Czechventures

I’m Saskia, a third-year illustration student and this is my blog of my adventures in the beautiful city of Prague during my Erasmus exchange in the Film and TV Graphics (animation) studio of UMPRUM!

[saskle]

Sorry for the neglect of art and context the last few months. Trying to keep it up again! Have here a long overdue finally finished English version of that Czech comic I was working on.

[saskiapraha]

Finally!

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It’s been one week since I left Prague and came back to my little rainy flat country. It’s true what people say, going to study in another country, no matter where, is an amazing experience. You’re meeting people from all over the world, not just Czechs, and exchanging experiences and ideas with people from different cultures is such an amazing thing to do. It made me think a lot about what it means to be Dutch and what Dutch culture means to me.

The Czech Republic is an amazing country with amazing people. They might need a little time to open up, but when you’re past that initial hesitation they are truly kind and helpful.

I will definitely go back there one day.

But this is the end of my Czechventures for now and therefore the end of this blog. You are free to keep up with my regular adventures at my main tumblr, saskle.tumblr.com.

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And at last, the actual trailer! Vimeo has an upload limit every week, so I guess you have to wait a little longer to see my Circus animation... Be patient, my friends.

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Klausura Exhibition Opening night, part 2

The ‘Poe machine’ was the most amazing thing our two curator-students put together: you could choose which trailer you wanted to see by typing in the corresponding number code. The code also matched the comics on the wall, so after you’ve seen a trailer you liked you could find the number (and name) and read the story.

A lot of students thought our studio had one of the best presentations of all the studios, a nice break of the usual white cube presentations, so to say. :)

[saskiapraha]

Opening of the Klausura Exhibition, part 1

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Preparing food for the jury that will grade our trailer animations...

The ‘jury’ concept is new to me, but works like this: the final Klausura assignments are always graded by a jury which consists of teachers from all Graphic Departments, so apart from Animation (Film and TV Graphics) also Illustration, Graphic Design and Typography.

Unlike most other studios, we didn’t have give an presentation, our trailers were just shown one by one and the jury gave immediately feedback. Petr Krejzek, the Illustration teacher who was in charge of our comic assignment was positively surprised by my trailer, as he called the comic progress a ‘tragedy’ (I don’t know if he meant that seriously or half-jokingly, but he was most of the time not very happy with the drawings I made for the comic). Still he and the rest of the jury found the drawings rather naive and childish. I don’t know what to do with that feedback. 

Anyway, we haven’t gotten our grades yet. 

[saskiapraha]

This weekend was all about cleaning the studio and making everything ready for the Klausura expo opening next Tuesday night! Sadly some people slacked and didn’t help, but that’s always the case, in Rotterdam too. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I’m excited about the exhibition, but it also feels a little sad because it will be the very last thing I’m doing together with my Czech classmates. In three weeks I will be going home again ...

[saskle]

Animation tests for the comic trailer… Almost done!

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The circus animation is almost done! 

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It’s been already two weeks ago that we went to see the opening of our projection exhibition in Ústí nad Labem! The video above shows only a few of all the video’s made by us, but as they are played in an random order I didn’t film all of them. Here are some pictures of the opening, made by Foto Lumpe.

Our super cool flyer with the name of the exhibition (Signály na známa, signals to know), which is somewhat in line with the major exhibition, titled Jak si rozumět (how to understand each other). Shame that they didn’t get the date right, it should be 15.5 - 15.7.17. Oh well!

[saskiapraha]

More comic updates

I feel bad that I didn’t update this blog more the last weeks, but I guess school work has priority over writing about it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

After my experiments on brown paper I suddenly got the idea that I also can make the drawing on white, thicker and more sturdy paper, scan them, and print them on the brown paper. After that I could go add highlights. That way I don’t have to deal with the brown paper’s inability to take much water and still have it’s wonderful brown color. Yay!

So last week I was practically drawing every hour I was awake. In retrospect I made it also quite some work for myself as I sketched the pages firstly on my laptop in Photoshop, printed them and traced them on A3 paper before drawing it out like you see in the picture.

So the full progress for page 3 was, for example, like this:

That’s right, the comic needed to be in Czech. Well, even though I got a 92% score for my Czech language test, translating poetic English into Czech is still out of my league, haha! So credits for the wonderful translation go to Vojta Koči!

The comic project is officially finished now, the deadline for sending the files for printing was today. But it’s also not officially finished yet, as our klausura assignment is to create a trailer or teaser of max. 30 seconds for our comic. So back to work!

[saskle]

Some more comic progress! The first page was a first test but the teacher didn’t really like it, it lacked contrast and drawing it with fineliner would make it to soft and delicate for what’s basically a horror story. So I went on an experimented with water-soluble pencil on wet paper - I got nice black expressive lines but the paper couldn’t take water very well… And I really wanted to use this paper because I like the color and when I draw on it with black and white it reminds me of old photographs and gravures.. And it’s cheap. I did another test where I drew the panels first and then went over it with water but it didn’t feel right yet..

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Aaaaand again posted on my wrong blog. Sorry!

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Architecture trip to East Bohemia, day 5: Litomyšl

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Architecture trip to East Bohemia, day 4b: Pardubice (Gočár’s Winternitz-mills)

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Architecture trip to East Bohemia, day 4a: Lázně Bohdaneč, Pardubice

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Architecture trip to East Bohemia, day 3: Broumov, Nové Město nad Metují