely, the best results for that day:

I made a mistake which wasn't so important right now but may become important in a bigger production. I just fixed the paper on its corners with some tape. But if the paper becomes wet through the colours it will get waves and when it dries, and its fixed propperly, it will get plain again. Mine got waves but I was lucky. The waves in the paper hadn't been big enough to produce any serious shadows. For the next time I would use some heavy cardboard or maybe some thin wood, it would depend on what I want to do with it. Or, you could use the shadows for your storytelling if you like, depending on what you want to archieve. The other issue with this is that the paper produces kind of hills and valleys. If you use very wet colours they'd probably become the rivers in your paper landscapes and start to run down th hills and become lakes. It's a very progessive technique because there's no going-backwards.

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.

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....