DigitalDuckling

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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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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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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The last couple of days I have updated to the latest version of WordPress and started on building my own design; amazing what you can do with some images and some tweaking in CSS… I guess the divs are blocking the background, but here it is if you want a closer look. Not much; just a collaboration. In other news… I still want a job! Got one for me? I received a phone call for a couple of hours ago about a job down here in the center of the city. It seemed alright, really the only thing bothering me now is that my friend, Morten, may have arranged for me to become a trainee on Qvisten which is awesome! This means that I’ll have to work for free, but that is well worth it! It is a little bit sad to hold back on the other job if I can’t get on the trainee program though. SO. I have to do something clever now! Anyway… this was not meant to be a story of my life kind of thing… Learning Maya is getting more interesting. The website I am working on for the guy I probably never mentioned is getting done, as soon as he pays me. Ah… I gotta go to sats now.

No Comments | In: Job, Life | | #