My fellow artist friend Angelika Höger recommended this video to me, and it really made my day! It's amazing what you can do with Stop Motion animation… And it's great to see how people play with limitations and explore new ways of using a medium.

Le Grand Sommeil was produced in 2003 by La Parti Productions, Studio Pic Pic André, WRD and Canal+ Belgique. It's distributed by Studio Pic Pic André and Aardman Animations. Directors Stéphane Aubier and Vincent Patar of Brussels based Studio Pic Pic André also did the animation. If you want to dig further, have a look at A Town Called Panic…

Now, that was refreshing!

Should I join Vimeo or Youtube? That’s the question for weeks now...
Or at least, it was until last saturday when I finally joined…

Click into the image and follow the white rabbit... er... the link to my new vimeo homepage.

Tadaaa!

– Yes, of course, youtube is much more popular, and if you want to get your videos out quickly it may be your first choice. But for several reasons I don’t trust a company who collects as much data as Google does for turning user data into money... I like Vimeo better especially for its artistic approach... They have a nice data policy and everything seems to work fine there.

Normally, I’d like to host my videos on our own server, but I thought it would be nice to reach a few more people through a video community website... In addition, I’m finally going to share my animation debut with you, Ein anderer Traum (engl. Another Dream) which I made in 2006:

While I was thinking about which videos I’d like to share I detected that I produced lots of short clips over the last years but no other completed films. But then I decided that I don’t care about this. The last years had been truly educational time and I tried and learned a lot of things... Ein anderer Traum was the very beginning in 2006, when I first thought to give animation a try and then decided to become an animation artist... Here I am now!

Thanks to all of you who came along with me that way!

When I need a pause from the work on my film project, I often watch some animated clips and nibble some sweets. It's great when the both come together sugar-free:

Thanks to Peter, this video yesterday really made my day.

Bon Appetit!

This doesn't happen often, but yet I am left speechless after watching Going West, a beautiful short film illustrating the hidden worlds in a book by employing papercraft and stop-motion animation. It was designed and brought to life by Line Andersen of Andersen M Studio, and produced by the New Zealand Book Council:

What it makes my this week's favourite is, it

• incorporates papercraft
• is dreamlike, magical and literally wonderful
• also well animated and it's
• simply a beautiful piece of art.

Like no other human activity reading opens up our imagination,

I feel helpless and angry with Andersen M Studio because their video is done so beautifully – and because it's exactly that kind of impression I'd like to give in my current project. I looked up their portfolio, they did some other animations at the same level of quality. And now I just don't want to copy their style... These paperworks just make me feel stunned and touches something deep inside me.

I don't believe in coincidences, at least not really. And so I just enjoy getting lovely recommendations from a dear friend while at the very same moment I just turned up and ordered a book on papercraft myself. Now I have to crawl myself through another field of wonderful discoveries... What a shame!

Pilobolus. As often, Nils recommended a youtube link to me and I was just stunned.

Discover Pilobolus for yourself:

There's also an interesting interview with them on their work which was very inspiring. Artistic Director Robby Barnett says,

"Shadows are a kind of mask that people wear and you know that it represents a […] facette of nature but not its whole. […] There's something illusive I think about shadows, you know, the real work is hidden and you see an overflection of reality."

How about you? What feelings do shadows evoke? What do you associate with them?

And because the last post was long, boring and lacks interesting pictures, here is an interesting youtube video and a lovely piece of animation I'd like to spread:



It's the official music video for the song You Got What I Want by Chris Nelson.

Thanks to Nils who cares a lot for (my) intellectual feeding.

After writing about William Kentridge yesterday, I searched for some video material on youtube to share with you. It was (and it is) very difficult to get some of his films for private use because they were treated as art, and I guess that's why the galleries or the artist himself has a great interest in keeping the copies on a small amount.
But nowadays and luckily, there were a lot of his works available on youtube.

I just had a glance at amazon.de and still they don't offer any DVD of his artworks but one: Drawing the passing is a great documentation of his work, where some parts of his films were shown and with lots of talks with the artist himself. The DVD gives us a great idea of how he's working and how his films are developed by looking over his shoulder while he's drawing and filming.

The film below is titled Automatic Writing and I suppose the title is a reference to the artist of the surrealism. Well, it's quite obviuos, I think: