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!

Today I finished the very next to last character (re)design. It’s Orpheus, the main character of my film (finally!):

Orpheus: character design 2010

Orpheus: silhouette character design

The re-design was necessary due to my decision for a paper look and feel. And after my successful bird animation, I feel confident enough to make a bigger character with these materials. Orpheus now looks a bit more adult or mature, very sad and somehow fragile...

If you’re reading my blog for years now, you’ll perhaps remember that I had a very clear idea of how Orpheus should look like before:

Orpheus: character design 2007

Orpheus: character design 2008

I like the new one much better, it just feels right now. I had never been 100% happy with the old concept, but now I am.

Did you notice the new progress bars on the right, below the navigation (I found them via Shelley Noble’s blog)? I’m nearly done with all the character design. – Unbelievable! Still, there are many things to do but it’s nice to see the progress so clearly...

It’s always a little celebration if I’m going to change the figures... And it’s amazingly motivating to see how much I’ve already finished...

Well, I don’t. But someone else does:
After several posts about other stuff I’m now back working on my Orpheus film project. Last Friday I finished another puppet, a tiny bird. This time it’s a minor character from the world of the living and that’s why it isn’t just a silhouette:

The picture above shows the puppet with rigging wire attached. I used 1.5mm aluminium wire here. The top picture shows the scale drawing. I designed the puppet very small (about 2.5 cm), but it wasn’t possible to build it that size from the materials I’d chosen, so it’s now approx. 3.5 cm in height.
Orpheus is suffering from Eurydice’s death and he plays his lyra for the sake of forgetting his grief for a moment. His music is the only thing he loves as much as he loves dead Eurydice. The bird and one or two other animals are attracted by the sad play and our feathered friend lands on the window ledge and listens to the melody.

I did a small test animation to see if the puppet works:

The bird is made of an armature of twisted 1.0 mm aluminium wire, covered with thin cardboard and paper. The eyes are tiny beads and it’s painted with ink and acrylics. It is the tiniest and yet animateable puppet I have ever made, and I found it a real cutie.

This is what the armature basically looks like.

Though it’s a minor character it was so very important to make it. I was thinking about how to make the upper world character’s design for weeks now, and at the same time I hadn’t any clou. I wanted them clearly made of paper but with a stable armature inside. So, right now: Heureka! I think I’ve got the solution!

Then I checked all my To Do lists for the project yesterday as well, and saw that I finished nearly one third of all sets and puppets which is absolutely great and more than I had expected so far. I’m only a few weeks behind my schedule...

Today I finished the concept design of my Eurydice character. She's just a minor one, but she'll have to walk in two directions though. Minor character is a very unprecise description, since Eurydice somewhat like a MacGuffin: she's the reason why the story is going to be told.

The main time she'll be moving to the left when Orpheus and she try to leave the Underworld. But in one situation she'll be moving towards the audience, so that part of puppetmaking (and then animation) could become a little challenging.

Eurydice is an oak nymph, a pure and graceful creature. Nature and wild life are part of her, and she loves to play and dance. She is grounded and lives close to nature, and everything around her is in simple and clear balance. She is married to Orpheus, who tries to free her from the Underworld after she had died.

I assembledd two pictures I shot during my time in Bristol and Vienna to have a nice background. The character's sketch is placed into the picture to get a good impression of what she's like. That tree really exists!

I traced the character's vector outlines by hand, and coloured them black to get an idea of how she'll look like as a shadow puppet. My scale drawing will be based on this picture.

Below you'd see the character design I drew two and half a year ago... I'm much more pleased with the new one, not to say I really like her. I think it won't be easy to build a front-view silhouette puppet but I'll definitely give it a try.

This week I entirely assembled the Charon puppet as I'd announced to do last Sunday. More precisely, I finished two puppets of this character since he's not able to turn his head completely otherwise. He's going to move in two different directions and so I simply mirrored his design which seems to be the easiest solution.

What's next then?
There are only two other silhouette puppets to make, Orpheus and Eurydice. Eurydice is a silhouette-only character, like Hermes, Hades and Cerberus. I already had a charater design of her, which I had drawn almost two years ago. I wasn't pleased with my first ideas of her design anymore, so I want (and need) to redesign Eurydice. This is going to be one of my next week's tasks.

Else, I still have issues with the concept of the Orpheus puppet. He definitively is the main character and has the widest range of possible movements, so that I have to construct his puppet accurately.

After finishing the silhouette puppets, it's time to design the characters who walk the earth in the world of the living people, namely Orpheus and Charon. Up to now I don't really have a clue how to build them. I've got some general ideas but I guess this needs some more time to breed in the lab...

Furthermore I finished the research on materials and visual references for the house setting and Charon's boat which is great. I'm going to publish the concept drawings as soon as they're done.

My To Do lists on 14 February, 2010. The first one is my modell making list, the four others are for the different settings.

You can see the current state of my To Do lists above. There are still a lot of things to do, but I also see and feel the progress... For a long time I wasn't sure if I'd ever finish the film, but today I'm quite optimistic... Next week I'm going to have more spare time to work on the project, and I hope to complete some more tasks.

Things I absolutely want to get done by the end of oncoming week:

• concept and silhouette concept drawing Eurydice
  
• scale drawing of her
  
• concept drawings of the house's interior like furnitures and stuff
  
• buy new modell making materials and
  
• work on the living puppets' concept.
  

Sorry for this dry report...

A week can be very short.

Last sunday I announced to finish the silhouette concept of Hermes, his scale drawing and his armature. These public deadlines work great for me and I finished it all. So big thanks to Shelley Noble on whose blog we evolved the idea of adding some external pressure to our productions .

This week's achievements: the finished Hermes silhouette puppet. It wasn't much more work to finish it completely.

Since I also work in schools and museums, I had just a minimum of time to work on the film the last days. I don't know how I managed to be in schedule, but I did it.

Actually, I even finished some more things I didn't announce: I assembled the Cerberus silhouette puppet, too, and I did some more research for the house's interieur, its furnitures and details.

Heck, I'm too tired to tell you all the details, but the process is always the same with the silhouette puppet making:

• brainstorm
  
• find references
  
• make concept drawings
  
• vectorize concept drawing
  
• assemble (paper) prototype
  
• correct vector drawings if necessary
  
• make scale drawings
  
• build aluminium wire armature with bones made of milliput
  
• cut out single pieces from black cardboard
  
• glue cardboard to armature
  
• spraypaint black from behind
  

The illustration above was absolutely a happy accident: when I spraypainted the puppet's back, I laid it on a sheet of paper to avoid stains on the floor. I really love the result, and that's why it made its way directly to another mood board...

Those are my finished puppets so far. I'm still surprised but pleased how well they look together...

For next week, I'm going to work on Charon's silhouette character. I have to design his silhouette concept, a scale drawing and his armature... It's pretty much a routine workflow now...

My friend Shelley Noble and I agreed that it would be nice to report the progress of each's film project on our blogs weekly. The idea behind this is to increase a kind of outside deadline pressure since self-set deadlines for some reason never really seem to work...

So I announced to finish the Hades silhouette puppet and the armature for Cerberus this week, and what should I say? I did it! Ha! I must admit that getting things done leaves a pretty pleasant aftertaste. To celebrate I'd like to share some pics:

The finished Hades silhouette puppet before he was spraypainted black from behind.

...and a look behind the scenes.

At first glance Hades looks like a cut-out puppet and to some degree he is. I glued his silhouette to a simple wire armature. Though I use silhouettes in the Underworld's setting, I also want to employ delicate lighting and depth of field.

I decided to combine the flat visuals with an aluminium wire armature to use the advanteges of classical puppet animation (its bones are made of super-fine Milliput). I finally sprayed all parts with a thin layer of black colour from behind to avoid reflections during the animation.

Cerberus scale drwaing...

...and the finished armature.

The Cerberus puppet is going to be pretty much the same, despite he's a quadruped character. Eventually, the naked armature will be hidden behind all the single black cardboard pieces and also painted black from behind.

I did some more research on props and characters, too. My final preproduction deadline is at the beginning of April. I have a little countdown widget for my Mac's Dashboard, and it says that there are 61 days left.

Next week I'm going to finish the silhouette concept of Hermes, his scale drawing and his armature as well.

Have a nice week, everybody!

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!

My usual frequency of blog posts slowed down a bit due to the fact that a day consists of only 24 hours, believe it or not! In fact, I spent every spare minute of the last two weeks in my studio to work on a maritime puppet I want to contribute to a friend's stop-motion project.

Now the Myctophiformes Draco is finished and it's going to travel its way to Los Angeles soon. Myctophiformes Draco is a Chinese Lanternfish (or myctophid, from the Greek mykter, "nose" and ophis, "serpent"), a small, deep sea fish of the large family Myctophidae.

It generally lives in the Pacific Ocean near the chinese coast, at least from March to November. The remaining months of the year it's living next to the coast of California because it's much warmer there now. Aaaand because it wants to become a film star:

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

This puppet can

• move its flippers and tail
• blink its eyes by the help of reddish plasticine
• open and close its mouth and
• move its tassel.

