DigitalDuckling

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

No Comments | In: AnimationMentor.com, Games, Job, Life, Movies, Shows | | #

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!

No Comments | In: AnimationMentor.com, Life, Stills | | #

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?

No Comments | In: AnimationMentor.com, Life | | #

I know this doesn’t have a lot to do with the theme of my blog but I want to write it anyway. For some time ago I got really pissed because of my razorblades getting dull after only one time use. I Googled around a bit and discovered that I was not alone! A lot of people felt like they were throwing money out the window for a brief moment of smooth skin.
I read a lot of methods everything from putting their blades in mineral oil while not using them to applying Vaseline on them. But the key point here was that the metal in the blade gets dull because of oxidation. I thought it seemed a little far-fetched at some time, but eventually I tried tapping my razor against a piece of toilet paper until it seemed dry. And then I just wrapped the paper around the blade so that anything that was left got sucked in. I also put it inside of a closet; I used to have it in the shower before.

3 days later I picked up the razor only to find the paper stuck to the aloe strip at the bottom of the blade surface. So I gently ripped of the paper and showered the blade in hot water and to my surprise both the blades and the aloe strip look as good as new!
Now 3 weeks have passed and I’m still on the first blade. No April-fools. That’s pretty cool, right?
Putting the blade in mineral oil will probably make the blades last a bit longer, but you will lose the aloe strip or whatever on the blade. The blades don’t get dull from shaving with them right away, but they get small amounts of rust on them and that matters for your skin.

No Comments | In: Life, Random, Tutorials | | #

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.

No Comments | In: AnimationMentor.com, Games, Life, Movies | | #

I finally got access to AnimationMentor. I was able to log in on the 18th,

but it was not to the full website; just a limited orientation site, but yesterday it finally opened up. And let me tell you it was worth the wait. I have got fellow students in my class from all around Europe and South Africa. My current Mentor in the Basic Foundations program is Ruth Daly, who have worked on The Iron Giant and Futurama for TV. I’m really excited and tomorrow we get to met her in the Live Q & A!
So now my headset is ready and my microphone is working as good as it gets. Hopefully I don’t come out as a complete idiot.
Even though there are no deliveries for this week we got a simplified version of the manikin-like rig “Stewie” called Stu, (without the extra wie,) on which we can play around with poses.

This is about me just kind of laying my previous animation knowledge behind me and starting over; really getting in there from the basics and working myself, (not back but,) up into a better animator that I was before.
I like their philosophy as well; “There is no BEST animator” And I can only look upon my two years at Noroff as a trail and error phase, I can’t say that it was a complete wast of time; I learned a lot and I got even more sure that I wanted to be an animator.

4 Comments | In: AnimationMentor.com, Life, Noroff | | #

This given time I’m on a little vacation back to my roots. I’ll be heading back to Oslo on Monday, and the orientation in AnimationMentor will start on Wednesday.

The last few days I’ve been hanging over at Martinus’ while he was playing through Silent Hill: Homecoming. This game was supposed to be the sequel to Silent Hill 4: The Room and had Silent Hill V as its working title.
The original creators of the SH series, Team Silent, did however not develop this game; a Californian developer, Double Helix, did.

I have to admit I never play the Silent Hill games, (I only watch,) because I’m an adventure-gamer and when the action comes I tend to fail miserably, but even Martinus hatefully criticized the combat system in this game.
SH: Homecoming comes puzzles, though sometimes they seemed to be a little bit out of place; Jig Jag Puzzles to open important locks? There are some awesome riddles around in the game that aren’t too hard to crack, but leaves your brain a little bit more challenged in the long run.
The graphics didn’t impress me that much at all; I think of them all together, (if the graphics don’t share the same quality through the entire experience, they aren’t that good!). Mart was playing on his computer with high resolution and the detail set to full. The scenes were often punished with bad texture resolutions and stretching polygons; the latter often happened during the transitions between the two dimensions. It was kind of sad to see as well because the game looked so goddamn good in the trailers.
The story is probably what disappointed me the most as it didn’t seem to base from the Silent Hill games, but the movie. They included Pyramid-Head, who really doesn’t belong in any other game than SH2, but luckily they didn’t overuse him. Don’t get me wrong, the story was good, but it didn’t have any mystery to it; all loose ends gets tied towards the end and rubbed into your face. Very Americanized you might call it. I still think it was a good effort, but Jacobs Ladder seemed to be more of an inspiration to this release than any of the others.

The Silent Hill games made by Team Silent left the player slightly questionable of what was going. The only questions I’m left with after Homecoming is: Why isn’t it called Silent Hill 5: Homecoming? Did Konami realize along the way that this game wouldn’t cut it for the fans of the original series? Will there be an actual Silent Hill 5? None of these questions are actually related to the story are they?

No Comments | In: Games, Life | | #

OK, so I finally finished my to-do-list, (if I can call it that,) for getting in to Animation Mentor, so now its really official and I have a huge Master Card bill to manage

I was actually considering waiting to the last minute with my payment, but after a brief one-hour-webinar I was convinced to pay before February 27th at least; I can win a 30-minute chat with a mentor, about anything. That’s awesome!

I learned a lot of stuff that convinced me that this school is worth it. Now the most interesting thing is that there are about 65% who graduate, and out of them almost 80% get jobs. I like the fact that there is a huge amount of students that do not graduate because that really proves you’ve got to be motivated to make it through.

The school is 18 months strait. That said, I need to plan a trip back to my roots preferably before March 18th and after the Pablo Fransisco show, March 8th. This will probably be the last time I visit Ulsteinvik before autumn or even Christmas!

Hope my friends will give me time for this… and space, especially during summer. I’ll have one week, and I’ve just heard that All That Remains are coming to the Hove Festival, along with Disturbed and Slipknot as headliners. Seems like I may get to watch a whole lot of awesome bands this summer if I plan it right.

During the webinar I got informed of stuff happening prior to the school start, (March 30th.) There was some milestones at March 18th and 20th, but I don’t remember exactly what happens when. I guess I’ll get some kind of email reminding me at some point anyway. Too bad I cannot look at a recording of the webinar; could be useful to take some notes.

Not much has happened these last few days. My parents were visiting and I spent a lot of time over at my sisters, staring at the walls. Listening and sometimes participating in the endless discussions with my father. Fortunately I do not have to have him around as long as I’m studying AM.

My nephew’s birthday was also covered this Tuesday, he turned 5, and as I knew his parents was buying him a Wii I bought him the Lego StarWars Saga. It was amazing to see how the kid glued himself to the TV set. He blocked out everything, occasionally he would call on his father to get help with the puzzles, but he would be eating his food in lightning speed to play even more. Then came the time to shut it off. The kid went crazy. I know I too had an issue with my parents turning off my system before I wanted to go to bed, but this really put things in perspective; I guess I was about 11-12 when I first bought my own NES, (I’m not sure, but I know the SNES was out,) I remember my disappointment when I had carried it two kilometers only to find out that it didn’t include any game. And the other disappointment in not having the cash to get one. Kids always go crazy, but I remember being limited to Legos.

No Comments | In: Life, Random | | #