The day of the apocalypse

Looking at our apartment, you would think we have had one hell of a party.... actually we're just cleaning and packing and preparing to move to Stockholm in a few days.

How come it always looks much worse when you're in the middle of cleaning compared to how it was before? My conclusion is that cleaning is bad. Don't do it!

Is this now a running blog?

 Maybe it is! My last post around two months ago was about running and ducks, and now I'll be writing about... running!

There are a lot of other things that have been going on though besides running. Primarily thesis-writing, but also a bit of vacation, vector drawing and animation. But more about that in another post!

I wanted to show you a few photos from my running route, as Visby is probably one of the best places to run around in. At least it's a step up from the nice scenery of factories that we got in Denmark!

The harbor that is filled with boats now that it's summer.

Oldest tower in town, it was finished during 13th century.

Pretty nice road for running, with a constant lovely breeze from the ocean.

Welcome to the swedish beach! Together with the lovely
breeze, there's also the nice smell of seaweed.

The ocean plus sunset provides some rather dramatic scenery at times.

Looking back at Visby. See that tiny silo way back? That's the same silo
as in the harbor picture at the top.

I usually run on the inside of the wall on the way back. It's pretty impressive.

Stone goats that can be found everywhere in Visby.
Also inside of the wall and stuff in the background.

This was taken during another day, but I usually pass these houses on the
way home. Also note the roses, it's not called the Island of Roses for nothing!

At least the ducks liked it

I was out running last week when halfway it started pouring down... but it was still warm, so it ended up being a pretty nice run after all!

On the way home I saw these ducks, they seemed to enjoy the highly uneven roads and the smaller lakes they create when it rains.

Which way is the time?

(sign says Halfpasteleven)

Some hip-hop animation

Yesterday I attended a 25-hour animation marathon! I spent 7 hours creating a short hip-hop dance battle thingie, might not be the best animation ever but it was loads of fun to play around with crazy moves.

Without further ado! (I will post a new version later on when the studio responsible for the marathon has had a chance to light and render it!)

Photos from my running route

I'm trying to get myself running! If anyone is interested, this is the route I run. I've kept it up for three weeks so far, holding my thumbs I can keep it up for several more weeks! (or even months...)

The studio

It's taken a long time, but here are some photos of our studio! We're on the top-floor of a building, and well... it's only us here on 600 square meters right now! Lots of room for running around and capturing references for animation. :)

We mainly only use three rooms though. One is for administration, one for programmers and techy people and one is for the artsy people. As you enter the rooms you notice pretty soon which is which. The walls in the artsy room is covered with concept art, storyboards and well... badly photoshopped images of Abba. (yes that's me on the far right)

While the tech room (also room for the music and sound designer) stays true to its origins. Also it's empty because I went around and took these photos at 7pm somewhere. The art people have a loooot to do right now, so there are always people staying until 11pm at least...

Let's continue to the rest of the house! We have a kitchen that's pretty useless at the moment, we don't have any microwave or kitchenware... but we can cook coffee for the addicted ones at least. We also have a meeting room where we do our morning meetings everyday. On Fridays we gather there to have Show and Tell of the work done during the week.

I'll wrap this post up with a photo of the house where we live! We have the top floor here too. I have the room on the opposite side of the house, with a beautiful view over the rest of Copenhagen. Sometimes living far out on a peninsula is not that bad!

TBC this weekend...

Life and work is taking up a bit too much time! Last weekend I went home to my parents and hung out with them and my boyfriend for my birthday.

I came back to the studio on Tuesday, and has since then been working day and night (or well, evening) on animating one of the characters for the game... I have loads of photos to show and ideas to write about, but that will have to wait until the weekend.

Just popping in to say that I'm still alive. :)

Until I see my loved one again!

Yes it's so silly and stupid, but I don't care, only 3 days left!!!

I wanted to show you something....

Our wall of concept art!

...but a wild producer appeared and blurred all the images. :(

Rainy Day

I was planning on going out running and all kinds of things today, but considering the rain and the sound of winds outside.... I think I will stay inside and draw storyboards instead.

My window... looking gray and boring outside. :(

An excellent way to spend time on these days is Munchkins!

