Inside Konsernen

Welcome to my room in the apartment! We're
currently in a house far out on Refshaleøen, a
former military area. (more photos on that later on!)

This is part of the view from my window.
Hello Öresund! (note the hidden bunker)

This is my room again... from the other side.
You can see the bathroom on the other side of the hallway.

If you look to the right, there's the mighty hallway.
There's 12 rooms all in all for 13 people.

If you turn around 180 degrees from the last photo, you
end up at the stairs. And beyond that you find our little
kitchen! And a washing machine.

Recap Week 07

The last week has been a break from work, so I don't really have a lot to report. So, I'll discuss the lessons learned from the last two weeks and how I will continue to use them.

My first issue to overcome was communicating with the sound designer. None of us had really worked with each other's roles before, so the first interactions were a bit awkward.

Troels had us do an exercise within each department (sound/music, animation, programming, etc) where we had to imagine performing a job for a client who had no clue how to do anything. As an animator, I need a certain amount of information to know if I can make the deadline, or even make the animation at all. And if my client don't know what information to give me, it's handy if I have a number of questions written down somewhere that will give me what I need.

And that's exactly what me and my fellow animator Valeria did! We put together a document with five different categories, and 3-4 questions for each category. The questions included stuff as "How many characters are there in the shot?", "What are the key events?" and "How does the characters relate to each other?"

As it turns out, these questions aren't only good for clients who don't have a clue about anything. They are good questions to have in the back of your mind for any type of animation you do. Say the director forgets to tell you that the shot is only going to show the face of the character, and you start animating the whole body. That's a lot of wasted work that could have been avoided with just one simple question.

So, to come back to the issue I mentioned in the beginning. Our first communications were a bit slow because none of us really knew what we needed to know from each other. But since we've both sat down and written these questions, we have a much better idea of what we need to perform our work. And thus, our communication flows a lot better.

This will hopefully help me in future work as well, whether I work at a studio or as a freelancer. If I can solve issues before they even appear, life will be easier for everyone around me!

The Apartment

Visa större karta

We're getting access to our new apartment on Monday, right on the edge of Öresund! I can almost wave to Sweden. :)

Recap Week 06

We finished up the sprint from week 05 on Monday, and were assigned new ones on Tuesday. Mine was to complete a new animation test of 150 frames on the theme 'Sadness'.

Ideally, one sprint should be divided into several shorter tasks (preferably so short that you can finish them within a work day). This is also to give a sense of progression and have an overview of how much is left on one sprint.

I divided my sprint into the basic stages of animation - Layout, blocking, splining and polishing (I'll go through those in the next recap). I tried to estimate how many hours each stage would take, and made those into the shorter tasks. I also added a bit of work by making my animation 200 frames instead of 150.

Besides animating I also got to do a couple of unexpected tasks. The team had been working on an application for Annecy, and we sat down for a few hours to do some collective proof-reading of the document.

It was a very good document to write in general, I think it gave us all a clearer idea of what we are doing. Plus that there is a huge sense of success in having such a nice-looking document as this!
We also decided on a working title for the project: "Driftwoods".


The writing team sat down to discuss the universe and the characters. I've chosen to not involve myself too much with the writing itself, but I'm still happy to give opinions in the meetings. :)

When Friday and the deadline for this week's Sprint came around I wasn't finished with my Sprint. This was mostly due to the fact that I had planned to spent all of my working hours on animating. But in the end I spent around 6 hours on proof-reading and various meetings, and since I didn't leave any time for unexpected meetings I got short on hours for my animation.

Our conclusion during the evaluation was to leave at least 45 minutes every day for those unexpected meetings and tasks. We also decided within the animation team to plan 30 minutes everyday for feedback sessions. My personal lesson from this week and Sprint was that I got to experience the limit of my abilities, and I know better what I have time to do and not.

Next week is gonna be spent on finishing my animation for last week's Sprint!

Welcome to the Fridge

I want to invite you to a visit to the Office Fridge.
As you can see, here is our office.

