DigitalDuckling

…If you do, and only want help with that, I suggest you just click the link at the bottom of this post.

OK, so I have apparently been really busy these last weeks, and on top of it all I have been trying to have some fun as well. Anyways, AM is back on its tracks for a new term and I am really stoked to have Elliott Roberts as my mentor this class; he has been working in Pixar, Tippett Studio, Blue Sky and more as well as the most awesome thing he has done is to work at Double Fine on Brütal Legend… Which brings me to the fact that it is right around the corner. :O I played the demo Yesterday and it felt like it was too short, but I guess I would get even more dissatisfied if the end of the demo came further into the game, as the game sucks you in more and more and more. There is so many things going on this time of year and it is impossible to grasp it all; Tv-shows starting to air (South-Park tonight) games coming out (BL, Uncharted 2, MI5 Season…), AnimationMentor and of course Qvisten work.

I have finally started my Business, (Howlstone M.A.S.S.,) while I was in Ulsteinvik and registered a domain and billing account for it today. Even made a nifty little logo to put on my domain site until I can come up with a decent way to percent myself.

Anyways, I’m looking into a new hobby so I bought myself something eventually convenient the other day; a Cannon EOS 7D D-SLR + accessories. Of course work and for now school related; I can learn a lot form using this camera for filming reference as well as shooting images used for textures. The hobby part would be learning to use it, as I am not too good with a camera yet, but I’m aiming to be and that is the reason for the investment, so there. Oh why talk about it when I can show a thread from the Video Copilot blog? =) I am not making movies; Just shooting reference, with a tripod, so i don’t experience the camera jitter mentioned in his video. Other than that I’m using a 18-135mm objective, and that is about it.

So the main reason why I wanted to waste an hour of my needed sleep to come up with something to brag about is that I wanted to share something I came across online:
I was having really a distinct lag in my AnimationMentor video lectures, nothing to do with AnimationMentor though, but the fact that I was watching flash video. I decided to do a little Google on the issue (laggy flash playback) and a little poking around lead my to this article on life hacker. Now this works for Firefox only as far as I know, bu it certainly worked for me. And another thing: It won’t take effect unless you restart FF after the change. If this doesn’t work though I have been before lead to do a complete uninstall of flash (Google flash uninstaller) and then do a fresh install. Either of this two should improve playback. Cheers.

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Class 2 Progress reel

Finished up Episode 3 of Tales of Monkey Island today, realizing that it is over a month since my last post.

I have been back in my home town for a couple of weeks, and now I am starting on class 3 in AM. My mentor this term is Elliott Roberts, who’s worked on a particular game I have mentioned a lot of in my previous posts and has release date Rocktober 13th in the US. He’s probably got one of the coolest bosses ever.

I had to swap with 2 other students in order to get into his class, which also was the most convenient class for me; Tuesdays at 6pm (my time)
Thankfully my Peerbuddy, Jason Jansky, from class 1 who had a break this summer term, made the connections in this week’s q&a, which I sadly couldn’t get due to being in another class at that moment.

Starting my own business now and need to get into the arts of invoicing as well. It can’t be too complicated, but I want to be sure that I don’t mess up any paperwork.

Its the time of the year again where all the TV shows start to air, and I don’t catch sleep,  so I cannot say I was very happy with having to do a time consuming system setup on my computer, because of constant blue screens and instabilities.

Thanks for reading, now I need to sleep…

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Hey people!
These last weeks have been really exciting for me;
A lot of my friends have started moving into town practically filling my spare time with laughter and joy, this also leading into some distractions form what I should be doing, hence animation etc, but I guess I can call my time out throwing Footballs and chasing Torleif on his skateboard motion-study
I’ve practically finished my IT-tech work over at Qvisten, so there has been some time to do my AM stuff and I think I’m still doing OK. Had a little trip over to meat up with Morten Lund today, and they seem to be having a little setback on people participating on their current project, (Inky/Blekkulf,) their CEO, Ove Heiborg, asked me if I wanted to help out a bit starting Monday next week. Of course I want to, so tomorrow I’m heading over to get a little more briefing on what I’m supposed to do as well as joining some of the guys over to Colosseum theater for a 20 min preview of James Cameron’s Avatar at 1600 hours; really excited to see what that film is all about.
DevilDriver’s newest album, Pray for Villains, is really amazing. The band sounded kind of weird to me at first, but I must say that it is a pretty interesting record, My favorite tracks are Bitter Pill, Another night in London and Pray for Villains.
New software have been added to my tool set as well; after watching Keith Lango’s video-tutorials on YouTube I got inspired to purchase Annotate!Pro. This is indeed not meant for animation, but in these LCD days we animators need a way to draw on screen without breaking them. dry erase pens are nice for CRT displays, but the LCD’s often have more of a matte finish so they are almost impossible to wipe. After testing it out I discovered that one of their features; ability to move notes around on the monitor by clicking and dragging them, kind of ended up as a burden because I kind of want them to stay put and be able to move my animation controls underneath. This lead me to send them a new feature request asking them for sticky notes, and to this they replied quite quickly and confirmed that my suggestion was forwarded to the development department. Getting replies like that really makes me a happy customer, if they include the feature in the future they’ll make me even happier
A lot of news on Brutal Legend have been popping up during the last weeks as well; trailers, soundtrack list etc. I really can’t wait till I get my hands on that game! Just finished the newest installment in the Tales Monkey Island series, The Siege of Spinner Cay, and I can confirm that I was laughing out loud several times, now I’ll just have to wait for late September for the next episode.

