Finally, I'm back to Germany and moved in Lukas' and my new home. We have plenty of space and I'm going to have my own basement studio here! This is pretty cool. We have to refurbish a bit which is just a tiny understatement.

For all of you who are located in or planning a trip to Vienna: There is a lovely animation festival taking place next weekend: the Tricky Women Festival. It runs from March 5 to 9 and has a wonderful and wide ranged programme focussing animation produced by women. I worked for them as a graphic designer and had a look at some film stills which look very promising!

There are less than two weeks left until I'll be going home and I thought it would be nice to show you my Vienna animation reel. I didn't work on stories or concepts, I just tested some techniques and solved some technical problems. It was interesting because I worked under a rostrum camera here which is totally different to a camera on a tripod in front of your set. I really enjoyed doing cut out animation, it's a simple but challenging technique. I like such things. It was also important to me to try this because of its further usage in my Orpheus project: there's a part when Orpheus is going down to the Underworld to rescue his beloved Eurydice from death and I'm going to do this part in silhouettes. I was wondering if I should do it by hand or digitally, but now I am pretty sure that I'd like to do it with oldschool cut out animation.

Besides that "classical" stuff, I got deeper into digital keyframe animation which is interesting but totally different with its workflow. I was working with Toon Boom Studio, After Effects and Flash Professinal, not to forget with Pencil and Blender. I think I now have a good overview of what is possible with animation and what's the advantage or limit of each technique and how you might combine them.
One of my most favourite techniques was working directly on film... It was great! Film has such a strong visual quality which is just beautiful, especially if we worked on black film leader and the light shone through the scratches and wounds of the black material during its screening... I loved that!

Maureen Furniss – who is an animation historian – wrote about nearly every possible animation technique. She explains so many things and this book is a good foundation to everyone who is interested in animation generally. It accompanies me during my time in Vienna and I worked my way through it. I found it very helpful. The book also provides exercises at the end of every chapter, lip sync, for example, or Pixelation or Flash animation and is referring to the workflow of animation artists. It's more llike a reference book or a lexicon which you could take out from time to time and have a look at. Have a look at its German Amazon website for details.

At the university of Applied Arts in Vienna, I attend a lot of courses on subjects which are not animation related at the first glance. I do font design and typography here as well as book binding next to flash animation or media theory. To me, Graphic Design is an important part of Screen Design as well. I often don't want to use already existing things and that's why I'm learning how to do them myself – not always on a pro level, but enough to understand what'd be necessary.

Due to the font design class we had to develop a display font while we were also learning about the history of using fonts and typography, how to digitalize it and finally, how to do some kind of final presentation. I made a small book (because now I can... hehe...) containing a disc with the True Type Font file generated with Font Lab software and a tiny piece of animation to show how it might me used.

Referring to all the other things I'm currently interested in, I call the font Styx, like one of the rivers of the ancient greek underworld. And while doing so, I remembered my character's concept drawings and came back to work for the Orpheus project. A part of the story will be taking place in the underworld, and I had the idea to make this part a silhouette film like i.e. Lotte Reiniger did, or Anthony Lucas in The Mysterious Geographic Explorations Of Jasper Morello which is a beautiful steampunk silhouette film made in 2005. They combined traditional puppet animation with computer generated backgrounds and compositing.

Doing the font presentation was also helpful to me to understand that I certainly wouldn't do the silhouette animation digitally but definitively animate the puppets by hand. I did some silhouette animation on a lighttable under a rostrum camera in the studio here before which are supposed to be posted next week. The advantage of software is, it's clean and easy as long as you know what to do. There are a lot of disadvantages to, like a hurting neck after several hours in front of a screen, cold feet, slow machines rendering even tiny pieces for ages, and software which is not doing what you want because you both truly speek a different language...

And CG keyframe animation simply isn't as great fun as animating with my hands. I love working with my hands which is one of my reasons for doing the book binding course. And I can control the animation so much more if I don't have to think of these abstract things like a timeline and keyframes... It's much more natural to me to simply move things further in time. With the software you can go back and forward and you doesn't have to care about your next steps since all is removeable... It always seems to be weird to me, although I sometimes really like to spend several hours in front of my computer until my neck is hurting.

So here is the final font animation and with this, my CG silhouette test:

For all of you who don't speak German, there are to pieces of text in the clip, which could be translated like this, "River Styx. It cycles Hades nine times." The text is very small and due to the extreme bastard type I designed, hardly readable in this size. I copressed the original PAL standard format video to the web size and .flv format, so you may excuse this.

I did the keyframe animation in After Effects. The problem is that the software would interpolate the keys in a linear way. But natural movement, however, would never be just linear, it always has an ease-in and ease-out, speaking in software terms. For example, an arm moving starts slow, getting faster to its highest speed and then slowing down until it stops again which is determined by how our muscles working. Spectators often don't really know but have a unconscious awareness that a linear animation would always seem to be unnatural or to us. So I changed the software settings to interpolate the keys with bezier curves which is a more natural way the things would move. The music was composed by Felipe Vila, a friend of mine who is going to be responsable for the Orpheus soundtrack.

Supplemental: The Styx clip in higher resolution is now available on my vimeo website.

Well, I managed to feel a bit more home in Vienna, it was just a decision and a kind of cleaning up in my time table. And I showed all my previous years work to the guy who runs the studio and convinced him by this letting me use the studio without finishing the course before. I haven't worked much under a rostrum camera by now but last friday I did some experiments there. I had a DV camera, iStopMotion on my G4 Laptop and two 150W lamps there as hardware. Some heavy paper was sticked by some gaffer tape to the table.Then I started painting with acrylics without any planning what you would see in the video. I just wanted to know what I could do with this techique and how other people may have done their films with it. It was cool because I came into a kind of paint rush, I painted for about five hours. Acrylics normally dry very quickly but it was too slow when I had been in the 'zone' so I just used a hair dryer to dry the colours more quickly. I was painting and overpainting the scenery on doubles and here are the results, or, more precisely, the best results for that day:

I made a mistake which wasn't so important right now but may become important in a bigger production. I just fixed the paper on its corners with some tape. But if the paper becomes wet through the colours it will get waves and when it dries, and its fixed propperly, it will get plain again. Mine got waves but I was lucky. The waves in the paper hadn't been big enough to produce any serious shadows. For the next time I would use some heavy cardboard or maybe some thin wood, it would depend on what I want to do with it. Or, you could use the shadows for your storytelling if you like, depending on what you want to archieve. The other issue with this is that the paper produces kind of hills and valleys. If you use very wet colours they'd probably become the rivers in your paper landscapes and start to run down th hills and become lakes. It's a very progessive technique because there's no going-backwards.

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...