DigitalDuckling

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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