Budapest

We've had a great trip to Budapest, it included a lot of exploring and we managed to over eat well. Our hotel had more than a touch of The Shining about it, but not when we were skipping down the corridors in our armbands and trunks heading towards the thermal baths.

The donkey, the dog, the cat and the cockerel

This afternoon I finished the donkey sequence, it's now 25 seconds long and comes to a natural end too. I think I like it best of all the experiments and when I get back to the bog I'll work on some sound. It's on a Musicians of Bremen theme and could do with an appropriate cacophony. As usual there's a couple of parts that could be better and I might shoot it all again. Sometimes it doesn't improve much time round but I'll have a go anyway.

Food - Budapest

Tommorrow we are setting off for two days in Budapest. It remains to be seen whether we will be able to semaphor ourselves a meal in Hungary, having proved ourselves to be particularly gormless at languages. In restaurants, it particularly irritates George that we greet our food with astonishment instead of an assured 'aah just what I expected.." Never mind I'll pack an extra packet of maize crackers and it's lucky I'm not a vegetarian anymore.
If only Uncle Billy was with us.

Our special visitor

We went on a whirlwind tour of Vienna with my mum yesterday, it was a sticky, whacky race with an ice cream pit stop. We finished off our fine day in a splendid Heurigan in Grinzing, thanks to our Vienna friend Philipp. We haven't been out much in the evenings, so it was good to be riding home on the tram seeing a little bit of Vienna after dark.

Donkey

Here is a 20 second shot that I made on monday, it took twelve hours and my ankles were quite swollen by the end. I think I could do a bit more to it since it hasn't come to a natural end yet and luckily I havn't goofed it up.

Kino Tulln

Today we visited Tulln. It was very quiet, because it's Sunday and the day after Assumption and most eating places were closed. As a result I was on the panicky lookout for cheerful umbrellas with people sipping icy Zitron Soda and we couldn't relax until we found somewhere. Mercifully we did find a place for lunch and once satiate we could enjoy a little trip on a tourist train, the Egon Schiele museum and two very baroque churches.
Here is the merry Kino (I think Nina will like this photo)

No. 40, Linke Wienzeile

I'm slowly getting to grips with Otto Wagner, on the left is Majolica House or 40, Linke Wienzeile built in 1898-9 which is easy to find, just look at that spot under the brolly. Today we saw his Nussdorf weir and sluice from a speeding train.

Stephansdom

We visited Stephansdom again and went up the Pummerin tower this time to have a good look at the beautiful roof and the second largest ringing bell in Europe. Afterwards thanks to a tip off from Maya, who knows everything about ice cream in Vienna, we went to Zanoni & Zanoni. It was the only place open on Assumption and playing host to all the muddled tourists in the city, including us of course. I can issue dribble onto my keyboard just imagining it.

A little bit of goofy grafitti.

There are lots of yellow shapes in the museums quartier that people lie happily around on, this is my favourite bit of yellow shape grafitti (can you read it? It says NORMAL SPERM and YOUR SPERM.)

From our hotel in Puchberg am Scheeberg

Lasse Gjertson

I was just looking at Lasse Gjertson's film Amateur again because it's great. I'm amazed to see that he has 28,760 comments and 10 million views. Hooray that good taste prevails on You Tube. If you're not one of the 10 million there's Hyperactive as well.

I had a good run at the beginning of the residency and now to put it baldly I'm stuck. There's a bit of pressure to get the sequence right all in one go, without spoiling it with inappropriate subject matter, finishing on a strange note or just a patch of bad animation in the middle and I haven't managed it yet. I'm feeling reluctant to remake anything I've already done because it makes the work a bit stiff doing that, so each sequence is a new adventure.
Here's a still from today's adventure:

Valentino in Vienna?

Well Valentino Rossi's mid-week pre-Brno Ringstrasse circuit was a bit of a disappointment here, partly because I don't think he showed. There was a lot of noisy revving from a bike travelling very slowly, but I think the bike in question was Jorge Lorenzo's.


























MotoGP is a bit like hot dogs for me, ideologically I'd like to bodyswerve both but since I gave up bucket bongs and bare knuckle fighting...

Face the Facts

We mostly gave up on the evening working in the end, after falling asleep over a story at 6.30pm and waking up in the morning three times in a row. Now I'm getting a full day animating every other day, which is easier for these long shots. Today was going swimmingly, I listened to The Archers omnibus, the next episode of Ruth by Elizabeth Gaskell and four episodes of Villette, then I made a fatal error in picking wretched Face the Facts on bullying. I found myself animating a fox being torn apart by hounds and no white paper left to turn the mood around. Here is a picture just before the bloody massacre took place.

Out of the city

We visited Puchberg am Scheeberg for the weekend and we had many adventures, culinary and physical. For some reason we didn't notice the rain clouds on the mountain before we set off and all four of us were inadequately prepared for the ceaseless torrential rain that began just as we got near to the summit. Thank goodness for the kind Austrian mother who gave us a whole set of dry clothes for Poppy. George has a few souvenir t shirts bearing the name of the cafe near the top of the mountain.

















This photo of our train journey gives a misleading impression of tranquility when it was infact one long testy game of top trumps.













Above is the view from Billa (supermarket)

The pants - the goat - the troll - the t-rex - the droppings - the fly

I finished my first 20 second shot on one piece of paper today, the paper looks like pigswill now. I made it over three days, which had it's trials for many reasons:
One of my trusty companions likes to play back the animation after every frame, and whilst the response is encouraging it makes the process V. slow.
There’s a lot of fluff.
The computer is taking a bit of a hammering around the clock, being radio, telephone and DVD player and frame capturing device.
There’s a heavy bouncy ball that I idiotically offered as a bribe for not whacking sisters over the back of the head that has (astoundingly) been won and is often richocheting around tripod, animator and hot lights followed by bouncy owner.
None the less I shall enjoy trying a few more next week. Have a good weekend!

Although a dangerous place to enter, the Naturhistorisches Museum has much treasure within, including the Willendorf Venus and a very good Ichthysaur. The Willendorf Venus was carved in 24,000-22,000 BC and was discovered in 1908 near Krems by Josef Szombathy. She's very beautiful, she's left me feeling like a pathetic specimen of womanhood. Must eat more cake.

Tartan light show

Have we gone nuts? Should we try and leave the white room sometimes in the evenings? The traffic lights and car indicators made lovely tartan shapes on our wall last night.

Stift Melk

This is a quick posting because there is some pressure to use my computer to watch the Jungle Book.

I'm just adding to this post now that Mowgli is safe in the boring old man village. On Saturday we went to Melk on the train to see the extraordinary Baroque Benedictine Abbey there.

A Goat eating some pants

A not so still still

A session

All this mucking around is preparation for making the trailer for the Tricky Women festival in March 2010. It's going to be 20-30 seconds long and I'm aiming to animate the trailer on one piece of paper. It's going to take a bit of practice and then I'll film the whole piece in one go in a couple of weeks time. When the time comes I'll need a classic serial on iplayer, a minibar, an ice cold flannel and biscuits that don't melt under the lights.

Karlskirche

Today we noticed that the Karlskirche dome is actually an elongated elipsoid.

Hens

There's one thing I can do pretty well and it's drawing chickens.
This afternoon I've been gleefully animating them on the brink of death.
Now I think about it there's an exploding chicken in The Emperor, and a throttled chicken in Sawney Beane too. What does it mean?





























There's no need to answer.

Leopoldsberg and another Flugzeug

I'm animating loads of animals on one sheet of Somerset Satin this morning, there are 11 seconds and 8 creatures so far, I've had to stop because the light's a bit hot, I'm running out of red and I havn't decided what to do with them all next. They've all shot off scene left and I've no idea what they were running away from or if they're still going.
No storyboard then.

I'll just go into the kitchen and see if an idea comes..

Here are two pictures from the weekend, one from Leopoldsberg and another of our newest kite flying outside our front door, where it all happens.

Market and Kaisergruft

Robert Breer

We visited the Secession museum to see The Death of the Audience curated by Pierre Bal-Blanc. The exhibition was a little bit mixed but full of beans and in a very good space, we found some Robert Breer pieces dotted around, they took the form of two ordinary looking sponge squares and a golden shiny piece of paper, we discovered that they were moving very slowly around on motorized wheels. On the same vein but from an earlier Breer era was a drawing for a proposed conference centre that roamed around it's site so that the delegates would exit the conference in a different environment.

Wiener Riesenrad

Last weekend we visited the Prater and started with a sedate revolution of the famous Riesenrad.