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:

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.

For the last school year I taught animation to student groups from two schools within a project called Kultur und Schule. The idea is, that students should meet artists there and try something new apart from all the useful things they learn in schools… The program runs some very interesting projects (which of course depends on the artist offering it), and mine.

No, seriously: I thought it might be difficult to keep them on it for a whole year. But they did a great job. The kids of one of my classes who did the video below are around the age of 16 now. It was their last year at school, and they spent much more time making the film than they should have…

They made everything by theirselves: the puppets, the sets and the lighting, the animation and most of the sound effects, too. At the end we ran out of time so we took a few iMovie sound effects to brush the piece up a bit. They tried to be very professional, and learned quite a lot (all of them animated for the first time). What I really like is the kind of humor they show… They're very influenced by media and have a huge repertoire of ideas and quotations. But see for yourself:

Here's a small translation for everyone who isn't familiar with the German language:

Evil Mistress (from the off): Note to self: I definitely must dissect a clown. – Igooor?

A poster reads: Circus Buttercup at the Land Of Igors/Horror Valley on Remembrance Sundays at witching hour

(Crowd is cheering while entering the circus tent.)

Evil Mistress: Go! Get me the clown! …Go!

While Igor throws the smoke bomb, the audience asks surprised: What's going on?

After the Evil Hand has vanished, the Evil Mistress says: Igor!? …I must follow them!

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I think the rest is pretty self-explanatory, but if have any questions about the story, feel free to ask.

Things the kids learned:

• simple puppet and set making from materials like plasticine, paper, cardboard and watercolors
  
• setting up an amateur animation studio
  
• developing stories and planning animation
  
• that animation isn't the biggest part of producing an animated short
  
• it's all about planning
  

I learned:

• If kids like what they do, motivation isn't a problem.
• If you show them how important things can be which they don't like very much, they'll do it.
• It's great fun to work with teenagers, and it can be hilarious.

Thank you Pia, Janine, Maren, Maike and Ilhan for the great time!

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!

For two weeks I was working on this set, and now it's done:

The set is approx. 70 cm wide and each 50 cm high and deep.

HORRAY!
A few weeks ago I already showed you some furniture that I made for Orpheus' house. Now that house is fully equipped: I built the room with a door, a window and wallpapers, and I added a bed, curtains, and some smaller light sources.

The door is made of strong cardboard, and the Tiffany glass-like window is a strong cel material painted with acrylics. I made the door's joints from strong paper and tooth picks. The little paper lantern is made of, well, paper. To be more precise, it's my all-time favorite sandwich paper. The sandwich paper offers a tactile experience similar to these fine Chinese papers which I like for its subtle quality. There's a small ballon LED inside so I don't need to hide any cables or batteries. (Hat tip to Shelley!)

In the picture above, you'll get an impression of the wallpaper. I originally designed a floral pattern for Eurydice's skirt, and here I used it for some of the furnishing details as well. I had the idea that the audience may not see the pattern here consciously, but somehow remembers and connects it to Eurydice when meeting her in the underworld. I printed the pattern in small stripes on 120gr office paper, and decorated the walls with them.

Like the door, the window is made of strong cardboard. The glass is the strong cel again, and the curtains are made of soft tissue paper. There is some wire in there to keep it in shape. I actually sewed the paper with my sewing machine – but I guess it's hard to see that in a picture of this quality. The curtain rack is simply twisted wire covered with paper.

The bed mainly contains of a box of cardboard. To give the impression of crinkled fabric, I ripped of the upper layer of paper from a piece of corrugated card board, so you now can see its flutes (it's visible in the picture of the dresser). I pretty much like the bed because I had the idea of using handmade paper for the linen and pillows.

The special thing about this paper is, that it also contains rags next to the typical paper ingredients (it's called Bütten in German). It's very strong and has a nearly textile quality. So I sewed the pillows and the blanket, and worked some wire in them to keep them animatable or in shape.

The little candle is made of wax and black yarn. The candleholder is made of several brass thingies from my tool box, and covered in acrylics. I'm not sure if I'm gonna animate a flame or if it's just too much. I think I'll decide that while shooting. I also added a small lamp from my old doll house to the scenery. It's still working, and I ripped of the old fabric and added a new one made of paper.

I now just need to paint a background landscape to hide my studio if anyone is looking through the door or the window, and to tailor Eurydice's bridal dress. I already tested all the camera angles and they seem to work pretty good.

I hope I don't miss a thing. If you want to know anything else, feel free to ask in a comment. I'm so happy because I finished another set. There are still two sets to go, and then I'm nearly done in preproduction.

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Oh, and I just stumbled about this picture:

Here is the 2010 version again:

It was a bit quiet around the blog for a few weeks now. – Sorry for that! It's not like I don't have anything to share with you, but sometimes artistic processes are rather internal than visible to the outside world, so they're quite difficult to share at all.

Despite decluttering our space and cleaning up the studio and doing the taxes and stuff, I kept thinking about what really matters to me. Well, I guess this is a question which has to be answered several times in our lives – and I just gave it another try recently. While doing so I found out that I rather want to do a good piece of work than a quick one. That was when I said goodbye to my deadline (which had been the first of December), and hallo to a new kind of freedom for my film project.

