Everyone finally seems to think highly of the work of Tim Burton nowadays, so even the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMa) currently presents a big solo show with his artworks and films.

Since I'm a big fan of his work myself and because I'm not able to travel to New York, I recently ordererd the freshly released exhibition book to have a tiny glance on what is presented within the show. I absolutely enjoy Tim Burtons combination of a childish view on adult problems mixed with absurd humor and yet sometimes weird solutions. Did you know that he also writes poetry? He's a brilliant artist!

My new Tim Burton book: Hmmm, brain nutrition!

Magliozzi, Ron & He, Jenny (2009). Tim Burton. New York: Museum of Modern Art.

While teaching animation in schools, I learned that my older students admire his films and style as much as anyone else. They look at his works and famousness and want to have the same for their life, too, while at the same time they deny that they could achieve anything alike. There's only one advice I can give them here, "Go and start doing it!"

There's an important thing we often miss while looking at famous people and their outstanding works: How long they kept trying before finally someone had noticed and supported them. Did you know that it took Tim Burton ten years of work from the very first drawing to a final movie called The Nightmare Before Christmas which now is a synonym for a succesful stop-motion animation feature? Ten years! My Orpheus project is quite on short run compared to this...

Tim Burton has been drawing since he was a little boy and now he's been somehow and eventually paid back for his work. Someone once said,

"It takes twenty years of hard work to become an overnight succes",

and I think that's just true.

So, what can we learn from this? Forget about gaining recognition for your work. Just work. Learn and grow and stay close to yourself as Tim Burton did. I know, it'se asily said but hard to accomplish. But you are creative, as everyone is. The question is, are you ready and willing to go that way?

Since this blog is mainly about animation, make sure you won't miss Tim Burton's promotional MoMa animation, and its making of!

Last friday there was a show titled Cartune Xpress – Wandering Landscapes + Trash at a local art cinema organized by Artists Unlimited. Peter Burr who's an artist from North America presented a screening of experimental animation combined with a literally animating performance.

Screenshot of the Cartune Xprez' website, October 2009.

This year's programme features artists such as Shana Moulton, Takeshi Murata, Martha Colburn, Bruce Bickford, Jacob Ciocci, Amy Lockhart, Taras Hrabowsky, Yoshi Sodeoka, Francine Spiegel, Barry Doupe, Adrian Freeman, and Jeff Kriksciun. I would't link them all but you could find links to the artists's websites on the Cartune Xprez' homepage. Especially the films of Bruce Bickford (Prometheus' Garden, 1987 and The Comic That Frenches Your Mind, 2008) and Martha Colburn (Meet Me In Wichita, 2006) caught my eye.

I hadn't seen any of Bruce Bickford's films on a big screen before and it was great to watch them that way. It's always amazing how movies transform as soon as they were screened at theatres instead of small displays. His films are pretty disturbing and it was interesting to see how the audience react on them after watching several funny pieces. It's a rare opportunity to see Bruce Bickford's films screened and I pretty much appreciated it.

Martha Colburn employs cut out and painted animation in her film collages. Have a look at her website, too. Especially the Making Of page is both, interesting and helpful at the same time. She offers pictures of her working environment there.

Complimenting my films, I create elaborately layered collages, paintings, and installations that incorporate transparencies, recordings, and live performances. As my conceptual process grows, so follows advances in my already detailed and labor-intensive animating process. Technically, I am expanding my technique into working with multi-plane glass animation which represents a physical manifestation of my conceptually layered ideas,

she states about her work.

Her films reminded me of another project of mine which already laid storyboarded and planned in my drawer since I had been to Vienna. I wasn't sure how to realize it but after studying her pictures I now have a much clearer idea of how I'd like to do it. It's always great to spy over other artist's shoulders to learn from them and to see how they'd already solved problems and how they design their work space.

But anyway, I absolutely recommend this programme if you're interested in either experimental animation or Bruce Bickford or any of the other artists. I had a nice chat to Peter and it's great to see how much he's dedicated to arts and animation. Luckily, he's on a tour across Europe, so it's still possible to watch the programme at one of the following occasions:

October 28: Berlin, Germany – Image Movement
October 29: Kiel, Germany – KOKI Kiel
October 30: Copenhagen, Denmark – Husets Teater
October 31: Malmo, Sweden – Loyal Gallery
November 5: Oslo, Norway - Freddy Knox Projectspace
November 6: Gothenburg, Sweden - Koloni
November 7: Stockholm, Sweden - Galleri Jonas Kleerup
November 11: Helsinki, Finland - Ptarmigan
November 20: Glasgow, Scotland - CCA
November 21: Aberdeen, Scotland - Peacock
November 23: Edinburgh, Scotland - GRV
November 24: Manchester, England – Islington Mill
November 27: London, England –The Old Police Station
November 29: London, England – House Party

I took those dates from their website. Make sure you'd check it out for any changes. Oh, and I found this youtube clip below so you'll get a tiny impression of what might expect you there.

Remember William Ketridge? I wrote an article about him and his work a few months ago.

Today Nils again recommended another videoto me I'd like to share with you because in general it follows the same idea of showing the passing of time through animation. It's a kind of meta animation precisely because it's reflecting the animation process itself.

Perhaps you saw the Muto Wall Animation before, which became quite popular last year around the web. It was made by the same guy called Blu who seems to be a highly creative person. – It's always a pleasure to see his works. Besides, he has a fancy website which suits his artworks very well. Have a look yourself at his film COMBO:

a collaborative animation by Blu and David Ellis | year 2009 | produced by studio cromie | music by Roberto Lange | made at Fame festival 2009

Of course Blu's films differ from those of William Kentridge. Kentridge draws and shoots them in a controlled (and controllable) studio situation with charcoal on paper, whereas Blu is working outside on deserted buildings with wall paint, chunky tools and sometimes capricious weather. Animators love to control lights and to reduce flicker to a minimum so they would have a constant lighting. In this case Blu embeds the changing sunlight and moving shadows in his animation. I love how he includes the building's doors, windows and special traits to literally unreel his organic animation.

And again, the sound design is very supportive to the animation... Animation is purely artificial but in order to build a convincing situation a balanced sound design is absolutely necessary.

The Necktie is a 12 minute animated short directed by Jean-Francois Levesque. It's produced by the National Film Board of Canada (who also produced one of my all-time favourites, Madame Tutli-Putli) and I'm glad that my friend Jan-Christoph suggested it to me today...

It will be online for one week only, so make sure you'd have seen it at plus7.arte.tv up to next Friday's night. It's a lovely piece of animation and earned its awards well. – Jean-Francois Levesque combines different animation techniques here which is something I enjoy so much. It's also a great example of how important a good sound design is, especially in animation where everything is quiet in the very beginning.

Most of it is traditional puppet animation inspired by the work of Nick Park and Tim Burton, he describes his influences. The main character was animated in stopmotion technique, his colleagues came to life by drawn animation and finally software was employed to do the compositing.

The film is about a man who lives his dull life which mainly consits of work at a weird company called Life Inc. One day he accidentally finds out where the career ladder or, more precisely, the career elevator really is leading to. It's a small parable about the importance of art in our life.

That interview below I found on the NFB website where he describes the whole process. So for all of you who might be late to watch the video in time I embed it here:

Oh, and make sure you'd check out all the details at the NFB's Necktie website, they have some stills and production photos there. Suprise: I myself like the paper look and feel puppets most...

After some long weeks of waiting for the German Coraline theatre release, last Thursday was the official date... And hey, they really made it! I didn't saw it in stereoscopic 3D, and so I was afraid that they would have a lot of backwards and forwards moves to show the 3D effect. They had. – And they had not. It was well balanced and there weren't any annoying effects to a normal cinema audience. This new 3D thingy seems to be another idea of the movie industrie to get the people out of their home cinemas into the big theatres. Personally, I like the idea of dipping completely into a movie though I don't like wearing special devices to do so.

(To everybody who wants to try real 3D stop frame animation I'd like to share this: Mark Roberts developed a motion control devise aimed to animators who want to try it theirselves.)

