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)

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!

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. :)

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.

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.

My new door!

Wojtek made me an awesome door sign! Thank you!

She and Bravo made a bunch of door signs for everyone in the corridor.
This is my favorite :)

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.