Yes, it's me.
It's been a while since I last updated this blog.

Due to some massive refurbishment at our beloved house I wasn't able to work on my film, or on anything at all. Everything has been messy in here, dust is everywhere and the only room that still has its usual function is our bed room. (Though it's slowly getting better…)

We just wanted to exchange a window and the front door. But what was planned as a one-and-a-half-day action, took us one and a half week so far since the walls need a bit more attention than expected, and will probably take another one or two weeks since the most beautiful man alive and I also have some scheduled work to do.

Part of the room formerly known as our kitchen, captured by @einfachkaffee. You can see me in the background, hi there!

Lesson learned: One does not just do a quick change in an old house like ours.

I cannot really concentrate right now. The clean-up phase has begun yesterday and slowly all our stuff finds back into their places. But it's still stressful and exhausting, and will take more time than I was willing to spend on this.

Anyway, I'm not complaining.
The good part is, that we're going to re-arrange our whole space, and that there will be space for a new order in here as well. That's going to be awesome!

But what about Animation?

Before all that chaos started, I taught a few awesome animation workshops with kids and adults. Due to the lack of progress on my own film Ins Dunkel, I'd like to show you something really cool from the kids instead:

The kids in my workshops would usually love to work with plasticine, but this time they all wanted to draw. And they draw! I don't know how many flip books and seconds of drawn animation they produced… (Actually, I do know, but that would sound less dramatic…)

I'd like to share this video with you that is made by 14 years old Benedikt, an outstanding drawing talent:

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Hängender Hund (engl. Hanging Dog) by Benedikt Scheffer, 2011.

Benedikt drew three days for four hours each day to make this clip during my animation summer workshop at the Museum MARTa Herford. He planned the story, the timing and everything else. We used simple 80g office paper, 2B pencils and file fasteners as peg bars.
Well done, doesn't he?

What I understand again and again every time I teach an animation class is that you don't need much to produce outstanding animations. This is something you really should keep in mind!

I just read today that the 19th Stuttgart Festival of Animated Film calls for entries until 1 December. This is going to make a beautiful deadline for Ins Dunkel, wouldn't it? What do you think?

Have a lovely week!
Love,
Jessica

Last weekend I taught my first animation workshop to adults aged 20 to 65 during a SCI work camp at the Thuringian Forest.

Our color palettes.

Warm-up: Getting the creative juices flowing

Compared to kids, grown-ups are much more afraid of play and their own creativity and need often more encouragement. I brought a lots of colors with me, literally my whole studio equipment. We had watercolors, wax crayons, acrylics, drawing ink, colored pencils and big sheets of paper. I also brought brushes in all sizes, bamboo sticks, painting knifes and drawing feathers.

My idea was to trigger the people's right-brain part where creativity and play are located. So I ask them to simply try all the materials before we start working on there animations. With their non-writing hand. With their fingers. And to give their natural body movements into the painting, because animation is all about movement.

We decorated the walls of the
yet to be refurbished house with our paintings.

Developing ideas

…was quiet easy for the participants then. I encouraged them to try easy things first, and to keep their story rather simply because we only had two days for the workshop.

While kids are good at play and experiments, my adult students had a better understanding of the technical aspects of animation, and a very individual way of finding stories. Only one of them had animated before, so it was all new to them.

They came up with some really lovely ideas, based on their individual experiences and knowledge. I'd like to share the videos of the workshop with you to get you an idea.

The Animations

All of them (except one) tried animation for the first time. Inspired by last weeks animation tutorial by Terry Gilliam we did cut-out animation since it's easy and often looks funny, too.

This first one is very special. Han Tse and Siao Chu are from Taiwan, and we talked a lot about Chinese language and calligraphy. Chinese signs are based on "real" pictures of objects or else. Han Tse and Siao Chu teamed up and produced this lovely animated piece in which the things in our world turn into their Chinese symbols:

Peter (like Pierre) is from the Netherlands, and they both were the oldest members of our group (around 65). Peter tells the story of a house that is searching for a good place to stay:

Peter.