Friday Night

The view from our kitchen window is breath-taking sometimes.

(my amazing setup for the last photo)

My snacks for the evening, and some Breaking Bad. :)

Still coughing...

I'm now in Copenhagen and staying until June 1st. It's been a somewhat rough start to this period though as I was down with fever and all kinds of nice stuff last week, and I still have a pretty bad cough.

So over the last few days I've barely gotten any sleep due to coughing, and barely eating anything since I have no appetite. My body said stop today and tried to get me to throw up, ahahah... so I've spent today home, also gonna spend tomorrow at home getting some rest.

Fun times! I'm hoping I'm on my way to getting healthier now though, I'll be back in business soon. :)

Visby before the tourist season

Visby is quite different in the early spring, compared how it is during the summer.
The harbor that is now completely empty will be full with boats and people eating
ice-cream and enjoying the sun. But if you don't want to share Visby with a
bazillion tourists, March/April or September is a perfect time to come visit.
Hope you enjoy this little photo journey!

This is a nightclub that's open during the day (Kallis). During July hundreds of
people will be here dancing (and the poor students studying summer courses get to
hear people partying all day long haha... makes you wish you were partying too)
It's only open during the summer though.

The "Beach". Well, it's Sweden after all, you have to expect rocks and mud!
Just waiting for the trees to start blooming and this place will be really nice.

The Almedalen Park (Almedalsparken). I love the silhouettes of the old houses
and church ruins!

While there aren't many people around, there's plenty of birds...
They seem to be having a party. :)

This is the major square in town, with the biggest ruin of Visby in the background
(S:t Karin Ruins). This is how it looks as soon as the tourists leave for the summer,
and they always clean it up just in time for the tourist season to begin...
At least this time they're making the square look really nice with completely
new flooring and design!

This alley houses two of the city's nightclubs - The Monk Cellar (the the left)
and the Gute Cellar (the white house to the right).
At the end of the alley is a game studio my old teachers started up!

Finishing off with this photo - the main street for pedestrians to get up and
down the hill. It's eerily quiet now, but in a couple of months...
I can't wait to come back to Visby!!

Coughing my way to Denmark

I'm currently on a bus on my way to Stockholm, where I will take a train heading toward Copenhagen!

It's sad to leave friends and loved ones on Gotland, but we're already more than half through the program! I'll soon be back again. :)

A bigger problem right at the moment is that I'm stuck on a bus with very dry air, and I have the cough of doom and no water. Neveragain...

Kalles Kaviar

Young ambitions

I've always had one great passion - storytelling. I've done this in several different forms and variations, as a kid I used to do a bit of theatre and dancing. Something that's stuck with me for a very long time is music, I started playing piano with sheet music around 6, and then classical upright bass at 8.

My favorite pieces to play have always been those that seem to tell a story. You might wonder what storytelling has to do with music, but listen to The Girl with Flaxen Hair by Debussy and you might understand... he doesn't necessarily tell you who the characters are or what the story is, but if you close your eyes and let imagination run wild it's pretty easy to come up with something or relive old memories.

Another piece that I love is this piece by Shostakovich. It's played with two pianos, but they play so differently that you could almost envision each piano as a character with a distinct personality. In the beginning they seem to be discussing with each other, almost agreeing until... well, what do you think is happening?

(for those of you with Spotify, I really recommend this version of it)

High ambitions at 3 years old!

But I didn't really start until 6 years old.

I've also always been interested in the more classical versions of storytelling. I read a lot of comics and books as a child, and once I was introduced to Sailor Moon I became almost obsessed with creating my own stories about girly superheroes. I also managed to create a decent amount of comics based on the Spyro game series...

Eventually I moved on from Sailor Moon and got very enthusiastic about the manga world. I got in touch with people drawing comics like me, and made quite a lot of silly comics...

But at the end of high school I got an advertisement from another university in Sweden offering programs on animation... I realized then that animation encompasses everything I had done and loved so far. And so I went from doing comics and music to doing animation full-time!

3 year old me in the middle of telling a story to the bear.

Inspiration - Fishing under ice

While I'm home on Gotland and enjoying some time off the project, enjoy this!

