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.

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!

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!

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!

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.

Trans-media Workflow

Trans-media Workflow on Prezi

We're packing up to leave Ludwigsburg and go to Sweden! It's been three loooong weeks, but an incredible amount of fun.

I'll leave you with this Prezi presentation. Click the arrows to get the presentation, or just use the buttons on the right to drag and scale around at any time. It's mostly notes from this week, but I hope you enjoy it anyway!

Recap Week 02

This is a post for my course at University. It's a long post analyzing a shorter game that the Eucroma group created last week, and why the game wasn't finished. Just so you know. :)


- We spent the last week working on a shorter project that would be finished on Thursday. The project was to create a smaller game that would be playable by the end of the week. The intention of doing a project over 4 days was to test the pipeline and the group. We would hopefully be able to see where problems would arise in a more controlled setting, and bring those lessons with us into the big project.

Everyone who wanted to was involved in the process of creating the idea. The goal was to at least create a simple game; if we had the time we would also create a trailer for the game. As I wanted to focus on a personal project and didn’t care too much about what type of game we would make, I chose to not involve myself too much in the beginning phase.

We chose to keep the concept phase short. Within the first day we had an idea for a game and designs for the two main characters. The rest of the time was spent on production of the assets needed for the game.

The tools I needed to start my work on the game (animation) involved two other people – the modeller and the rigger. The modeller created the character from the designs our Production Designer made. When that was done, the rigger received the character and created a so-called skeleton for it. The character that the modeller created will then act as a skin on the skeleton, as with a real human being.

This also involved a lot of communicating. Even though I couldn’t actually start animating until I had a character with a skeleton, I could give feedback on the process of the character creation. At this time I also communicated with the programmers. They knew what kind of animations they needed for the game to look believable. In our case the game involved throwing and getting hit by various instruments, and so we needed characters that looked like they are doing so.

In a perfect world, this would have been a fast and smooth process. But as we, after all, are a group of people from around Europe that has never worked together before, there were a lot of problems that arose once we were in production.

 - The most important problem was that there was no direction. As with any kind of bigger group that needs to produce something, whether it is a game, orchestra or basketball team, you need someone to organize the effort. It could be a coach, conductor, or in this case a Game Designer (from now known as GD). The GD has an overview of the progression of the game, and makes sure that the end product is something that’s enjoyable to play. (this is a very simplified version of the role)

In this short project we didn’t have a GD, or any other kind of leading role. This was due to the fact that the leading group (GD, Producers, Production Designer and Animation Director) spent almost all of their time in meetings concerning the main project. Specifically the universe that is to be created for it.

One of many consequences of this was that the programmers had to take focus away from their main task and take decisions that the GD should have been responsible for. Among many things they had to design how you actually play the game. This process was very rushed because the programmers still had to do the actual programming, so a lot of bad decisions were taken.

Simply put, since no one had taken direction of the general direction and experience of the game, it wasn't something that could engage the player. In the first play-through of the game we realised that it wasn't very fun to play at all. As a result the programmers had to throw away everything they had done so far and create a completely new game. Something that should have been avoided with a clear direction from the beginning.

- The creative team also experienced a lot of turbulence. Since we are very dependent on each other’s work, it’s important that we share the same vision about how the end product should look. If a few people think that we are making an apple, and some other people think that we are making a banana, then there’s going to be a lot of confusion in the communication within the team.

One way to avoid this would have been to have a central point of information about the concept. This source of information could for example be a Style Guide, Wiki-page, etc. It would be updated with info and clarifications for different aspects as problems and questions arise.

There was a lack of direction in the creative team as well. The Production Designer who designed the characters weren’t available enough to answer all of the questions, and no one had an oversight of the process. I had no way of knowing if the file I received was approved for the next step in the process, because there was no one there to approve it.

In the end the project never got finished. We had a lot of finished assets, but the game as a whole wasn’t playable. There were a lot of smaller issues as well, but I believe that the two issues I’ve described above are the causes of project being unfinished.


If you have read this far, I would really appreciate if you left a comment on how easy/hard it was to understand. I’m trying to keep my language open so that non-game production people can read it too, so please point out for me if there are any passages or words that are confusing. Thank you!

Obligatory post about Eucroma

Hello! Welcome to my blog about Eucroma. It hasn't been much about Eucroma so far, but we'll change that right now!!

So, what the hell is Eucroma? You can find some information over here, but I'll try to write a summary that's easier to understand and more in context of what I've learned while being here.

Basically, with every product released for entertainment (movies, games, comics, books) there exists some kind of universe. This universe is what allows us to take a book and remake it into a movie, and we will still recognize the story and characters. In the same sense, it's what allows us to make a movie into a game, and so on. As long as the essential things in the universe are used for the new product, we will recognize it and make a connection.

For example... The universe of Mario or... The Lord of the Rings.

Eucroma was put together with the intent of creating a joint universe, and based on that create a game and some kind of movie. The actors behind Eucroma are a couple of Universities around Europe (which is why we're visiting a couple of different cities, that's where the different Universities are located).

All in all we're slowly nearing 20 students from around northern Europe. Most of us are from Sweden, but we also have a few from Denmark, Holland and Bulgaria. We're divided into two teams with different focus (games and movies), with a few people that will deliver stuff to both teams (such as music and sound effects). Yours truly is focusing on producing 3d animation for the movie.

It's a very interesting process, because the two teams have to work very closely together. Right now the concept people (the ones who come up with the initial ideas) is in another room discussing wildly about how the universe could be like.

The goal by the end of these 6 months is to have a small piece of a game and a movie. Anyone who has ever worked in this industry knows how much work it can be, and our focus is on creating something that will be as finished as possible. So, it's gonna be 30 seconds of animated movie instead of 30 minutes. But there's nothing stopping us from creating a full movie later on!

One of the questions that we will try to answer with this project is more or less: Could it be possible to create better products through focusing on the creation of the universe (rather than game mechanics or story)

I hope that this whole eucroma things will be a lot clearer now. Every monday I'll post a recap of the week that's been for a course at the University. So even if it's still confusing you'll get a lot more insight and understanding of what I'm actually doing. But for now, good night!