If you continue forward a bit, you'll see the emergency exit.
Note how the bridge is 3 floors up and that the floor is see-
through. Don't fret though, cause if you get to the door...

...you arrive at our Fridge. In the emergency stairs.

Recap Week 05

I arrived a few days late this week, and had my first working day on Thursday. While I was gone the others in the team had several lectures, relevant to what they are working on. The concept team got to learn more about how to frame a shot, while the game team focused more on the pipeline.

We were also introduced to Scrum, which is a kind of work process. One of the essential parts of Scrum is that you have a back log. In the back log all of the features for a certain product should be included. The features could for example be stuff that the Product Owner (often the guy with the money) wants to see in the product.

When you have your back log, you decide on a release log. In this log, all of the features that you want in the first release should be included.

For example, if I were to create a TV series of 10 episodes, the back log would include everything I want to show in the the whole series. I decide that my imaginary series will feature one boy and one girl, and their parents.

For my first episode I want to focus only on the girl and boy. To avoid unnecessary work I create a release log where I only include the boy and the girl.

But say that I want to introduce the parents in the second episode. For the release log for the second episode, I would make sure to include all of the characters from my back log.

This works just as well on games, programming, lectures, and really all kind of situations...

When you have your release log, you divide all of the features into a number of Sprints. A Sprint usually lasts 3-30 days, and is a good way to see how the team is progressing. If the team hasn't met the deadline by the end of the sprint, it's a sign that something hasn't gone right.

When I started working on Thursday the team had already gotten Sprints to work with that was due the following Monday. Mine was to work on an animation test with the two main characters for Driftwoods (the working name for our project).

The purpose of this animation test was to see how two characters of very different sizes and moods would work. I also worked with the Sound Designer on adding sound effects and noises to the characters.

I learned a lot about how to work with someone who is dependant on my work to be able to do theirs. When I start my animation I'm now focused on blocking out the major movements as quickly as possible so that the Sound Designer will have an idea of what's going on in the scene.

We had no problem meeting the deadline, and it served as a good basis for the next week's Sprint.

While this was happening the bigger part of the rest of the team are working on fleshing out the universe to be able to write a back log. This was something that carried on to next week, and I will expand more on that then.

See you next week for more scrumming and animating!

Inspiration - Thought of you

More inspiration! I can't say how much I love this video and how fluid the animation is.

Created by the amazing Ryan Woodward!

The Hydroplane Hangar

We're currently working our asses off in Denmark. It's been very fun so far, especially since I've finally started to animate on dummy characters. Since we don't have the actual models or rigs yet (not even a finished concept!), we're just in general working with how the characters in general could interact with each other. This creates a base that we can use later on in the project.

Scrum has been introduced to the group's workflow. In essence, it's a way to organize tasks and have a good overview of the team's progress. It's also quite a contrast to how we used to work before (chaos).

But enough of that for today, I want to introduce you to the awesome building we are working in! It's part of the Danish Design School, and built inside a hangar. I've tried again and again to capture everything on photo, but it's impossible. So I'm just gonna upload a few different photos, and hope that it makes sense.

This is the "office" space in the morning.

The office as seen from the stairs.
We're basically up on a tower inside the hangar.

The stairs and ground floor!
We're on top of the tower on the right.

If you look to the right there are huge windows.
And very pretty light in the mornings.

The view from our tower office.
Note the smaller tower on the left side.

This be the smaller tower and windows as seen from the stairs.

Be right back, going to Denmark

I've spent a couple of nice days at home with my parents. But now new adventures await in Copenhagen where we will get going with a new structure and lots more energy!

Though I am gonna miss this corner... Music has always been a huge part of my life and animation. And it's nice to have a piano to play whenever you feel like it. :)

Inspiration - The Fantastic Flying Books

This animation was made in 2011 by the amazingly creative Moonbot Studios. I was linked to it just a few days ago, and I've rewatched it a few times by now...

It's 15 minutes long, but it's worth every minute. I love everything with it, especially as an animator. The sense of timing is stunning. The little scene at 04:14 is very entertaining!

