John Jay Marathon

I guess I can share the name of my thesis project now that I secured a website. I have been working on this project on and off for the last year, writing, doing concepts and sketches and figuring out how to make things. Right now, I am at a point where there is still so much learning and working ahead of me but I feel like I am going in the right direction. I am enjoying the process of learning and trial and error where I used to be very goal driven and easily annoyed whenever things did not work out perfect instantly. This is a new quality of work (and life) for me. I have been getting great support and feedback from my close friends and this makes everything easy for me, knowing that I am not sailing alone.
I hope my film will show my love for film and telling stories in this medium more than it will "only" show off my skills to score me some work. The project itself is a narrative experiment and stylistically incosistent, allowing me to explore and take in new ideas that might occur in the process of production. This is something completely different than the tight industrialisted production process of animation (writing, storyboarding, designing, pitching, sucking dick, animation, compositing, post, render, release) but it makes the process joyful and exciting.
I feel like for the first time I am really, honestly, a student of film and design.

However, John Jay Marathon is not my sole invention but the result of a collabo with my friend Roland. We did this music video together in 08. When looking for a name for my film project, this name just came up again and he was happy to let me run with it. Thanks bro!

Thesis Paper Illustrations

It is such a lovely sunday here!
Anyway, here are some illustrations I made for my thesis paper "Ästhetik und Ökonomie des unabhängigen Animationsfilms" ("aesthetics and economics of independent animation"). I wanted to achieve a style of illustration that mimics the effect that you get when you see more frames of one animation sequence at once. Animation, after all, is a sequence of pictures shown one after another. My illustrations make this process visible by showing this connection on one sheet of paper.

The book cover. All pictures together. Ah, the chaos!

Chapter 1 "The animation business" (Well, no sequence here. It's a mimicry.)

Chapter 2 "The Independent Filmmakers" I used photo reference by Ahrum for anatomy guidiance.

Chapter 3 "The Resumee" Look, she dances! Photo reference by characterdesigns.com

Chapter 4 "Attachment" Swim, hippo, swim!

Thesis: Steamboat Willi (1928), Please Say Something and Bolt (both 2008)

In my thesis work I am featuring the greatly appreciated David O'Reilly whose webserie Please Say Something explores ways to find new aesthetics for animation with the new tools of the trade. I realised that in doing so, his work gets closer to the earliest works of Disney like Steamboat Willi from 1928. Abstraction of form, movement, sound and event relationship have much in common, while of course O'Reilly applies much more current storytelling structure and a format appropriate for the Interweb. High speed Soap Opera.

Steamboat Willi

Please Say Something

PSS Season 1 from David OReilly on Vimeo.
In the meantime Disney's new feature Bolt does the "old eye candy with cute puppies and some Pixar flavour" trick.

Thesis: Nina Paley & Bill Plymton

Bill Plymton pretty much got me hooked on becoming an animation guy. He makes the animation process visible, animating with illustration by really cutting back on the frames he draws but making them count. While traditional animation uses 12 pictures per secound and more, trying to hide the fact, that all the fun characters are just a bunch of flickering pen strokes, he gets by with three at times. And he makes his own stuff, so that's why I have to feature him in my little thesis. Nina Paley worked three years on her first feature that I saw at the Berlina festival. She uses flash and a lot of different styles to tell her story but she does that with such delightful humour and fun attitude that made the electrified the audience and made me very euphoric about her work.

Sita Trailer Great.

Idiots and Angels OMGWTFBBQ

Thesis 2 : "Your Career in Animation" by David B.Levy

Last week, I got this book in the mail, and it proves very helpful for any Animation Artist trying to get some orientation. It is not a technical manual as the "Animator's Survival Kit", it covers fields like getting educated for animation, getting jobs, marketing & networking, working in a variety of studio and people types, setting up a studio, being independent, pitching projects to networks, and many other fields that can help you out and make an intersting read. I really like the book.

Thesis: starting out

I am working on my thesis "the aesthetics and economics of independent animation" which is a very interesting subject for me to explore. These are very exciting times to be in animation and I think especially the independent, or let's say for now, the smaller studio scence, is producing a never before seen mass of artistic successes while exploring new business models. I am very fascinated by the kind of artistic driven smaller and middle size studios like Studio Soi, the Mill, Studio AKA, Psyop to only name a few. But I want to explore more on the kind of Studios and single Animators that focus on telling their personal story in their films and try to get an audience and probably a revenue out of their films.(like my peer David o'Reilly, we have little fan club here :) ) How do one approaches animation as a small venture? How does one juggle artistic and economic goals and how to organize distribution and marketing?
I have talked to and conducted interviews with people that I really admire, like Fred Seibert, Bill Plymton, Nina Paley, Pat Smith, Hanan Harchol or Klaus Baumgart, the latter being a successfull Childrens Book Illustrator and my professor, but I listen to him anyway, sometimes. :) Even though my piece will mirror my personal stand point on the subject, the interviews helped me a great deal to for perspective and to examine different strategies. My starting point is that "Independent Animation" should be both the striving for artistic and narrative fullfilment and economic independence and let's see where I get from there.

Sidenote: check out the DVD promo animation for Richard Williams DVD collection the Animator's Survival Kit Animated. I bought the book in 2003 and roled with it ever since.