Pierre paints since he had retired, and also has a very painterly approach towards animation. He tells the story of a woman who wants to hang clothes onto a washing line.

Pierre.

Katrin from Germany shows us what happens if pylons interfere with New York's rush hour:

Katrin.

Guiomar (from Spain) tells us a contemporary and rather brutal version of Red Riding Hood:

And Micha did this beautiful animation off a swimmer who jumps of a diving platform.

Micha's setup.

Finally: Ella (7) and Gabriel (8) were the youngest participants, guess who did what:

I'm always excited about what you can achieve within two days… They all did an amazing job!

If you want to join one of my animation classes…

you're more than welcome!

The next animation course for adults will take place in November 2011. From Friday, 11 November to Sunday, 13 November you have to chance to have an animating weekend (The course's timetable: Friday from 18:15 to 21:30, Saturday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and Sunday from 15:30 o 18).

If you work with kids, that's great since I'm going to show how you could do animation easily with children as well.

I'll hold the course at the VHS Bielefeld, please check their website for details or just give them a call: +49 (0) 521 51 22 22.

– I'd love to see you there!

Love,
Jessica

From time to time I'd like to share animations from my workshops with you. This time it's a cut-out animation from Samuel, a very talented third-grader, called "Gegenseitig reingelegt" ("Mutually Tricked"):

Samuel loves Star Wars and made the all the characters and the background alone. He also invented the way to animate the laser beams himself and without my help. I think he really is an animation talent and able to think trickfilm!

All the DVD for the kids are burnt and the school year finally is over. Now I have the time and the opportunity to focus on other things…

"Do you know who or what is flying the space ships?"

From time to time I'd like to share films that were developed by some of my students in my animation workshops. This one is made by three ten to twelve years old kids who worked with me during this year's Easter holidays.

What I like so much about it is that it's pretty close to the early 20th century silent films. Back then all dialogue was shown in titles between the scenes.

For their film, the kids wanted to use balloons for the dialogue instead of titles, as they were normally used in comics. I pretty much liked the idea of using balloons, and so they produced this little piece in about 5 hours time.

They developed the film mostly on their own. They designed the background as well as the cut-out puppets and the balloons. The music and the sounds of the space ships* are part of the iMovie package that is delivered with the software.

I rather did the job of a midwife: I helped them at giving birth to their ideas. – Which is actually what I like best about teaching: showing others techniques and tools to solve a problem on their own.

* Yes, I know, you can't hear sounds in space, it's completely silent there. But with sound it's much more fun!

Here's the film:

It's not the action that I find most intriguing about this piece, but I enjoy the aesthetics pretty much. Today's insight: Teaching is always learning as well, and I suppose a good teacher never stops exploring…

…

In case you aren't familiar with the German language, here's a translation/transcipt of what the Aliens are talking about:

Meeting of the Aliens

Marie: Hallo, I am Marie of planet Yoga.

Albert: Hi, I am Albert from the planet Hugesmall and this is my sister, Alberta.

Bernhart: Hi, I'm Bernhart from the planet Eight Arms.

(Everybody says hi to each other.)

Alberta: Look, a rocket!

Marie: Rockets are passing my planet every day.

Bernhart: We rarely see spaceships around our place.

Marie: These rockets only pollute space!

Alberta: Do you know who or what is flying those space ships?

Albert: No idea. I don't care!

Marie: You better do! Anyway, we'd better fly home. It's late.

(Everybody leaves towards his or her home.)

Film still from "The Temple", a short film made by two boys in one of my workshops

Teaching art, and especially teaching animation is one of my most favorite activities. Usually I work on different projects with kids or adults at the same time. This time I'd like to show you a video which isn't animated in a narrow sense of the word. But I take animation literally: it means something like bringing someone or something to life, and this what we did.

The two boys (10 and 11 years old) brought shadows to life with their hands, like old fashioned or Indonesian shadow theatre. Invisible Shadows was the title of an exhibition at the Museum MARTa in Herford in 2010. I teach there regularly, and during this special course we mainly worked on shadowy subjects in all kind of artistic media.

