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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…If you do, and only want help with that, I suggest you just click the link at the bottom of this post.

OK, so I have apparently been really busy these last weeks, and on top of it all I have been trying to have some fun as well. Anyways, AM is back on its tracks for a new term and I am really stoked to have Elliott Roberts as my mentor this class; he has been working in Pixar, Tippett Studio, Blue Sky and more as well as the most awesome thing he has done is to work at Double Fine on Brütal Legend… Which brings me to the fact that it is right around the corner. :O I played the demo Yesterday and it felt like it was too short, but I guess I would get even more dissatisfied if the end of the demo came further into the game, as the game sucks you in more and more and more. There is so many things going on this time of year and it is impossible to grasp it all; Tv-shows starting to air (South-Park tonight) games coming out (BL, Uncharted 2, MI5 Season…), AnimationMentor and of course Qvisten work.

I have finally started my Business, (Howlstone M.A.S.S.,) while I was in Ulsteinvik and registered a domain and billing account for it today. Even made a nifty little logo to put on my domain site until I can come up with a decent way to percent myself.

Anyways, I’m looking into a new hobby so I bought myself something eventually convenient the other day; a Cannon EOS 7D D-SLR + accessories. Of course work and for now school related; I can learn a lot form using this camera for filming reference as well as shooting images used for textures. The hobby part would be learning to use it, as I am not too good with a camera yet, but I’m aiming to be and that is the reason for the investment, so there. Oh why talk about it when I can show a thread from the Video Copilot blog? =) I am not making movies; Just shooting reference, with a tripod, so i don’t experience the camera jitter mentioned in his video. Other than that I’m using a 18-135mm objective, and that is about it.

So the main reason why I wanted to waste an hour of my needed sleep to come up with something to brag about is that I wanted to share something I came across online:
I was having really a distinct lag in my AnimationMentor video lectures, nothing to do with AnimationMentor though, but the fact that I was watching flash video. I decided to do a little Google on the issue (laggy flash playback) and a little poking around lead my to this article on life hacker. Now this works for Firefox only as far as I know, bu it certainly worked for me. And another thing: It won’t take effect unless you restart FF after the change. If this doesn’t work though I have been before lead to do a complete uninstall of flash (Google flash uninstaller) and then do a fresh install. Either of this two should improve playback. Cheers.

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Class 2 Progress reel

Finished up Episode 3 of Tales of Monkey Island today, realizing that it is over a month since my last post.

I have been back in my home town for a couple of weeks, and now I am starting on class 3 in AM. My mentor this term is Elliott Roberts, who’s worked on a particular game I have mentioned a lot of in my previous posts and has release date Rocktober 13th in the US. He’s probably got one of the coolest bosses ever.

I had to swap with 2 other students in order to get into his class, which also was the most convenient class for me; Tuesdays at 6pm (my time)
Thankfully my Peerbuddy, Jason Jansky, from class 1 who had a break this summer term, made the connections in this week’s q&a, which I sadly couldn’t get due to being in another class at that moment.

Starting my own business now and need to get into the arts of invoicing as well. It can’t be too complicated, but I want to be sure that I don’t mess up any paperwork.

Its the time of the year again where all the TV shows start to air, and I don’t catch sleep,  so I cannot say I was very happy with having to do a time consuming system setup on my computer, because of constant blue screens and instabilities.

Thanks for reading, now I need to sleep…

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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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