The problem with the deadline is that I'm lost in thoughts about the deadline, how to keep it and how to solve problems quick and dirty in time, instead of just making the film. When I reflect on why I do what I'm doing, I remembered that I simply do it for myself, my own pleasure and my artistic development. Of course I want to please my future audience but the process is still and foremost about learning and growing as an animation artist.

I have absolutely no problems with deadlines if I work for other people or submit my work for competitions. But this isn't the point here. The priority here is to develop my own (animated) language (and a good film) which hopefully will one day lead to professional work with deadlines and things alike. But for now, it's all about making the film…

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How do you work best? Do you need the pressure or do you go for a more playful approach? And why? I'd love to read your thoughts within the comments!

Remember that little bird? I finished another animal puppet today, a cat:

The cat puppet is about 6 cm high and fully moveable.

Like the bird, the cat's "just" a minor character. Together, both of them are supposed to carry a distinctive atmosphere in one of the scenes, and that's why they're not really unimportant.
– And they're a kind of warm-up or dry run for the last two major characters I have to build, too. (Well, there are a few dead souls more to make, but those puppets are going to be pretty basic cut-out models without armatures…)

Since I want the world-of-the living-characters look completely different from the underworld silhouette puppets, I try to apply a similar style to them such as I did to the cemetery set.

Basically, you'll find an armature made of twisted wire and a lot of hot glue inside the puppet, wrapped in thin cardboard covered with sandwich paper and some colour finish on top. I've got the weird feeling that I start repeating myself… Is this still interesting for you?

While it's so paralyzing hot outside, I spend a lot of time in my basement studio to work on the film. It's great: down there I don't sweat myself to death and the film is progressing continuously as well. I worked the whole weekend on the final three silhouette puppets, and here we are: yesterday I finished Orpheus (two puppets, each heading for opposite directions) and Eurydice.

The puppets are made as usual: thin black cardboard is cut into silhouettes which is then attached to aluminium wire. This time I chose very thin wire because the puppets are much smaller than the models I made before. My idea was that the Gods and the God-like characters should be slightly taller than the mortals.

For Eurydice's skirt I designed a floral pattern which I like so much that I designed a digital wallpaper, and which now adorns my computer desktop (in 1920x1080 resolution). If you like it too, feel free to download it either in green or in grey:

You'll find the full resolution images by just clicking into one of the small Wallpaper pictures above. To download one of them, right-click into it, and choose "save picture as…"

My school projects are finished due to the holidays, and I have a lot of time to work on the film. This seems to be a puppet making week, more to come...

Yesterday, something totally unbelievable happened: I finished the cemetery set for my Orpheus film project. I finished it completely. Done. This is just crazy! Now I only have to build the Orpheus puppet, and then I can start animating (though I’m a bit afraid of that for whatever reason…)

I already was nearly there two weeks ago but then Lukas and I went to to London for holidays, inspiration and visiting our friends Weng and Betty, and Simon and Anna. Instead, I did some drawing studies during that time:

1. Tree at the Hyde Park; 2. Girl at Tottenham Court Road; 3. Girl reading (Big Head); 4. Lukas sleeping at the beach; 5. Seaside landscape at Climping Beach.

After being home again, I directly started completing the set:

Nils suggested to add some structure to the cemetery’s landscape and sent me a quick sketch to illustrate his idea:

I pretty much liked and like the idea of the plateau-like hills which are indeed still very flat but provide some rhythm to the set. An important point here is that our eyes need a kind of visual anchor to clearly recognize a perspective. Else the viewer could get visually lost. Thanks to Nils for this is a perfectly matching idea! I’m absolutely pleased with its outcome. (Thank you, again!) My initial idea was to use the plain plywood for the ground but after coming back home with a refreshed view, I decided to give it the same look as the one I use in my drawings.

I also drew the street to the ground, glued everything down and added some grass, stones and other tiny details. Before I finally fixed everything in place, I did quick test shots with the camera to see if all the takes are going to work properly, and well they do!

So the biggest set of the film is done, the progress bar shows 65% on set building, and I’d like to give you some impressions (these are not the final takes!):

I still can’t believe it!

For more details of the close to finished graveyard set click into the image.

I am utterly speechless, sorry!

If you have any question about the set, feel free to ask. I need some sleep, I feel stunned and exhausted but happy...

Supplemental

After sleeping very sound for several hours, I thought it would be nice to share some more information with you about the graveyard set. At the weekend I bought 3 sqm of 19 mm chipboard and and some stands from a DYS store. Since I now have a table, I started to assemble the finished props to it though they aren’t fixed finally yet.

I cut the mountains from strong paper and glued them down in front of the greenscreen which is attached to the wall. I also cut and placed the little wall in the background from paper to achieve a smooth transition from the middleground to the mountains in the background. The paper wall is colored with pencil and watercolors. The other little wall in front of the entry to the underworld is made of foam board covered with paper and the fence is made of wire covered with acrylics plugged into the foam.

The set is now approximately 1.5 m in depth. The problem is that my studio isn’t that big and I have to find a way to deal with that without renting a new room. Next I have to add some more tiny details like a road and some grass and the stairs down to the underworld. Oh, and not to forget an Orpheus puppet…

Today I discovered that I have to solve some technical issues before I could start filming… After yesterday’s ecstasy I thought I could start animating soon, but today I guess there are still few things to do… So, with this little work-hangover I go back to the studio…