The Temple

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If your not familiar with the German language, the story told is this:

Once upon a time there was a lonesome temple. The sound of a gong could be heard everyday. (Gong stroke) One day, an archaeologist wanted to know who may strike the gong. "I'm going to investigate who has hit the gong!" said the scientist, and that's why he went into the temple. After he has entered the building, he heard the gong again. (Gong stroke) Later he found the room where the gong was: he discovered a light shadow – He definitely wanted to reveal who that was. (Gong stroke) Closer and closer he came – and found an old anchoret. Thenceforth they became friends and met regularly. "Bye, see you next week!" – "Yes, see you then!“

When I work with kids, I give them a simple script writing worksheet so that they'd get an idea of how to write an animatable script. It's pretty simple, but amazingly helpful to guide them through the story. With these sheets you could develop a simply story outline within minutes (which is especially helpful when you only have a short period of time to work on a project).

(If you like, download either the German version of my Script (light) worksheet or the English one as a pdf file to use it for your own projects, and feel free to share it.)

All the props and puppets were cut out of thin black cardboard. The puppets have wooden sticks glued to their back so that they can be played without the hands being seen. The buildings also have triangular stands so that they stand upright. Everything is pretty simple and low-tec, but I like the aesthetics very much. We had a 250W spotlight lighting from behind and a screen of semi-translucent paper in front of our set ahead the camera. It took us about six hours to complete the film including set building, recording and editing.

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So. Wanna too?

There are more animating workshops at the Museum MARTa in Herford (DE): I'm going to teach an one-day animation workshop for adults on Saturday, 22 January 2011. It runs from 11 to 5 o'clock, and we're going to explore abstract and ornamental animation playfully.

This course is for people who always wanted to animate themselves but didn't really know how to start. There's no previous experience required. The fee is 20 €, and it would be great if you join us. Please call the lovely folks at the museum under +49 (0) 5221 99443015 for further information. Hope to see you there!

Teaching animation is one of my favorite ways to earn a living in an art related field. I recently held several workshops in schools, museums or family eduction centers, and that's why I'd like to share a few more videos with you.

The videos below are the results of a workshop with primary school kids at the age of 6 to 10 years. Animation is quite difficult for younger children because it needs a minimum understanding of a very abstract concept. In my experience, stop motion and drawn animation work best with kids from the age of 9 or 10 years on. The younger students don't like to plan too much, and they don't really care about accurate storytelling, which is why it's sometimes simply difficult to understand their stories without any further information.

An Animating Workout

A fantastic way to do animation with younger kids is pixilation. I already wrote about pixilation in another blog post, so I keep this brief: pixilation is a technique where real people act like stop-motion puppets in front of a camera. Younger kids generally love to move, and they love physically demanding challenges. So pixilation is a great way to keep them moving and testing their limits, and doing animation at the same time.

Often the kids and I have to work with limited resources since most schools and public education centers have to save money – you've probably know that old story. And still I try to get the best out of it for kids. For the pixilation video we built a simple stage with blankets and gaffer tape (also, we had only 90 minutes that day). It doesn't look very professional, but that's not what this is about. It's more important that the kids have a really good time by learning something new, and sure they had:

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Altogether I had four 90 minutes classes with the kids, and after a short introduction with wooden shapes and plasticine, they animated small stories with plasticine characters in a town made from recyclable materials.

Here is one of those videos:

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I try to keep it simple for the kids, especially if I only have a small amount of time. I'd like them to learn that you don't need fancy stuff to create funny videos. As with all things the fancy stuff comes later as soon as we got some experience with materials and techniques. In the beginning, it's easier to solve fewer problems at the same time since animation really is a complex but yet playful field of work.

What do you think?

During the summer holidays I held an animation workshop at the Museum MARTa Herford which is a museum for contemporary art, design and architecture.

