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:

Quadrupeds

Here's a couple of quadruped cycle-tests I've done with the Animation Mentor dog rig.

Admirable!

Just read on CGTalk that Jeff Lew is close to releasing his feature film - Killer Bean Forever. He spent 4 years doing a 85 min animated feature - alone! I totally admire people that does these kinds of things. They have a dream and they do it - however crazy it might sound. I'm sure the process of making this movie is worth it alone for Mr. Lew, but I do hope that it will pay off financially as well. The trailer looks really cool!

Another guy who's website I came across several years ago, that did the same thing is Sam Chen. He spent 3 years and a lot of savings making his short film "Eternal Gaze". Reading his diary about the making of it is impressive and a huge inspiration. I bought the DVD a few years back and its a wonderful piece!

Kudos to those who dare following their dreams all the way!

Pluggin' away

Not too much going on lately. I've been busy practicing lipsync (which is darn hard) in my sparetime and at work things goes very well. Been working at Ambient Entertainment for 2 1/2 month now and still lovin' it.

Just downloaded the latest podcast (Dale Baer) from The Animation Podcast and I was happy to hear that Animation Mentor now is sponsoring the site, which means that they're gonna put out a new podcast every month. This is awesome news! Those podcasts are a huuuuge inspiration and worth listing to more than once.

Enjoy :)

Save the Cheerleader

Yes, I'm a "Heroes"-fan :) Here's a quick facial test I've been working on lately.

Student Showcase Fall 2007

The AM Student Showcase from Fall 2007 is out. It's amazing to see all the cool work that comes out of the school. And it makes me extra proud that they have included a shot from my short film in the short film highlight section :)

Congratulation Kent & Celin!

My little brother just got married, while on holiday in NY, at the Norwegian Church in New York City. Nobody knew anything about it in advance. Freakin' awesome! Huge congrats to you both :)

A small animation test

I've been working on a little animation test lately. It's for nothing else than just practicing and for fun. Hope you like it.

Quadrupeds and life drawing - a good week :)

The past week has been pretty good. I finished a quadruped-shot at work (my first quadruped-shot ever) and started a new acting/dialogue shot. I really enjoy the planning/blocking phase. Its so much fun exploring different choices, shooting reference (which is a lot more fun when you're two), trying it all out with thumbnails and then start blocking it in. Lovin' it :)

We attended a life drawing class last week. It was pretty cool, except that it showed me, big time, that I totally suck at drawing :) But gotta keep doing it. 5000 drawings before a good one comes along, right? (and at least 1000 before I'm posting anything here).

I've been a subscriber to Keith Lango's VTS's since the beginning and last week I started to watch them all over again from the beginning. It's pretty cool to watch them from my current point of view, now that I have some experience and can relate to what he's talking about in a new and different way. VTS 12 and 13 in particular is awesome, where he talks about acting and how to get uniqueness into the poses. Check it out! The subscription is cheap and the information in there is pure gold.

Exaggeration and Variation in Timing

Found a couple of great animation tips on Victor Navone's blog.
The first one is about that exaggeration not necessarily only means faster, snappier and bigger, but also slower, smaller and subtler. The other one is about trying to get at least 3 speeds into the shot to get texture and variation into the timing.

Enjoy!

Trying to get faster - backfired!

As stated in earlier posts, I feel slow. We were warned about this at school. It's normal and it's expected cause we're new, right? However, it's still bothering me. During AM I found a workflow that I was really comfortable with and I used it on every shot when I was making my shortfilm. Now, when I'm in a production environment, where deadlines are more important (or at least the consequences bigger), I find myself skipping steps in my workflow in order to find ways to get faster. But the thing is, skipping important steps in fact takes a lot longer, because I don't feel in total control anymore.

My AM workflow included thorough analysis of the videoreferences (Not to copy it, but to get a feel for whats happening in the acting and what the body does). I still shoot reference and thumbnail the main poses from it, but I've not analysed it the same way as I did in school. Some shots has turned out ok without doing this, but on other shots I find myself confused and scratching my head wondering what went wrong. Then I spend tons of time trying to fix whats not working. Shawn Kelly (AM Co-founder) has said several times "The shots that I'm most happy with and animated the quickest, is the ones where I spent most time planning in advance". There's probably something in that :)

It's probably an experience thing and I guess I'll get better at a deciding which shots needs that kind of thorough analysis and which ones don't. However, the old Disney-guys filmed reference of everything and analysed the heck out of it before animating :), so skipping that step is probably not a good solution to animating faster - at least not for me.

So for now, back to my good old checklist and still looking for other ways to speed up my workflow :)

Bobby Beck and Carlos Baena interview!

I came across an interview with two of the co-founders of Animation Mentor, Bobby Beck and Carlos Baena, done by Anand Baid, a classmate of mine from Animation Mentor.


Bobby Beck/Carlos Baena Interview Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4

Also, check out the latest Animation Podcast with Ray Harryhausen. Its so cool to hear one of the animationpioneers sharing his toughts. Awesome!

And finally, an interview with Pete Docter done by the Spline Doctors!

Enjoy!

The real world

I've only been working as an animator on-site for about three weeks now and I'm not sure if I'm fit to describe the life as a professional animator yet, but here's some quick thoughts about what I've noticed so far.