But back to Coraline. In Germany it's released with FSK 6 (German only website) which means that it's classified for children from the age of 6. Perhaps that's a bit difficult because there are a few creepy or at least weird scenes I wouldn't recommend for younger children. We had two girls in the backrow about that age under parental guidance and they got very quiet when it came to these scenes... I'm not sure how imaginative children's fantasy really is or if the two girls slept well that night...

Readers who are following this blog regulary know about my thoughts on perfectionism. Referring to all the wonderful making of videos I saw I was afraid that the film could be perfect but cold. But it wasn't both, neither perfect nor cold. It's a slowly enrolled story which first is strange but then very pleasant to watch in contrast to a lot of other movies. Somehow I expected story told more quickly but it was alright. I was so happy to see a glove moving without being touched by any puppet. The animators there were human! It's good that even in an extra-ordinary and stunning project like this mistakes are made. Or as my former art school teacher says, "perfection equals stagnation".

Though films like Corpse Bride or recently Coraline made me become an animator, they're not my favourite type of stop frame animation. I really enjoy discovering that these films are made by hand. With Coraline, the artists are hidden behind the artwork somehow. I much more love to see or even feel the artist who had created the work. A very good example is Barry Purves who works at a nearly perfect level, too, but as an artist, not as a mashine. After Corpse Bride triggering me, eventually it was his Rigoletto which got the ball rolling.

One thing I really enjoy with interesting stop motion animation projects is their richness of details... And Coraline were full of them... Mmmhhh... I love if artists design everything so precisely. They obviously gave every tiny little prop a thought. – Well done, folks!

Wow! Today I had an amazing experience! Up to now I wrote several times about the Austrian Filmmuseum which has a wonderful collection and screens amazing film copies and really rare treasures of cinematic history. But today I was totally blown away by a Laterna Magica or magic lantern show as the English speaking people call them. But due to the language mix on this blog I just could call it what I want, I guess... I like Laterna Magica more, because it sounds like a magic spell...

And really, it was like that. The show was called 'The Magic Carpet'. Normally they say, the beginning of cinema took place in 1895 with the screening of an arriving train and workers leaving a factory by the brothers Lumière. But especially in the 19th century the Laterna Magica has been the most popular way to do imagenery travelling. And today we were taken on such a journey by Joss Marsh and Sir David Francis.

(This picture is borrowed from Wikimedia.)

They use a double lantern like that one above which allows dissolving and overlapping pictures. For those of you who don't know how a magic lantern works: it's like an ancestor of modern slide projectors. But the slides for the lantern screening were painted or etched on glass or glass slides manipulated by photographical or mechanical help. The slides had really rich colours (all but the black and white photos of course). There had been slides with movable extensions or layers, so you would get some kind of a flip book impression. The show had different contents, fantastic stuff like the Tales of Arabian Nights or how people imagine Afrika could be; educational things like some "Rail and Salvation" stuff or just documenting. But their purpose was clear: to bring the spectator in a world far away from it's own. Joss' and David's focus laid on the Victorian age and the British colonization. The show were accompanied by piano music and a terrific reading of old textes which had originally be read to the shows almost 200 years ago combined with modern comments and notes. Joss is an amazing actor and has a wonderful humour. I had to laugh all the time. She was just brilliant. It was delightful and impressing how much you could get out of such an old technique.

And this is why cinema is such a wonderful invention: well done it's just art. And I'm not talking about paying 10 Euros for a seat in a way to loud action screening and paying another five for popcorn... Don't misunderstand me, there are also great and artistic action films out there. But the experience I had tonight is far, far away from that. It took me into a different world, in a different time and made things possible which seems to be impossible. It was real magic. And this is what I want to have back into the theatres.

This is why I like film so much. It can make things possible which aren't possible now. It's literally a vision. Like Jules Verne stories. I would never forget the video phone in Back To Future 2. I was so impressed when I was a child and today skype is so... normal. But it's not only science fiction I'm interested in, it's developement in general. Getting touched in some way.