My sister is coming down to Oslo on Sunday, pity that I won’t be able to spend too much time with her during my work at Qvisten, but I figure she will be busy as well. The AnimationMentor community is increasing and recently Vibeke Cleaverley managed to gather a bunch of Norwegian students to meet up in Frognerparken September 1st as the current set date, this is really exciting as I’m not able to attend the official AM gatherings Now I’m off to bed, really need some sleep as I’m going to try to get a lot of work done by tomorrow, as well as the Q&A starting in 6 hours.

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One thing I learned in the last couple of days is that Qvisten runs on really small budgets for their feature films! To top that off the animators are expected to finish about 6 seconds of splined animation a day. I thought that we were given extreme amounts of time per shot at AM, but based on what I have seen in the videos on BlueSky Animator, Jeff Gabor’s, website it actually seems fairly realistic, though they probably do several shots at the same time.
The guy that tipped me on this told me that he kind of felt ashamed to put the work he did on his demoreel; you don’t really get 6 seconds of great animation done in a day! They even have a month per shot on the 11 Second Club and there are a lot of challenged people posting there as well, though most of the winning shots are done by experienced animators. Anyway it seems to me that you really need a lot of time if you want to make a perfect shot and I guess bigger studio means bigger budget; where bigger budget means more time.

This term I accidentally ended up as a Peer Buddy for 9 students. They are pretty nice so I guess it is working out. I’m always trying to give them a couple of notes from my experience every week and it is quite heartwarming when I see they make use of what I’m trying to get through to them. The biggest problem about this is that I can’t afford to give so much input to my class this term. Anyway I’m learning something new every day.

Remember to go check out the AM Webinars as a new one showed up July 20th. This one covers the Drawn to Life books, witch are more or less a tribute to Walt Stanchfield, whom apparently seemed to be a really awesome guy. He made a lot of lectures and interesting stuff while he was working at Disney and Don Hahn brought thees notes together. But don’t take it from me, just check out this commercial

I ordered a lot of books this week, started off with these and ended up with 3 more on drawing and anatomy etc.
Thanks for reading =)

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A lot of things have returned to me these last several days; Dirty sexy money is back, (or should I say completing their 2nd season,) Entourage started airing Season 6 and The Secret of Monkey Island returned with recorded sound and re-imagined graphics. MI1SE was really fun, but I miss some features like being able to mix the game modes with sound from the new and graphics from the old.

I got to see more footage from Brutal Legend gamespot.com. This game is looking awesome! I also came across news about Ron Gilbert being in the makings of a new game called DeathSpank; there are 3 official teaser trailers out and they look pretty funny, now this isn’t news really, but it is new to me
In my browsing on old Lucas Arts stuff I learned something sad as well; the voice actor for Ben, Roy Conrad, in Full Throttle died back in 2002:( I guess there will be no sequel to that game ever now, but it truly is a classic and I hope that Lucas Arts ads it to their Steam list soon!

I’ve seen some new movies in the cinema lately: My Bloody Valentine 3D; This one was a real surprise to me as it has been a long time since I have seen a decent horror flick. This was my first real action movie in stereo3d and I must say I’m really impressed with the perspective. Now I cannot wait for Avatar! Ice Age 3(D) was really cool as well, though I cannot say that it gave me a really big WOW effect with the stereo3d experience the animation was pretty awesome, and to think it was worked upon by a lot of AM graduates and students is really inspiring me to complete my course. Transformers: Rise of The Fallen: You know what I really enjoyed this movie, I went to the cinema alone because I kind of had to see it; There was going to be a Transformers Live Q&A at AM. I think I will buy it once it comes out on BluRay because I kind of missed a couple of shots in there; I was so tired that keeping awake was a struggle. Some reviewers criticize the film for not getting to know the characters and frankly I think it is a very bad point; you are meant to know the characters from the prequel, introducing them once more would be kind of stupid.