First of all - I love it. There's no doubt whatsoever that this is what I want to do for the rest of my life. There's no big surprises so far. I wanted to get into animation because as an animator I can direct my of own shots to a certain degree and at the same time being directed by the supervisor/director - I can perform without being on stage, well hidden behind the computer screen and finally and most important, I'm never done learning. There's always tons of space for growing and there will always be something new to learn about the craft, independent of where I am or what I'm working on.

As a newbie, I feel really slow, which can be frustrating (it's normal I guess), but it forces me to always try to search for ways to do stuff faster (preferably without sacrificing quality), which is cool! At the studio I'm sharing a room with five awesome people and their feedback is really helpful, but I wish I had more time to ask them for feedback and to make corrections based on it. The supervisor's feedback is really great though and I feel that I learn something new every single day!

On the private side, I just moved into a really nice apartment here in Hannover. Soon my wife will join me, which I'm really looking forward to. It's kinda lonely here without her :)

First week at Ambient :)

I just finished my first week at Ambient Entertainment in Hannover, Germany. It's still hard to believe that I'm actually working on a feature film - it's so freakin' awesome! I played around with some rigs the first day, got an introduction by the supervisor and met the people (most of them) that are working at the company. Everybody is super nice and I already know I'm gonna love it here. My first shot was approved by the supervisor today and that was a really really good feeling :). I'm really looking forward to spend the next 4 months here. I feel sooo lucky going straight from school and into being a character animator at Ambient.

Hannover is really nice. It's tons of people everywhere, but it's still kinda quiet and relaxed here. A real contrast to LA which was really busy and actually also a big contrast to Norway. Wherever I go, people are very very nice and if they don't speak English (most do though), pointing and gesturing works totally fine.

Being away from my wife is a lot harder than I thought it would be, but she's probably gonna come pretty soon to check out appartments (wonder why she don't trust me about that). Hopefully within a couple of weeks we have found something and she's gonna move down here as well. Looking forward to that :)

Back in Norway

Monday evening, we got back to Norway after 24 hours of traveling. Everything went fine though, no delays or anything, but still, traveling that far and across a bunch om timezones are exhausting.

The past three weeks has been amazing. I've met soooo many awesome people and experienced so many great things. The highlights (animation-wise) has been meeting Sean Sexton and Morgan Kelly at Dreamworks, the AM Graduation ceremony/reception and meeting Dean Wellins and Glen Keane at Disney. Non-animation-wise, the dinner with Kari and concert at Hollywood Bowl (wedding-present from Elaine) was totally awesome! Every day during our trip has been fantastic, though. So many great memories that we can surf on and bring back on days that suck, for years to come :)

Things are going really fast. On sunday I'm flying down to Hannover, Germany to start my new job as an animator at Ambient Entertainment. Yooohooooo! I'm going to work on a feature film!!! It's soo amazing. I told Bobby Beck about this at a reception in San Diego last week and he jumped up and gave me a huge long hug. What an awesome guy! Also got tons of congrats from Shawn and Carlos! It feels so good that 18 long months (amazing months tho) of hard struggle pays off and I guess Bobby, Shawn and Carlos feels that too, that all the work that they has put into the school actually gets us students jobs in the industry. There were lots of people I met during Siggraph that has gotten jobs as professional animators lately and it's freakin' awesome! Animation Mentor rocks big time!!

In fact - An AWESOME week!

There's so much going over here that it's hard to consume it all. It's kinda overwhelming. Early Wednesday morning we took a cab out to Sea World and watched an awesome show with the killer whale Shamu. Then we spent the day walking around the park looking at all the animals. It was pretty cool. In the afternoon there was a ReelFX/Animation Mentor Reception where a bunch of AM students and industry professional got together to chat and have fun. I got the chance to thank Bobby, Shawn and Carlos personally for starting the school and totally changing sooo many peoples life, including mine. I also met my Class 2 mentor Robert Russ and had a really nice chat with him. The rest of the evening we hung out with some awesome AM'ers and had a really great time.

Thursday we went to the convention center to catch a talk by my class 3 mentor, Michelle Meeker and she recognized me right away, which was really cool. She was really busy and everybody wanted to talk to her but I was able to have a small chat with her before she started her talk. She talked about the making of her short "When I grow up" and it was really inspiring to see how she'd done it. It made me wanna make another short :) After the talk we left San Diego, had a nice stop at La Jolla, and went back to LA and relaxed at our hotel for the rest of the evening.

On Friday we had an appointment with Elaine's Class 5 mentor, Dean Wellins at Disney Feature Animation. Kari, Elaine, another of Deans students, Ryan and me headed out to Burbank, superexcited to get a tour at the historic ground where it all started more than 80 years ago (not exactly the same building tho, but still). Dean is co-directing Rapunzel with Glen Keane and guess what, we met him too. Yep! Shaking hand with one of the greatest animators on the planet was totally awesome! After lunch, Dean showed us around the studio and walking around there, watching all the amazing concept art from upcoming Disney movies, was totally mindblowing and super inspiring. It was really amazing of Dean to take the time off to spend time with us. What a fantastic guy!

We spent the rest of the day at Disneyland. It was okay, but way too many people and too long waiting times to get a superfun experience out of it. But it was a nice ending to a fantastic going-to-remember-for-the-rest-of-my-life-day :)