Lee Leyna, Leon, Johannes, Tom, Enrico, Jonathan, Lennart, Yannik, Max and Luca are between 9 to 12 years old, and the kids did a fantastic job. These are their videos which were made within one week:

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A Quick Change shows the fatal consequences of a volcano eruption.

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Slimozilla haunts a city and terrorizes its inhabitants.

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In Jump'n'Platsch a guy jumps from a skyscraper although he forgot his parachute.

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Change in Circles is a hand-drawn animation about, well, circles which are changing.

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A new twist on flying tells the story of a modern Johnny Look-in-the-Air.

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Do you know the joke about The Two Tomatoes? The fi rst one says, "Hello, Tomato!" and starts crossing the street. It gets hit by a car, and the other one says, "Hello, Ketchup!"

As usual, we used plasticine, paper, cardboard, watercolors, scissors and glue and last but not least our phantasy. I really love animation workshops with kids, they're so creative and not afraid of failing at all…

Not much progress with my film the lat weeks, but a lot of animation workshop with kids during the summer holidays. Today I'd like to share a clip with you which is animated by 7 to 11 years old school kids, who also made the fish puppets:

Deep Down in the Sea …Life's Raging

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The animation is supposed to be a background for a children's musical, "The Rainbowfish", which is a popular children's book in Germany. A children choir is going to sing one or two songs from the musical during a charity event in October at the Stadttheater in Minden. Since there are a lot of other artists and singers, they needed a background which is easily (un)decorated. So I suggested to project an animated underwater sequence and tadaa! – I had another job.

The day we produced the animation, I had about 20 children around me, for over eight hours. I first did a small training animation, so they then hopefully knew what they were doing, and after that, everyone who wanted to animate was asked to make a fish or any other underwater creature. It was an awesome experience. Despite I were deaf and nearly dead by the end of the day, the kids were lovely and did a great job!

We shot the sequence under the camera, from above. All of the fishes and turtles and jellyfishes laid flat on the table. There's a lot of light flickering due to a sunny day but it works nice with the background I added in post production. I also added some music and credits but this is just for their DVD. At the charity event kids from three primary schools will provide the music.

The summer holidays had ended several weeks ago and I still owe you some results from my workshops So, here it is:

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The text is completely in German. There are only a few spoken sentences mostly referring to the observed action.

I had two courses, and the video above was made by the younger kids. Their age ranged from 9 to 11. Altogether, the kids worked about 15 hours on that film. And yet I'm still stunned what they had archieved.

We started moving a simple wooden puppet so they could get a feeling on how generally animation works and how to use the computer and the software.

Two things happenend: first they were surprised how much work animation actually is and second, how much fun it is to watch the puppets coming to life.

I kept the setup simple trying not to concern them with too much technical stuff: We had an DV cam which we eventually used to record audio effects after filming. There were also two Ikea desk lamps and my tiny iBook with all the required software. And we had several cables we stuck to the floor with gaffer tape to avoid stumbling and after this, completely resetting our studio.

I tried to encourage the kids to tell a story together because I want to motivate them to bundle their energy. If anyone needed a pause, the others took over. Younger children often don't have too much stamina. This worked pretty good but we then had to face another problem...

The girls wanted to tell a pet story and the nine year old buy wanted to do an AC/DC concert. But we managed to put these opposites together as you can see above. The boy really was a fan and I hope AC/DC won't see a problem here. I just couldn't persuade him to use some other (rights free) music.

The kids had a great time and so had I. I love working with children because they tend to be totally free in their creative decisions. They just do things without struggling so much.

And despite the simple equipment their ideas were wonderful and realisable. They often found solutions on their own. And I learned from them again as well. My most favourite insight of that week is that we need to play to develope solutions. I am too often too worried about seriousity.

What are your experiences with kids and arts? Did you ever do (animation or art) workshops with kids? What did they teach you? I'd love to read your experiences.

This week I'm going to start my in-school workshops. I want the kids mainly to work with their hands.

To get them started I thought it would be nice to learn about the technique behind animation. I don't want to teach them but I'd like to show them how it works. Philosopher John Locke once said,

Nothing is in the understanding, which was not first perceived by some of the senses.

