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!

Until I see my loved one again!

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

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...

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.

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

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.

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. :)

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. :)

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!

Victor ate a Burger in Budapest

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

But it was enough to make Victor happy!

10 hours ago...

10 hours ago we entered a taxi to the train station in Ludwigsburg. Now we're just about to eat the first real meal of the day in Stockholm. Hello Sweden!

We still have a bit to go though, at 00:20 we'll set foot in Visby. (for the ones wondering what the hell we will be doing for 8 hours, we have to travel to a harbour and then go on a ferry for 3 hours)

Then I can finally say "Hello home!"

Summary of Budapest

Second attempt at summarising Budapest... it's a city of history, and there are so many impressions to take in while being there. I really recommend visiting it (don't forget to visit both sides of the river, basically completely different cities!), but do spend some money on getting a decent hotel... ours literally stank of crap. Anyway, here goes!

As a swede, the language is impossible to understand. For example 'thank you' is 'köszönöm'. It also sounds a lot like Finnish.

We found this sign on a pizzeria close to the hotel we stayed at. We discussed the different possible meanings of it, but I think we decided on 'We do not serve sushi!!!'. Since it's a pizzeria and all.

One of the treasures of Budapest. Sandwiches in every size and form! You could order 10 smaller ones in a box to bring with you, and they would have everything! Salmon, egg, tuna, salami, roast beef, cheese, brie cheese, ham, clam...

Since everything in Hungary is really cheap as well, these were only 3 swedish crowns per sandwich. I miss them already.

Nomnomnomnomnomnomnomnom

This sign belonged to our favorite pizzeria. They actually had awesome service and tasty food, and they also introduced me to the awesome concept of having sour cream on your pizzas instead of tomato sauce.



Unless you apply the sign to our hotel of course... besides stinking of crap they liked to turn every room into a sauna. They would go in during the day and turn the heaters up to max and close the windows. Don't ask me. Onwards!


The meals were gigantiiiic!

(depending on what you ordered of course... Victor always managed to get the humongous meals)

Quite often you will see these random holes in Budapest. I don't know the history behind them, but it seems like the old building has been torn down and then not been replaced by a new building. One hole had been turned into a parking lot, but many of them are just empty like this.



It's kind of odd when you walk by these at night, as there are no lights at all in them, just a big black... hole.

And finally, speaking of contrasts in Budapest. Here are two more examples of how different styles neighbouring houses will have.