The fish is made of foam latex, has an aluminium wire armature and a skull made of Fimo. The tail's bones are made of Milliput and for the eyes I used glass beads. That's the very short version. I'm still working on the long one... So stay tuned. ;)

During my research for my film I had a closer look on mechanical paper art. I stumbled upon a lot of blogs and other websites (of course) where a lot of gifted people show what they are able to build from paper. One of those made me stay for longer and finally buy a book called Paper Puppet Palooza.

Norma V. Toraya is a New York based artist who works as an animator director for companies located in the United States and Canada. On the internet she's known as Crankbunny and – referring to her text about the author on Paper Puppet Palooza –

When her brain wants a creative vacation from animation, she makes paper puppets and pop-up paper novelties.

I decided we had enough in common so far and so I bought her book and read more about her work. This book is truely wonderful. I appreciate her style which is weird and lovely at the same time, and her models containing an amazing amount of details. She offers two coloured cut out paper puppets within the cover of her book but I don't brought myself to cut into this beautiful artwork. Besides all the lovely paper puppet templates she employs for explanation, she also describes which tools she uses and what techniques works best for her in her absolutly unique way.

Up to now I myyself worked with a single hole paper punch compared to those you'd might have in your office and normal brass brads (they're also called split pins, packaging clamps or brass fasteners or sometimes just thingies). Punch and clamps fit together very well but the brads are 0.6 cm in diameter which is a tiny bit too large for my purpose. I searched for smaller ones to draw the attention away from the pupppet construction and back to the action. Finally I found different kinds of clamps in a local art and craft shop in the scrapbooking section.

The tiny ones are just 0.4 cm in diameter, have a really flat head – and hey, they're colored! Yes, you're absolutely right: I could just paint them with acrylics or like but it's nice if I don't have to. The black ones came in two sizes and I'm going to use the bigger brads for the shadow puppets because you eventually won't see them anyway. I also bought an eyelet tool which produces small holes of equal size. For the bigger brads I still can use my normal paper punch.

I wanted to see how the crankbunny puppet works in real life. I copied it from the book on glossy paper and glued it to the inside of a packaging cardboard box to make it stronger and less bendable, cut it out and followed the instruction to put all the single parts together. As you see, the coloured cramps fit in very well.

The most interesting part here is the crankbunny's tail because it isn't stiff but has three joints to move it somehow realistically. In contrast, the head and the arm only have one each. That was very helpful to me since I'm constructing one of the shadow puppets right now. So, back to work!

As you may have read in the workshop section, I’ll start teaching animation next week. I’m going to offer workshops for children and I got involved into two school projects for next whole year which is just great. I don’t want to use my DLSR with the kids (which are about the age of nine to twelve) so I bought a DV camcorder, the Panasonic NV-GS90EG-S. I also bought some simple desk lights with moveable arms (at Ikea’s) and several StikFas at Chromacolor. All Girls do like shopping... Somehow...

I like tools and workshops...
That’s why I built a simple wooden puppet similar to that we used in Bristol today for the kids which is easily to modify. But mainly I want them to work with clay and perhaps cut-out animation. The premises are quite simple so I have to make a lot of compromises. For example, we have to work on normal wooden tables, so no screws or magnets could be used. I’ll let you know how it went. I’m also going to take some pictures during that week.

Here is how I build the wooden puppet:
First I draw a sketch of how it should look like. This gives me an idea of how small or big the single parts should be. Then I cut the elements from round and rectangular pieces of wood which I got from the Do-it-yourself shop. (Except the hands and the legs; I bought those at an art and crafts shop, they’re quite cheap) I sandpapered them so that there are no sharp edges left. I used aluminium wire I bought (again from an art and craft shop) and twisted two strands together so they would be stable enough for some time. The last part was glueing it all together. I drilled holes in all parts where I want to fix the limbs in, but be careful: because the wooden pieces are so small it’s important to fix them tightly while drilling, otherwise you really could get hurt.


Glueing it all together with a glue gun is a very simple solution. It’s not the most professional way but this is not about professionalism but about fun with kids. If one wire has been broken, you could carefully (I said, carefully!) heat it up with a heat gun, get out the broken bit out and replace it by a new twisted wire. Thanks a lot to Arril Johnson who suggested this to me in Bristol last summer... It’s almost over an year now that I went to Bristol... Beloved Bristol...

Why is it so much more easy to work for other people than for yourself? My own project is delaying more and more and the things I do for others work pretty well... Perhaps it’s much easier to fail other’s expectations than your own... There’s an old saying, too, that cobblers children have no shoes... Hm...