So for all of you animators, book-loving people and... everyone actually... watch it! It's a piece of movie magic you won't forget. Mom too, there is no english in this movie. :)

The Journey so far

I'd like to take a moment to recap the journey so far. I know a lot of people have been confused about where I've actually been travelling, and where I'm going, so this is the moment to catch up!

January 8th

Me and three classmates left the safety of our little island, and ventured to the amazing Budapest! Here we got to have a lot of various lectures and also get to know each other. It turned out the a large part of the group were from Sweden (and thus we invented the "Swedish Panel" who disapproves if you speak swedish...)

We also created a game in a week. This was both a huge success and a huge failure... a lot of problem arose, and we were able to discuss them in detail and how to avoid creating the same situation in the future. I think that project will help us a lot in the near future, when we start to work on the main project. However we never got a finished game, so we failed in that sense. Still we learned a lot!


January 22nd

Two weeks later we had booked a mini bus to take the whole group to Ludwigsburg. It was a 10 hour ride packed with bags and people, but we were happy when we finally arrived in Germany.

There we enjoyed a week of workshops with Jörg Ihle at the Filmakademie. We focused mostly on the creation of storyworlds (the universe which will spawn into different products). We did this in various ways, one day we would be completely free to do whatever we wanted. The next day we would work from an image in small groups, and then let another group create products from our idea.

January 28th

This day marked the return to Sweden and Visby. We made an epic 18-hour journey with a train, two flights, two busses and finally a ferry. And when we finally reached home, we were very tempted to go back to Germany straight away... they didn't have loads of snow and -12 Celsius. Brrrrrr.

It's still pretty though. This is just outside the school!

I have mostly spent this time reflecting on what I've learned so far, and whether I have it in me to continue (as it is very stressful to travel around and spend all day long working). I actually had to visit the dentist because of the stress, I'd been grinding my teeth so much in my sleep I could barely eat anything, haha....

I also baked. A lot. Enjoy these samples!

February 8th

The journey to come... instead of going to Cologne, we're going straight to Copenhagen where we will spend the rest these 6 months. We've gotten to see some images of the work spaces, and it looks amaaaaazing... there will be a lot of photos once I get there.

We're staying there for two weeks until the next study break at home. Those two weeks are planned to be spent on learning pipelines and working on a benchmark (basically, creating stuff that will show how we want the finished product to look). I'm hoping it's gonna be a lot of fun!

Recap Week 03 - Inga Staden

Week number 3 was located in Ludwigsburg, Germany. We had workshops led by Jörg Ihle and a lecture by Inga Staden, both of which are very skilled and inspiring people.

Inga Staden's lecture is kind of already on the blog, as I used my notes from it and turned it into a presentation. To make things simple I'll just insert it below, so that you don't have to have two separate blog posts open.

Trans-media Workflow on Prezi

The "Development" section are notes from her lecture (use the arrows to move back and forth between the slides, or just drag to move around freely)

First we went through what a Trans-media team should include. It would be very important to have a Trans-media producer who makes sure that everything keeps together. You would also have a Content Director who makes sure that the overall experience of all the products created, is coherent.

As we experienced in the first two weeks, there are a lot of differences between working with animated movies and games. There are different workflows, the team members have different perspectives, and so on. A Trans-media producer and a Content Director would in that case be very important to bridge the gap between different teams and make them work as a whole.

So if you click forward a bit in the presentation, you should come to a frame with the word "Brainstorming". The thought of this type of workflow is that the whole Trans-media team should brainstorm together to form a common storyworld.

Then the teams split up into their format teams (my examples in the presentation are games and movies) to individually produce assets for the product. After a while the teams re-unite to evaluate and optimize their efforts. And then we go back to the beginning with brainstorming!

This was our lecture with Inga Staden. I'd never considered the importance of having a Trans-media producer for example, or that you can split up into different teams and then reunite, so I found this to be very interesting.

Victor ate a Burger in Budapest

This wasn't the biggest burger they had...

But it was enough to make Victor happy!