DigitalDuckling

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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Well I’m at the end of Term 1 in AM so here is what I have done in the last 11 weeks

Hope you enjoy =)

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Just wanted to share some of the assignments I have done at AM so far.
This is the Basic Foundations Course and there is currently one assignment left
you can download it from here (Quicktime)
Next up walk with personality.

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Oh my, things have happened since last time that I cannot even start to mention. I’m really sorry for my lack of blogging lately, but it is getting hot outside. (In my case that means pretty hot inside as well.) I want to share my AM work so far and I’ll do it in the next post, but for category purposes I’d like to keep this post about what has been going on lately. Or for over a month.

Since my last post I have gotten hold of the Broken Sword port for the Wii, being sometimes annoyed with the horrible sound work, but it really brought back a lot of good memories.
Seen Monsters Vs Aliens and Coraline. Won’t go into details.
I have been a lot with my good friends and have had relatives for visits.
Norway won in Eurovision, which meant that I had to be in hiding for a couple of days because of the annoying song, which obviously appeared everywhere.
May 17th came along.
A few days later a bookstore right outside my apartment had to close down, so they had a sale where I managed to get a hold of a lot of cheep books and DVDs.
A lot of TV-Shows has ended over the days, and some good news about some shows returning.
Lucas Arts and Telltale Games announces some stuff that makes me smile wide, involving the Monkey Island franchise. Additionally Brutal Legend has got a release date and is looking frickin’ awesome!
It is getting hotter every day and my computer seem to hate it.
I get above average grades on AM and am pretty sure I’ll manage to stay in the mix for term two.
My car is apparently going to cost me a lot this year :S
I have spent some time over at Qvisten Animation Studio.
Metallica concert featuring Lamb of God June 17th.
I’m leaving for Hove festival June 19th.
I better get to bed and start this week’s assignments.
Oh, and unless I leave the country I won’t be able to see UP before the end of September :S

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Really should have crashed on my pillow for like 3 hours ago, but I was really worried for my recent assignment on AM.
Luckily Ruth read what I was going for and I can go to sleep soundly with a very unexpected B grade! The current weeks assignment was just a bouncing ball and another Stu-pose, but I really spent a lot of time on it, so I was really glad to see that my effort payed off.

Almost all of my relatives came to visit this weekend. Even my cute little niece shared her presence, and how she has grown . My father was really nice and generous this weekend too; taking the family out to eat no less then two times in their stay. We even got to go to this tasty Thai food place called Yaya’s. Really, really spicy stuff! If your ever there I dare you to taste the lamb dish, (I’m going to try not to go into today’s toilet visits.)

My nephew, Oliver(5), is really getting into video games. To be frank its quite scary how he looses contact with the outside world; He rarely has time to eat even. I let him play some while he was at my place and he seems to respect me enough to let me control his playtime, but when he is over at my sisters he gets totally out of control when implying that he has been playing for 3 hours and needs a break. A little fun to feel that he respects me more, but I guess he doesn’t know me too well yet.

This weeks assignment is about dropping two balls with different weight at the same time. I guess I’ll start planning tomorrow. Sounds like I’m completely new to this but its being critiqued with laser sight and its really nice to get a good feel of timing and spacing before we get into the more advanced rigs.

I have passed about 150 visits as well. Hopefully some of these people return and I have some plans to get some more layers to this site in the future. If you are using Internet Explorer I suggest you try another browser because the site is kind of focused to work well in browsers like Firefox and Chrome, and some of the visuals as well as the scrolling don’t work very well with IE. I think it is really strange that these features never get included in IE and I guess they never will either. Anyway I strongly request that you comment on my posts as it makes the blogging a lot more interesting. Thanks for stopping by!

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This week I have to get out and doodle. No animation assignment yet, really. AM are very careful and make us go in with a gentle approach.
The assignment this week is to go out and sit down at a public place and do thumbnail drawings of what we see around us and hopefully get down a lot different poses. Then we are going to look at our poses and decide what we think is most successful and draw a circle around it. When all that is done we will take the favorite pose and try to copy it into Stu and hopefully get a good pose with personality.
I feel really confident with Stu now and I have even worked on a little animation on him jumping around, so the drawing will be the most challenging part of this assignment, but they don’t expect the drawings to be perfect; stick figures will do. I sort of have a little idea on collecting poses as well; drag my camera around and take some pictures rather than trying to grab the poses right off the bat. So the biggest challenge is to find the place where the poses happen. I need to know the perfect public place. Maybe the train station?

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Played around with Stu a bit tonight, basically just to get to know him. And I must say he seems pretty easy to pose.
The biggest downside is that the hip controls are on top of the lower-back controls. That makes it a bit hard to click, but you get used to it. I even tried to put two Stu rigs in the same scene to test that out and it seems to work fine. Can’t wait for the assignments. I know what they are, but its kind of cheating to start this early

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My first live Q&A is now over!
It was great fun get to know some of the people in our class and not to mention our Mentor. We just got two more students in our class one more from Sweden and another one from South Korea! So we really aren’t just Europeans + the South African guy anymore. This girl from Korea was up at 4 at night just to get into our Q&A and to top that off she is teaching English as well! I love to see the dedication in our class. The new Swedish guy (is not really form Sweden either, but) works in a game company there. He has recently been working with the motion capture in some of the newer GTA games and anybody can tell that is awesome!
We also have a couple in our class, so this could be very interesting.

Monster VS Aliens is coming to cinemas at Friday. Guess I will go on Sunday if I get tickets. I’m really looking forward to the film; looks fun and I’m a huge Seth Rogen fan so this will be a double treat! Should really get to bed and start playing around with Stu tomorrow. I should start drawing more as well! There really is a lot I should do.

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