Well, the year is close to its end and it was such an exciting and sometimes exhausting one. My blog is close to its first birthday. It has also been the last year of my studies and a lot of things are going to change after my oncoming final exams. It's weird because I learned so much about animation, its techniques and styles and so many other things relating to my favourite subject and I'm still feeling so hungry for it. After spending some time here in Vienna and trying to do painted, drawn and digital animation I still found puppet animation to me is the best of all. I just love puppets. Animation is (still!) something magical to me, it's just wonderful when the things start to move. But with puppets it's so much more touching. I don't know if this relates to our childhood feelings when we only needed fantasy to move them... But puppets have been used in most cultures as toys or as a kind of substitute for realitiy: it starts somewhere in childhodd and ends with voodoo or theatre... Perhaps substitute is too judging, because it suggests a kind of escape from reality. I think it's more a reality next to reality, or things that are real, but can't be seen otherwise. I think the story of little Coraline is truly a story of what we puppet animators are and what we do. So it's really good to see people making a puppet animation movie on this tale showing the realitiy next to reality. I really hope that there will be a release in Germany, too, because I'd really love to the final piece. I always feel attracted to the stop motion, it touches me in a way I can't really describe.

See this box? My Dad gave it to me. He is actually cleaning up my parent's basement and rediscovered it while doing so. It's a mixture of my old doll's house lighting equipment and his old stuff when he was trained as an electrician. It was very sweet when he said, "I guess you might use these things for your animation stuff, don't you?" – and now I have this wonderful box full of tiny lamps and cables and stuff to set a kind of lightning accents. It was one of my best christmas gifts... And I got some strong magnets from old speakers, too. I really need my own studio where I could try all these things.

But first I'll go back to Vienna for another six weeks. It's still a weird feeling not having a real home at the moment... But it's also really good because it keeps my mind open... That's quite important to an artist, isn't it?

You all, have a wonderful start in 2009 and keep your dreams alive. To quote Disney once more, "If you can dream it, you could do it!" Thanks to all who have supported, accompanied and encouraged me to go my way. Without you all, I wouldn't be here.

It has been busy week in the cinemas of Vienna on animation. Last Sunday I went to the cinema to see the Viennese chapter of the Siggraph Animation Festival. The Sigggraph conference is perhaps the biggest one on computer generated graphics and animation worldwide. First I was surprised by the mixture of things: there were animated shorts as well as animated advertising and technical or scientific studies like the development of vortexes, for example. This may be caused by the idea of the conference and that is okay, I just didn't expect so. It was more a cinematic event for technic freaks, I guess. The rendering was fine and the surfaces were wonderful, as you may expect. But if there was a story, and if there had been non-abstract animation, it wasn't nice to see for a trained eye. They didn't care about details, and I was surprised that they had been taken into such a fetival programme.

I can't really judge about the abstract things where christals and cubes are moving and morphing to some kind of asian R'n'B music. But I've got the weird impression that I've seen dozens of those before with tiny variations... The technical aspect was so much more important than the story or the world created by the animatiors that I got very annoyed watching it. I'm still angry with those people who had obviously a nice idea and then pressed it into a mold which didin't suit. Just to do cool computer generated things... And I don't understand the judgement of the Siggraph jury who had chosen those films as the créme de la creme of computer animation... I've seen much better computer generated films, and much more interesting films as well. But I'm an optimistic person, I always have an eye on the good things, too. Some good examples had been Professor Knoll's computer class which was well done and funny and well animated. It was made by Matthias Parchettka (German website) from Düsseldorf. Two other very good examples were Our wonderful nature about the sexual life of a water shrew (youtube link) and My little Angel by Flurry Studios. The first one is about a watershrew and it's made similar to the nature documentaries. I have laughed a lot. The second one was very simple, but well done and funny as well. One of the technical things which had impressed me much is called Simulating knitted clothes at the yarn level made by some guys from the Cornell University. And I really was impressed and amused and felt all the work which were put into that...