Recap Week 09

We spent this week finishing up discussion on the storyworld, and went on to start discussing the teaser that we are gonna produce these last two and a half months.

The storyworld doesn't have much to do with story itself. The storyworld contains all the parts that allows a story to exist. The story is basically just a series of events based on that world.

So, the storyworld that we have been developing includes the main characters, their biographies, the relationships between them, the social structure of the world, culture and history. Now we just have to throw in some kind of conflict into this storyworld that affects the main characters, and we have a story.

This gives us as writers an incredible power of the stories that we create. We could choose to make a feature film movie, a game, a blog, etc. Since we already have the brickstones to play with, we just need to order them in an interesting way and adjust them to the media of our choice.

For this project we are creating a teaser. A teaser is, just as it's called, teasing your interest for something bigger to come. It's like a trailer but shorter, often only 60 seconds long.

In the teaser we will show a few of the characters and a very limited amount of the storyworld. We aim to show as much as possible in how the characters look and behave, but a 60 second long teaser is really not the place to delve deep into the inner workings of your universe... our focus is catching the audience, and wanting them to see MORE.

As we are also creating a game, we will incorporate the storyworld into that. The game will also have a story that is pretty closely bound with the teaser. They will both show the same main characters and storyworld, but they will focus on different aspects of it. You might get to know one character in the teaser, and get to follow the journey of another in the game.

The goal is to create an experience where the teaser and game works on their own, but together you'll learn much more about the storyworld.

How to create a Game Character

...where the character in question is a swing, and the game is of course swinging!

This presentation goes through the basic steps of how you would create a 3d character, rig and animate it, and then implement it into a game. If you have no idea what I just said, hopefully you'll know after clicking through this thing below! Don't worry, it won't bite. (it's actually pretty cute)

Enjoy! :)

PS. When it's loaded, look at the bottom-right corner and click "More". Then click "Fullscreen", it's a lot easier to read!

The Swing on Prezi

Refshaleøen

Refshaleøen (the area where we live) from our bathroom window.
It's an old military area, now there seems to be mostly industries.

These photos are taken on the way to the hangar.

This is the office we're moving to in 2 weeks! Basically we have the whole
top floor to ourselves, looots and lots of space! :)

Beautiful Denmark

Recap Week 08

This week I started off with a promotion – from animator to lead animator! Actually, since we aren’t that many people, I kind of naturally fell into a role where people would come to me if they had questions about the animation.

What this means is that I’ll do a lot of things besides purely animating. I’ll spend a lot of time communicating with the other members of the team, discussing issues that arise and how to work together more effectively. I will also work on developing a pipeline for the animation department.

The team acquired two new members this week – a rigger and texture artist. The rigger works very closely together with the animators on creating the rig and tools needed for animation. The texture artist works on giving the character color and texture.

I worked mostly with the rigger during the week. We tested the controls he created for the model in a number of different ways, and gave feedback. To make it easier for both ourselves and newcomers to the group, we try to find a standard way of doing various tasks. So during the testing of the rig, I’ve also come up with a series of tasks that finds problems within the rig while being time-efficient.

The writing team continued discussions on the story world and story. We focused on inner themes, the underlying questions behind the story. One inner theme that we discussed came from Dexter – “Can you live a normal life while being a serial killer?”

We also focused on the relation between our two main characters and came to a lot of interesting solutions. Basically we sat down with a huge paper and wrote down their different ideas, approaches to life, and every little bit and piece that came to mind. There was even a discussion about how the main characters would approach euthanasia compared to our world and to each other.

One important thing to realise when you develop a story is that most of the stuff you come up with during the beginning phases are never going to be mentioned in the final script. Our characters may never actually discuss or experience euthanasia, but it still gave us a lot to discuss it. Because now we know how the characters in general approach death, and it’s easy to incorporate in various events and lines of dialogue.

The more you develop around your actual story line, the more fleshed-out and believable your universe will feel. It’s one thing to say that “the character didn’t care when his mother died”, it’s a completely different thing to be able to back that line up with an explanation of why he wouldn’t care.

And that wrapped up this week’s work!

SPRING!

It's a whole whopping 7 Celsius here in Denmark! The birds are whistling, swans swimming around in the water, sky is blue... it doesn't get much better than this.