All good things has to come to an end!

Today was my last day at Ambient Entertainment! I've been working as an animator here in Germany for the past 4 1/2 months and it's been some very good months! Ambient is an awesome place to work!

Even though I've been there for a very short time, I feel that I've learned a lot and grown as an animator. I've picked up some really good tips and tricks from both my co-workers and from my supervisors, who are the nicest guys ever. I feel very very lucky to have gotten a job at Ambient as my first step into the real animation world.

The worst thing about leaving, is the parting from all the great new friends I've made during these 4 1/2 months. Every day when I went home from work, my cheeks were hurt from laughing all day. It's been fantastic! I'm gonna miss those guys and I hope that sometime in the future, we will be working together again.

Bye bye Germany. It's been a true pleasure!

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you all!

The Hobbit

Peter Jackson will after all be involved in the making of The Hobbit. This is awesome news for a true LOTR fan :)



More about the great news at the official The Hobbit Movie blog.

Goodies

Over the past month there's been posted some goodies from the animation world on the internet.

A few weeks ago, Victor Navone posted the one shot he did from Ratatouille, followed by some really cool thumbnails he has done at Pixar. It's nice to get a peak into how he's planning and thinking about his shots. Navone also did the first e-critique at the 11 Second Club. It's a great learning resource, especially how he talks about the importance of showing the characters thought process.

Another animator that has been sharing his process is Justin Barrett. On his website he's posted the progress of a 25 second long shot with Puss in Boots from a marketing campaign for Shrek the Third.

The second part of the interview with Dale Baer is out at The Animation PodCast. Great to learn more about his generation's experience at Disney, kind of overlapping the Nine Old Men and todays young animators, and how they see the transition from 2d to 3d.

It was really cool to see the 2d work that James Baxter did on Enchanted. Beautiful animation. Can't wait to see it on the big screen. I'm really happy about Disney getting back to 2d, with the Goofy short and the Princess and the Frog with Ron and John back behind the wheel.

I'm also superexcited about the upcoming video tutorials from Jason Ryan. He's started to post some Ramp Up tutorials already. Sign up to his newsletter and get the goodies :) It's gonna be great stuff!

Exciting times ahead :)

Featured in the Animation Mentor Newsletter

This month, two of my awesome classmates (and co-workers), Michael, Carmelo and me, are featured in a full article in the Animation Mentor Newsletter.

Click here to see the article: "3 Students - 3 Countries - 1 Feature"

Caricatures

I'm sharing a room at Ambient with 4 great guys. One of them is an Italian jukebox that have decided to make caricatures of us. I'm not sure about the theme here, but he obviously thinks that the Christmas needs to be saved somehow. Anyway, fun stuff :)

Here's Mitja's interpretation of Micha, Carmelo, Patrick and me: