It’s been exactly a month since I left The Netherlands Institute for Animated Film.
During the residency, we had to submit a report every 3 months to discuss work in progress, experiences at the residency, events we participated, etc. Ton, the managing director of the organization, strongly believed in “reflecting” your work and life.
I just finished the last quarterly report and sent it to NIAF. I thought it will be nice to post an excerpt from it.

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The NIAF experience has helped me slow down from my busy life in NYC. When I arrived at NIAF, I felt like I had squeezed everything out of my brain and was sucked dry. I needed the time to catch up with my thoughts and try something different.
At NIAF, I fell in love with animation again and also became interested in making different kind of art like live action film, installation, drawings, print making, etc. Before NIAF, I could only think about the film I was making at the time. When that film was done, I had no idea for the next. I treated each film as if it were the last. There was a lot of pressure and sense of urgency that came with the production. However, at one point, I realized that this won’t be the last and I will make many more. Somehow it calmed down my feelings and gave me an optimistic view to experiment more. If it doesn’t work out, it’s OK because I have the next film to try out something else.

I left NIAF with one short animated film well into production, one short film in storyboard stage, one feature film script in development, a comic series still in progress and various small artworks. Even though my residency period was shorter than I expected, I feel very content with the outcome.

Thank you NIAF for EVERYTHING. Simply, it was the best time of my life and I hope to return to the Netherlands (or somewhere in Europe) to continue my adventure. When I think about NIAF, I still don’t understand how I got so lucky to be part of it.

50th artist-in-residents @ NIAF,
Ru

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From one of the international meals @ NIAF. Everybody saying “PROOST!” (cheers)

PROOST to the next chapter!

Max and I said good bye to The Netherlands Institute for Animated Film and arrived in Baltimore, USA. It was sad to leave the Netherlands but we left with lots of fun, art, friendship and experiences.

When we visited North Dakota University for a lecture back in November, the print master, Kim Fink, and I started a project of 4 lithograph prints. They are dogs that I stalked from the window in Tilburg, The Netherlands.
Thanks to Kim, I received these wonderful prints on the last day of the Netherlands. Phew, right on time!

Another animation resident, Frauke, was taking pictures of this man with two white dogs. He passed in front of our apartment about 4 times a day, rain or shine. So we started taking pictures of all the dogs that passed by us. Some have strict time schedule, some lose, some used as smoking break. These dogs brightened our days.
Yes, we were stalking. I am not sure if they know. I hope they don’t.

*Pictures are a bit blurry since I took them from 3rd floor looking down with zoom.

Since the summer, we stopped seeing the man with two white dogs. The dogs are still well but it’s his wife who takes the dogs for all the walks.We are not sure what happened to the man but one theory we have is that he is visiting his long-lost daughter in Australia for a few months since she gave a birth to his grand-child.

We will miss these dogs and all the lovely things in Tilburg.
Good bye Tilburg, good by 2012.
We hope 2013 will be as fun, exciting and productive as 2012.

In the Netherlands, they celebrate December 5th which is St.Nicolas’ birthday.
Children receive gifts and there are lots of fun activities. I was told that adults write rhymes to tease each other and I wanted to do it really badly last year. But I didn’t know everybody well enough to tease so I decided to wait until this year.
Of course I cannot write rhymes in Dutch so I decided to do a visual poetry to tease everybody.
Here is an example.

It is an inside joke but Ton, the director of Netherlands Institute for Animated Film, loves cookies so much. He will never say “no” when you offer cookies.
Yes, I made not-joke cards.

I hope nobody got offended because I only meant as a friendly tease.

One of the nicest things about belonging to an organization is that we do very cozy events that makes our relationships better. Followed by my Hinamatsuri (aka Japanese lunch), we decided to continue this international lunch event.

RUSSIAN LUNCH

Next up was a Russian lunch by Frauke (German) and Digna (Dutch) on May 22nd.
Everybody was puzzled why “Russian” lunch when none of those girls are Russians but let’s not question things too much.

I am not sure how many people were productive after the lunch. But it was delicious.

DUTCH DINNER

June 19th was a Dutch dinner organized by Ton (Head of NIAF).
The new herrings were in season around this time. (Salted, raw, small fish)

Run to herrings! They were gone in probably 5 minutes.

Followed by a very strong Dutch drink, Korenwijn. (Very similar to Jenever)

AMERICAN JEWISH LUNCH

Then it was Max’s turn on July 11th.
*As if we were obsessed, there were so many lunches around this time…
Brisket, Potato Latkes, Bagel w/ Cream cheese and NY cheesecake.

Max explained about NYC and its food culture.

Fulfilled!

The Next international lunch is undecided since everybody goes away for a few weeks during the summer.
But I am sure in September, something delicious will be organized.

How lucky are we to be in EU for the Euro football/soccer championship!
The Netherlands placed 2nd for FIFA 2 years ago that the expectation was high.
The picture was taken from vs.Portugal…which felt like the crowd had already given up because there was very little hope for the team to make it to the tournament.
But a few days before this was vs. Germany. Totally forgot to take the picture but the only color you could see was ORANGE. It was fun… No more Sneijder or Van der Vaart. They lost all the matches.
Well, now onto London Olympics!

A few weeks ago, NIAF invited Peta Ridley, a documentary / commercial editor from London, UK.
Check out “Skateistan” directed by Orlando Von Einsiedel, edited by Peta Ridley.

SKATEISTAN: TO LIVE AND SKATE KABUL from Diesel New Voices on Vimeo.

I met Peta at Abu Dhabi Film Festival last fall and I thought her editing style was really cool.
Animators are notorious for not being able to edit down their films. When you spend days and days animating a few seconds, it’s extremely difficult to say “this shot is unnecessary.”
Peta works mostly with documentaries, which is opposite work flow than animation.
With animation, when the animatic is done, the editing is 90% there. (At this point, I feel like I completed the film.)
With documentary, there are hours of footage and the editor has to assembled them to tell the story at the end.
So I was interested to see what Peta’s expertise can bring to animated films.

Thank you NIAF for making my request happen.
After 3 hours of figuring out the animatic together, we basically had a full day of editing together.
What a learning experience that was. I love having professionals from different discipline come for guidance. It opens up another depth into film making.

Thank you Peta for the visit!

At Nederlands Instituut voor Animatiefilm (aka NIAF), they open up for tours to students and art organization.
* There is an open house on June 3rd if you are in Tilburg area.

Last week was a group of film technician, engineer, broadcast, etc from the analog days. They pick an organization to visit every year.
Ole is one of the volunteers at NIAF who helps out the archive department. He belongs to this group and decided to bring his friends.

They were very interested in Max explaining how to mix analogue and digital techniques.

The oldest man was so excited he touched one of the puppets and broke a piece.
(the puppet can easily be fixed with my gluegun)
Then he came up to Max and whispered in his ear,
“The past and the future are closer than you think. I’ve seen the future and it’s beautiful. ”
What a sweet things to say… he made our day.

We’ve always wanted to work with a composer / sound designer during the animatic stage. End of last year, we spoke with Bram Meindersma, a very talented composer / sound designer who lives in Amsterdam.
He came down to Tilburg ( 1.5 hours south of Amsterdam) to sketch out the music for our new film. What an interesting experiment. With Bram’s suggestions, we worked on the edit together. I felt like it was a really cool collaboration. Music can drive some scenes of the film and Bram’s suggestions really helped to shape up the film.

At the Netherlands Institute for Animated Film, we get a guidance once or twice a month. We’ve had writers, animation critic, animation directors, etc. ( I had completely forgotten to document all this but I decided to start now…)
Last week, we had Guido van Gennep who is the BEST Director of Photography in the Netherlands.

After we showed our animatic and discussed some scenes that can use interesting camera moves, we went right into working! Guido showed us some cool lighting effect using our set. It was an eye opening moment when Guido put some masking tapes on a mirror and created simple geometric shapes. When the light hit the mirror, it created a very German Expressionistic shadow!
Now we got some ideas how to light and shoot.

With the help and support from many people, we are slowly moving onto the production phase of our film….When I feel like “time is running out”, that is a very good feeling.