(though I always thought this was an quote of Aristotle, but anyway).

Photograph ©Andrew Dunn, 5 November 2004.

For this purpose (and because I wanted to do it for a long time) I built a Zoetrope. I'd like to do a kind of How to build a Zoetrope here. So:

How To Build a Zoetrope

If you'd like to do it the same way I built mine, you'll need the following materials:

• an defective record player (seen at ebay.de from 1€ plus shipping)
  

• chipboard in the desired size of your stand (mine was less than 0,04 m2 and costed me exactly 0,35 €)

• wood glue, spray mount

• acrylics

• black cardboard in required size (depends on you record player)

• long paper stripes (again, size is derivated from the size of you final cylinder)

Helpful tools:

• screw drivers and whatever you need to disassemble the record player carefully

• a drill and appropriate boring heads

• a brush, a cutter, a ruler

• pencil, eraser

• a calculator (unless you're brilliant in mental arithmetics) to calculate the size of your cylinder

• thick felttips

Please always keep health and safety in mind! Work slowly and concentrated.

I wanted to keep it simple, that's why I took a short cut: I got an old broken record player from my future parents-in-law and completey disassembled it. I just needed the turntable and its mount to make the table again turn smoothly. By the way, there are plenty of mechanical pieces left which I'll keep for future props... You'll never know.

The next step was to construct a stand where I could lay the hinge in. For this I bought chipboard. Bigger DIY stores may cut it to your preferred size and it's very cheap. I decided to make a box of 12 x 12x 11 cm.

First I drilled a hole into the top side with a range of 4,5 cm in diameter (it depends on the size of the parts of your player). This is because the lower part of the hinge needs to move freely. Then I started glueing the chipboard pieces together. Wood glue does a great job here.

I painted the box with black acrylics to hide it a bit and then screwed the bearing on the top of the box.

Then came the trickiest part: Calculating the size of my cylinder and where to place the slots. I cut 12 of them which will be enough. Later, you'll have to draw the same number of pictures on a paper stripe. The space below the slits should be same height as the gaps theirselves.
As you can see in the picture, I cut out tabs on the bottom at the cylinder to fix it to the record player later.

Then, finally, I glued it together with spray-on glue and fixed it to the plate.

Very last step is to draw a stripe at the same length of the inner circumference of your drum. I took mine and divided it into 12 frames of the same size. My "story" is a jumping fish. It's very helpful to draw a tiny storyboard here, and the last frame has to be followed by the first one again. Every cycled animation of 12 frames could do a great job here.

Keep the drawings simple and use a thick pen. You won't see delicate lines.

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This is my strip as an animated gif:

I want the kids to experience how we perceive moving pictures generally, and to do their first steps in animation without a camera. So they're going to draw single frames on paper stripes. I'll let you know how it works.

Had anyone build a zoetrope before? What are your experiences? If anybody did by the help of this, I'd love to see how it works for you.

My new DV camcorder is broken. The Panasonic NV-GS90EG-S doesn’t play the tapes anymore though it still works with iStopMotion. I used it last week for my animation workshops with the kids and the course was a really good experience. The camera worked well and the kids could simply use it, but I’m going to send it back to Panasonic and I’m excited how long it’ll take until I’ll get it back.

It’s annoying because we recorded the sounds on tape and I can’t get them on my computer now because the mechanism suddenly doesn’t seem to work any longer. One of the boys brought some African instruments which worked fantastically for fooley effects. The rest does iMovie and its sound libraries. This really is a simple set-up but it works great with the kids because they could focus on their clips.

I’ve got an old but pimped iBook G4 (late 2004). It now has a 160GB hard drive and 1,25GB RAM which is enough to run the Leopard system propperly. – And to have fun while editing movie clips. Here’s the first clip made by the kids with the wooden puppet I made earlier:

The kids had a natural feeling for timing. They realized very quickly which clip may work and why. And they also realized what they could do with the puppet. It was great fun to watch them discovering puppet and software and clay the first day. We can learn so much from them...