Today I found this OK camcorder on a site selling used stuff, I wanted to buy it, but it had been sold. It actually was quite expensive; its one of these Sony handy cams with a pretty lame function, Smooth Slow Record; Basically films 3 secs of video in 240 fps and stretches it over 12 seconds in 60fps, as for that I’m kind of glad the camera was sold since I would end up with a major disappointment; I thought at the time being that it could shoot in 240 fps for a longer period. 3 seconds is not even enough time to get the objective, I discovered this over at a electronics store that sold those cameras. Another lame thing about it is that it had to buffer the video after shooting. Now you go about 12 seconds with a practically unusable camera and your action shot is almost over. I’m still considering something like that. Or at least a Full HD cam they film in 60p witch kind of gives me the ability to play my reference in half speed at least, I could probably even go with at third of that as well. Certainly beats my lame photo camera with a whooping 16 fps and really bad res.
I also helped out with carrying a really old piano today; it needed to go 3 floors down and I even got to try out lifting with carrying straps for the first time. Carrying straps are awesome, without them the job would have been really painful, I cannot imagine.

These past weeks I have invested in some new stuff; A livedrive.com account, this is essential for backing up all my project files as my computer is probably dying pretty soon and I need to be able to recover from that. A new web host; this site is no longer hosted by Cliche.no, but by the more flexible one, hostmonster.com. A heat pump; strange as it is summer and all, but this baby can invert to be a cooling system as well, and the best part is that The City of Oslo actually sponsor investments in equipment as such, because of the environment panic, (at least there is some good coming from it.)

Now I think I’m going to get ready for bed. The guy installing my heat pump is coming tomorrow and I think I’m going to get some exercise before that; haven’t had a good workout in months. I really have to get started on this weeks assignments as well.

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Well, that’s that, after 9 years of waiting I have completed the newest installment in the Monkey Island series, and I can’t say that I didn’t love every minute of it. This of course also meant that I didn’t sleep at all tonight after a 11 hour day at Qvisten. I’m currently waiting for term 2’s second q&a with Leigh Rens. After this weeks eCritique I really think that this term is going to be very interesting, as I am really amazed by his thought process and input he is able to give is truly amazing.
I’ve yet to see the new Transformers movie, (I hear it isn’t very good, but I don’t care cause I bet the animation is awesome,) and Ice Age 3 hard to get someone to join me to the cinema these days; most of my friends are back on the west coast for the summer, and some of them are even getting ready to tour the US, oh how I envy them, but eventually I’ll do it too; I definitely need to get to my graduation when the time comes!
José Diaz from my class last term gave me a pretty cool link yesterday; “Thirty Second Drawing” supposedly its going to help you to start drawing faster and loosen up basically. You can adjust it to different times and the purpose is to scribble down the picture as fast as possible not caring to much about detail, eventually you manage to get a lot of detail in your drawings as you will probably draw faster and faster over time. Its a cheap substitute to life drawing, but hey, its a start
Gee I’m tiered now. After the Q&A I’ll have to go to Qvisten and work some more. Think I’ll end the day early and go home and sleep. I mean I’m doing charity work so I can demand some flexibility right? I need to get started on this weeks assignment as well, but sleep is the first thing on my to do list once I get home. there is always Thursday and Friday.
Oh and this German guy made a trailer
If you haven’t seen his earlier MI1 in 5 minutes you better check that one out as well!

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The big break is over. Once I came home from Hove I got a phone call from a friend asking me i he could crash for the weekend; apparently he was going to have a look at a open apartment here in Oslo. -Awesome; Seems like my network is finally building up down here =D Of course I couldn’t say no, but I warned him that I had sinusitis and needed to take it easy. Of course I didn’t get to sleep too well that night as I had to drive another friend to the buss station early in the morning as well. Saturday went a little unexpected as instead of taking care of my self I chose a more destructing pattern. I ended up out on town and actually had a really pleasant night out. Now I am sitting in my apartment melting away in front of my computer and am worried sick if the weather is going to get any hotter than this; its 30 degrees Celsius (86 Fahrenheit) in the shade and its 05:40 pm, and I don’t have a functioning AC. Really worried about being able to do AM work these next weeks.

I love summer, that is if I can spend time enjoying it, like on the Hove festival! Good lord it was awesome! I’m really happy I went as I got reunited with Faith No More who turned out to become one of my favorite bands ever; growing up with a lot of their music on the radio never knowing much about them. A lot of great concerts some new to me some old flames. And the weather? Great! The bathrooms? Awful! The camp? Fantastic! Bathing in the sea was awesome; clear water down there, nothing like the muddy water in Oslo. Got to meet a lot of fun people. Now I’m left here with a smile on my face and a lot of snot in my sinuses. Hopefully I’ll get well soon!

Tomorrow, back to work! Qvisten in the morning AM at night =D

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Metallica was awesome! Really disappointed with Lamb of God though. This wasn’t LoG’s fault, but the sound crew in the concert hall sucked ass!
Seriously eliminated LoG’s glory. I bet I could have done a better job with the sound even.
Anyways I’m leaving for the hove festival now! Yes, that is right, GONE for a week!. Man its pouring outside, keeping me from going to my car. Oh it just stopped. guess I’ll be going =P dammit
it started again, no wait, wait for it, wait for it… silence!

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