A long, long time ago... It has been left from week three I think when we were supposed to create out own character containing a spring somewhere in its body. I designed Loli, a fat bird which is so fat that it actually can't fly. And because it can't fly, it has to carry his nest with its babies on his head to have them in secure. I thought it would be nice to have a character who has a "reason" for the spring. This was the character design from week 3:

The final model is made of plasticine with a foam core to avoid much weight. Its eyes are glass beads and the spring is made of aluminium wire to be animateable. And for whatever reason I didn't animate it up to last week. First I was afraid of that and later I just forgot it. But now I finally did it and it was quite fun although it's just a small animation.

I was also able to improve the matte of the reporter video just by using the uncompressed tiffs in the after effects composition instead of compressing them first into a FotoJpg sequence. Now there's less flickering at the puppet's edges, but I still didn't find out how to make the flash-video work propperly.

Phew, good comments. I sometimes wonder if this Web 2.0 thing really could be a good thing. But today I think it is...

First thing I started with was both a to-do list and a to-buy list. I feel a lot more tidy now. There hadn't been any volunteers so I've got to organize it by myself. That's ok. I remembered why I'm doing this film and it is because I'd like to. I must not forget that... ;)
Strider mentioned a few good points within his comment. To answer that clearly I have to ask myself some questions. Do my ideas of set design and lighting match to my story? My story is about Orpheus who was married to Eurydice. I guess most people do know the ancient greek tale of them. He lost her because she was bitten by a snake and died of it. Being stunned Orpheus decided to descend to the land of the death to bring Eurydice back to life. This is the very short version.

They had been marriaged just a few weeks ago and had just moved into this fresh furnished house. And then she suddenly died and that burst their bubble. He's been left alone. And this is what my set design should show: His lonelyness and his desperation. There is a beautiful house with beautiful furnitures and happyness should be another room mate. But it isn't. The house's beauty seems to him like cynical monster. He doesn't feel save there but defencelessly at the mercy of something he couldn't name. This feeling I would like to show by lighting and set design. It is a good idea to get his clothes dirtier because he didn't had a shower for days and didn't change clothes. I think dark circles around the eyes would be a good thing, too. Ok, cosmetical puppet design.

But what about the set? I think it is a good thing to make it a bit darker by adding a greyish layer of colour to the walls. The curtains could also be grey. I think cold lighting would be better then the light I used for the picture in the last post. More ambient lights, als Nils recommend, could also make sense. The picture doesn't show the final situation. Through the window you could see some landscape and parts of the graveyard. So there will be light from the outside, too. There will be a died down fireplace on the right side and yes, it should be a moody and cold atmosphere.

What are my other motives for set design decisions? I don't want it to look too perfect because I don't like too-perfect-looking stuff. To me this house and also the puppet are looking too clean. I like the more trashy production style. But I can't do it with my own hands, they always like it clean and smoothed... I've seeen a lot of animated film the last weeks (thank youtube and santa!) and I much prefer the "a bit darker" style. Like Madame Tutli Putli which is an absolutely disturbing film. It is done lovingly but they kindly did not do it perfectly. You can see it is a handmade world. This is what I'd like to archieve: people watching my film knowing it is fake what they see. But the story and animation are so well done that accept it could be real. Another good example is Nightmare before Christmas. We all know it's done the most perfect way. But that's okay to me because it fits to the story. They made it to get the moody Tim Burton stuff into an authentic and perfect story. They managed to be perfect and moody. How did they do that?

I wrote much more than I supposed to. I'll have another coffee yet.
Thinking about ambience is always reflecting about your story.

It was a bad week, I didn't finish the storyboard and I didn't get managed much for the film so far.
Okay, that's only true in parts: I've drawn a lot of wallpapers by hand because I want it to look not too perfect. I could have used the printer but that would look too clean. So I finished most of the interior of Orpheus' house but I didn't really feel comfortable with it. It is still too clean, I think. And the few missing details wouldn't change course. So I tried out some lightning to archieve a depressing mood, but that did not work as I wanted it to do. Sometimes I've got the strange feeling that I would never finish this film... But I hope not. My first animated film, "Ein anderer Traum", was made much more thougthless: I just wanted to do a film and I made one. Now, I want to do a much more professional film and this prevents me from keeping it simple. It stops me thinking about how I would do it....

I now know why people use to work in bigger teams: if you're are alone and do all the stuff by yourself, you couldn't concentrate on all the things with 100%. My head works like this: "Well, I must buy this and that and build this and don't forget ...what?" and by trying not to forget important stuff, I'll forget some really important stuff. Any unpaid trainees out there?