Hey guys!

Here are some pictures from fmx two weeks ago. It was ah-mazing! Later more… this week is really stressful… :)

Just wanted to give a little heads up that I’m about to finish a new Demo Reel. It’s going to be a nice Mix of stuff that I did at AM and lots of new stuff and ideas. I’m excited! I hope that I can finish it in the next few weeks.

The FMX is a conference on Animation, Effects, Games and Interactive Media. It’s held in Stuttgart every year. This year it’s from May 04 – 07.
For me it’s going to be the first time at this conference and I’m really excited! We’ll do an Animation Mentor gathering there. It’s going to be awesome. Finally I’m going to meet some of my colleagues, mentors and friends!

I finished Animation Mentor! I’m kind of sad and happy at the same time. AM was pretty exhausting but also an amazing experience.
Before starting at AM 21 month ago I had never animated before or even worked with a 3D program. It’s amazing to look back and see how much I learned in the meantime.
I loved my time at AM! A big thanks to the AM team, all my friends and mentors!

For my new flat my parents got me a huuuge UP poster. It’s like 3×2.5 meters tall! Now… that’s an awesome housewarming gift, right? ;)

I just moved to Ludwigsburg. Ludwigsburg is an important Film- and Media-Location in Germany. It seems to be a really cool city. I’ll post some pictures of the city soon.

One of my colleagues at AM brought up a problem that I found animators and creative people in general struggle with a lot. It’s procrastinating. Here’s what I experienced and researched about it:

The cool thing about us animators is that we love to absorb everything that the world has to offer… that makes the world such an amazing place! But this fact can sometimes be a bad thing, too… Squirrel!… :)

Here’s what I found interesting about it and I’ll try to set these things into practice:

Because we’re interested in everything, every tiny thing will be good enough to catch our attention when we want to postpone an important task that actually should be done now.

I found out that there are a lot of reasons to postpone a task. An obvious one is that you don’t like the task that you have been given. I sometimes postpone things because I can’t decide what to do… which camera angle to take, which acting choice to use… some shy away from huge projects. A big project or a change in life sometimes looks as difficult as climbing the Mount Everest. One of my biggest reasons to postpone is that I want everything to look perfect and think I can’t get it how I want it to be. I just can’t make my shots look like a full blown Pixar film yet… All of these come down to one big point. That’s being afraid to fail. A huge point in getting ourselves motivated and stop procrastinating is to build up self-confidence in us and our work. But that’s actually quite difficult to do when we procrastinate out of habit.

I think, procrastination is a thing of habit. Every time you want to break with a habit, you need to build up another one to replace the old one. I read somewhere that it takes between 23 days and 2 month to get rid of a habit.

Making a to-do list is a great way to stay motivated. Breaking the big task into smaller bits, giving them priorities and starting with the smallest and easiest bit to get started. Try to block out a rough timing for each task.

Generally we get motivated by two things. Pleasure and fear. And that’s what we have to use for our advantage. Use the pleasure to get you motivated by rewarding yourself after you did a certain job. Resist the temptation to reward you in case you didn’t finish the task. Use fear by telling yourself how your life will be if you don’t reach the specific goal or don’t finish the task you set for yourself. Don’t use too much of the fear thing when you know that you mostly procrastinate because of fear of future, though… :)

We humans love to play. Especially we animators! :) So it would maybe an interesting thing to try to make a game out of stuff that we have to do. Maybe writing a point system on our daily to-do list. More points for stuff that you don’t like and for stuff that takes quite a while to finish and less points for easy things. If you reach a certain amount of points a day, you could give yourself a special reward or something like that.

Wow! This got longer than I intended it to be… I just struggle with that problem a lot and tried to come up with a couple of solutions…

Now get back to work and stop procrastinating! ;)

Class 5 ended last week! Crazy! That means that my last class at AM starts soon! The LAST class! Man…

Anyways… class 5 was awesome. Mario is a great mentor and I learned a ton of cool animation stuff.

Now I’m looking forward to class 6! :)

Yes, an animator’s dream is coming true! Lego combines the two main passions that all animators share. Animation and toys!

Look at this! :)

Pixar recently opened up their studio in Vancouver, Canada. They are planning to ramp up to a staff of 75-100 people. This facility is going to be used for making animated short films and specials.

http://www.pixarcanada.com/