On Thursday then there was the an One Day Animation Festival organisid by the Asifa Austria. The first block contained short films from the AURORA Festival Norwich, UK. The programme is called Unfamiliar countries, impossible structures and it was a kind of Best Of from the festival in 2007. There had been some narrative animations and some abstract, too. I sometimes have big problems with the abstract things, especially when they're just boring. Most of them want to bring the audience to another level of understanding of the reality or of theirselfes. But they had been just boring, most of the time. One of them made me nearly fall asleep... Some of the examples were cut so fast, you and your eyes can't follow without getting a headache. The pictures were made on a high contrast. It wasn't disturbing which I would say is a good thing with film but annoying because your body IS biologically determined. My favourites from this block are Kraina Cieni by Thomasz Glodek and Krypt by Lars Nagler because of their style, Radar by Volker Schreiner and Going nowhere fast by J Tobias Anderson because they were all interesting and disturbing and well done. Especially the last one is the very best from this compilation, I think. It combines abstract things as well as narrative parts. It's well animated, but I'm not sure if rotoskoped. But here it doesn't matter so much because it all fits well together.

The highlights from the second block are Cutecutecute by Clemens Kogler (Flash animation) and Eintritt zum Paradies um 3€20 (drawn animation) by Edith Stauber. The second block was on new animation from Austria and it was interesting to see what people do in my temporary country. Finally, Jörg Pieringer did a live animation performance which was interesting to see. He started from some prepared and static animation (it's a contradiction, isn't it?) and by adding sound and his voice in a life performance he made the letters move instantly. I've never seen something like that before, but I think it's a difference between the performance and what we normally call animation. Because the magic with animation is that we can't see the person manipulating things...

I'm not really sure about the meaning of the word abstract but I always thought an abstract thing would be a sign or symbol which is not the presentation of something physical. An idea is abstract, for example. Mathematic is abstract or how a computer generelly works (well, I'm not sure if this is a good example). Art is not nessecarily abstract but it always is a bit. A photograph itself, although it looks very concrete, is an abstraction of the reality because you would see a three dimensional situation on a two dimensional surface. I think music perhaps is the most abstract art form because it's so independent from anything else and concrete. It has its own system and symbols and will create new pictures and moods to everyone newly. But music also has its climaxes and ups and downs and changes of speed or volume...

I think our biological limitations are so important to the perception of arts. All our senses are getting tired after a while if there is a steadily teasing. And if our senses were tired they wouldn't react on what's a kind of normal or usual. If something should stay interesting there should be changes in whatever way. Back to the abstract CG animation I had seen, this means that they can't set new impulses to the viewer because he would have been fallen asleep before the message has arrived... I think it was Chaplin who said that the only limitation cinema has is dullness, which is strictly forbidden...

This is going to be the first post from Vienna. My uni hasn't started yet so I have to spend a lot of free time. I went to the Austrian Filmmuseum in Vienna to see some silent movies tonight. It was wonderful to see them on the big screen without music, just the silent films and a well entertained audience. There was this nice old couple, for example, and the old woman doesn't seem to understand English which was the language of the titles, of course. Her husband explained the action to her then into the silence and he really had an old voice. It was so cute and made the films so much more funny, because it was obviously what's going on. It was such a nice situation.

I think the old silent movie stars are so good actors, and I as an animator can learn so much from them. They screened two Harold Lloyd films, "Number please" (1920) and "Never weaken" (1921), then "Lizzies of the field" by Mack Sennett (1924) and at last, "Big Business" (1929) with Laurel and Hardy. What you can see best at them is what our tutor calls "internal movement", the way they think, how they do react on what is happening and their emations generally. They make their motives and ideas totally clear without using words. This is what an ideal animation should be, shouldn't it? I found it very often that anmation is much better because of the sounds and music and words you use. But in the silent movies, you can't use one of those tricks. It would be nice to try a silent story, only the pictures, especially when the audience expect sound effects. So "Never weaken" is so funny and I think it's because of the missing sound. If you imagine that movie with a kind of Tom & Jerry sound effects, it wouldn't be as funny as it is. It sharpens your visual senses if you haven't anything you could listen to. It was a wonderful cinema experience tonight. If you ever have the chance to see those, take it!

The end came quickly. The final screening took place almost two weeks ago and now I'm back in Germany. The time in Bristol seems to be like a dream, it's totally weird. I learnt so much and I had such a good time, and when I came back, everything was like before. Was it? I still feel jetlaged and I haven't arrived mentally I think. Less than to weeks left until my flight to Vienna and I still don't know how to talk about that time propperly. I want to keep it some more.

