DigitalDuckling

I decided to get up early today to get some work done, but then there was a power outage at around 9 o’clock… after waiting for a while i decided to take a nap on the sofa.
waking up around 12 the power still hadn’t returned so I went down the 6 stories to enjoy some of the warm weather. coming back around 1:30 I climbed the 6 stories of my really hot apartment building… walking across the hall sticking my key in the lock and then out of no where I hear the buildings alarm-system kick in. Perfect timing!


Actually typing this as my Facebook update I realized that I hadn’t updated my blog for a while, and it wounded up here instead.

My little week in Annecy was amazing. I already went ahead and booked a room for next year!
I even got to greet Simon Otto after watching his masterclass on how they came up with the Style and Movement of their Dragon characters, or rather it was actually on a pub way after the masterclass; as one of my friends from AM a Swiss guy, (Fabian Keiser,) got recognized by him, and sense I was there I couldn’t exactly keep my hands hanging. He also seemed pretty laid back and calm as he probably was more or less on vacation rather than crunching up at the studio.

Other stuff that happened, well… I have been to a wedding, In Flames concert, (which actually is quite exclusive this year due to them returning to the studio to record a new album,) made some new friends by camping with them in Sweden. I also met someone, that to me is very interesting, and even though it will never happen, it’s quite calming that I can feel interested in somebody again as I have downtroddened my emotions for quite some time now.

Using that word was actually fully intentional as a couple of weeks ago Ron Gilbert’s DeathSpank came out so if you have a X360 or a PS3 you should definitely check it out. The same thing goes for the classic Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge: Special Edition that came out the week before.
I mean here you can get two things of awesomeness for the same price as a half awesome! That’s got to be worth it right?
Other cool stuff that have launched this summer include Nelson Tethers: Puzzle Agent, and a couple of new episodes of Sam And Max.
If you love puzzles you are absolutely going to love NTPA it has really put emphasis on the puzzles and also manage to make a nice little thriller out of them.

I’ve had a GREAT summer so far and as previously twittered my new mentor is James Chiang; This guy, well he absolutely knows what he is doing and again kind of hit me with a realization that I had about 12 months ago; I’m not really there yet. Or in my own case its more like realizing where I stand now I should probably remove all my previous animation work from the net altogether.

Well, my power is back, and has been for an hour now. So why am I still sitting here typing this crap?

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So, I’ll be traveling to Annecy, France this upcoming Sunday for the Animation festival. Really looking forward to it, even though it kind of hurts to go away from my current shot in its currents state. I hope that in the end I’ll return refreshed and renewed and ready for a complete term of polishing.

Kind of feels like yesterday when I signed up to Animation Mentor. The course has been throughout a crazy ride and I can’t wait to see what being an alumni has in store for me. It will also be nice to be able to start a vacation without thinking about the ongoing shot all the time.

Lately I have really started to enjoy gaming again, mainly on my trusty PS3, but also a occasional adventure game  on my computer. Since my long break from blogging I have had such pleasures as to play through Tales of Monkey Island, The Secret of Monkey Island on Steam and PS3, I have also gone ahead and started on the new season of Sam & Max, both on PC and PS3, (it usually comes out for the PC first, but gotta have those trophies.) I have gotten the chance to catch up on a lot of PS3 classics like inFamous, and Uncharted 1, am yet to play the sequel, but I guess I’ll buy into it when it hits platinum shelves. I got to replay GTA4 on the PS3 and really had a fun time down memory lane while also being reminded about how annoying it was to walk up and down buildings in that game, during battle.  Before I have had the chance to try Stories from Liberty City, Red Dead: Redemption is available for pre-order, and glad I am I did. Its sold out everywhere and I got a War Horse  and a cheaper game. I’d recommend the limited edition, because of all the in game goodies. And your horse is constantly dying so its nice to have a speedy War Horse available for quick disposal. I’ll probably start hitting the multiplayer feature of Red Dead when I get home from  Annecy. Also despite how much I love the game, I’m shamed to admit that I have yet to clear Brutal Legend on singleplayer. Playing on Brutal was a bit hard for me, but I was too focused on the trophies I guess.

On a side note I posted a checklist on what to look through while polishing (Courtesy of Jay Jackson) and added a few notes of my own. Mind you I don’t intend this to be shared with everyone as for this moment Jay doesn’t even know that I have posted it. So until I know it is fine with him the post remains locked, but AM students are welcome to PM me for the Password.

Also if you haven’t seen it yet, go see How to Train Your Dragon!

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As you probably noticed this blog haven’t been updated since October last year.
The main reason for this is that I have a bowed down and subscribed to Twitter.
I now actually can keep my nonsense somewhere more suffice and instead actually tweet about me blogging if I bother to write anything interesting.
I’m planning to do some changes to this blog and eventually also open my sites. Outside of all things I’m going to try my best to do a good job at AM, as I have found out that working while doing AM really just results in bad animation in both ends (at work and at AM). It also means that I won’t have any time to spare to do things I love like gaming and hanging out with my best friends, that aren’t too much involved with the digital media scene as a before mentioned lifestyle would require them to be.
In the end and hope fully this blog will be hopefully less personal, (of course I will include my opinions on techniques and whatever,) and mostly oriented by new apps I come across Techniques and tutorials. Educationally I will still write some random posts, or maybe when I have more time on my hand I’ll run two blogs. Anyways, remember to keep your razor blades sharp as I have mentioned in a previous post, will save you a lot of money.

I’m going to go to Annecy this June and I’m really looking forward to it. Too bad that I didn’t understand their site and missed out on the pre-reservation on their events, but at least I will get to travel some and I think it has been over 3 years since last time.

My current Mentor is Jay Jackson, who has done some amazing stuff as animating Sebastian, the crab, on the Little Mermaid. How cool is that? He even got mentored by some of the Nine Old Men back in the day. He is a really kind and inspiring guy.

My last mentor was Jalil Sadol, who currently works at Weta Studios, (Avatar,) I must admit that I some times disagreed with his methods, but when I relate on the term I realize that he actually taught me a whole lot about acting and also learned me to make big changes in a small amount of time.

I personally think that I have evolved a lot since my last post and it goes to show that most people get better in time. I will of course upload a new demoreel some day in the not to distant future, but I’m happy with what I have got so far online, so I its not worth watching, I tell you that much.

Oh, and go to the theater and watch How to Train Your Dragon NOW!

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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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