I'm really glad that I had done the Three Month Course. All the frustrations during the course had been overcome and I had such a great learning curve... I actually miss that feeling most. This had been the three best month in my education ever...

Here is the final reel:

Three Month Animation Course Showreel (Quicktime, ca. 6MB)

The good thing is that you can't go back in time, so I have to deal with the oncoming situation, the scholarship in Vienna. I changed some eMails with a former aniamtion student who is now in the photography course. She told me that there are not the best conditions to do animation. But that doesn't matter so much because I have all my materials with me, my cameras and my iBook. I really want to have the more artistical view on that subject now. How do artists deal with animation? (I differentiate here between fine artists who use film as a medium ("artists") and film makers (who are also artists, but with another and sometimes commercial focus). I don't know which category I belong to, but perhaps I'm going to find that out in Vienna.) Animation is an art, a craft, a tool and also a language you could use. How do artists use it? There are so many ways...

The Brothers Quay impressed me as much as Jan Svankmajer did referring to the content and the design of their films. Another good example is Jochen Kuhn (German website), an artist and film maker, or more: a multi talent. He paints his films directly under the camera and the moving and changing paint fits perfectly to the mood of his more or less absurd and dream-like stories. I really like those. They're only avaible in German, I think. 1

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.

Just another quick post for today. Last Sunday I went to the cinema for "La Antena". First screened in 2007, this Argentine movie was directed by Esteban Sapir and often described as a mixture of Tim Burton and Fritz Lang style. I don't know how important such a category may be except for selling this film. But I found it visually outstanding and impressing because it's something comletely different to what our cinematic eyes are normally used to. The story is about a city who has lost its voices. There is only one person, called The Voice, who still has it, isn't she? She is a singer and entertains the city with shows on TV. Generally, the TV plays a big role in the citizen's life and the only TV channel is ruled by Mr TV who has a sinistre plan. A television engineer and his family get involved and try to rescue those they love and thereby the whole city. The screenplay is amazing and also the combination of oldschool black and white filming and the digital and stop motion effects which are used. There aren't much spoken words on the film so it has a silent movie atmosphere generally and the music is beautyful and suitable. The storytelling is not the best I've ever seen, but the story is told slowly and in a beautiful way. I just recommend this movie to you because it fully satisfies my everlasting visual hunger for intresting pictures. Have a look at the official website where you can find some pictures. The DVD already is available at German amazon and at amazon.co.uk where it will be released on 18 August 2008.

After watching the Orpheus in the Underworld film I remembered a small book I bought in an out-of-print book store about ten years ago. It's a text book from the Offenbach operetta. I read it again and yes: the movie's storytelling is bad and far away from the storytelling of Hector Crémieux. The man I didn't recognize was a woman in the original play: she is is personalized public opinion. This kind of public view has been part of lots of Greek dramas. A choire had shown the society's opinion of one character's behaviour. Now I figured out why this strange man advises Orpheus to take care of his reputation. This needed some time... ;)

My Orpheus film will be forced into a small pause, I guess.
The Bristol School of Animation took me into their Three Month Animation course which is absolutely amazing and breathtaking. It's more than a huge chance to me and I'm going to take it. Three Month completely concentrated on animation, I'm still overwhelmed by that. Now, I have to quit my room (done), book a flight (done) and pack all my stuff into boxes (not) and find a room in Bristol (not). The "Stuff in boxes" thing is very interesting because I now have to decide what really is important to me. The film itself is but I can't pack all my animation stuff just in one or two bags.

There will be a silhouette part (the underworld) in the film. Perhaps I'm going to start with that when I'm in England. It don't need much space and it don't need any probs. This will be the only part I could work on with less of my tools and materials. But that will be fine, too, I guess. Things have to be done. But I don't know if there's really some time, space or energy for that. We'll see.
I'm really looking forward to the time in Bristol. I'll try to post regulary about the course. The earlier panic had vanished now, and I can enjoy the last weeks in Germany and look forward it calmly. Thanks to all the people who shared their knowledge with me. I can't say it as often as I'd like to!