Alot have happend, and I think it will all go on next year, but before that, we'll take a break for a couple of days, celibrate christmas and try to relax with our friends and family.
The work with our class site is in full progress, we all share the feeling of a huge calm before the gigantic storm we all know is comming early next year when all the work starts to catch up with us and we'll be having our hands full all the time. BUT there are stil a couple of days left before that happens, so I'll try to relax and enjoy this holliday, and I hope you'll do the same!
With this fast illustration I'll wish you a Merry christmas and a happy new year (guess I'll write again before New Years Eve, but you never know).
Here it is, after a long waiting... check it out! A christmas gift from Digital Media class of 2007, Stockholm, Hyper Island, click the image to access the calender!
Here is a sneakpeak of my and Raouls christmas card that we've done for a class calender that I'll post the URL to asap. This is what we got after we was done in illustrator... now it's off to photoshop for some magic and then off to After Effects for animation.. I'll post everything here as soon as it's done rendering.
EDIT: Rendering done :) This is the postcard 1,0, some further editing might be added but we won't know that til after the weekend.. check it out and enjoy!!
Ziah Fogel from Pixar was here today, she spooke about their latest production Ratatouille. It was very interesting to meet this giant, and to hear all about their production line, all the way from first idea and brainstorming, to finished products. Reason why it took so long before I told you about it was because I had some problems getting pictures from the lecture. But now I got them, and here they are.. Ziah and her rat!
That's pretty much what I've spent my time doing this week. Bought a new pair of shoes and a new hat yesterday, it's pretty amazing, I havn't found a hat that I actually fits in, since I was in like 8:th grade.
Anyways, our project is moving forward with a good pace. It's alot of planning and meetings right now, discussions between clients and the agency. We are working in blocks of three groups now, both beeing the agency, the client and the oponent group for eachother, so it takes a lot of planing and timing.
We are keeping the same groups that we had in our last project, so it's me, Axel, Samuel, Raoul and Martin again, tha G4.
Time for morning meeting now, gotta get back to you guys later, hopefully with some pictures too :)
We had kroki today at school, don't know what that's called in english, but it's a form of sketching. Here's some of my pictures, one 35minute sketch and some 2-5 minute sketches.
First day of our new project yesterday, we had a lecture all day about communication. Doing some workshops and learnd about how people think about your work depending on how you do it.
Finaly we got an hour to produce either a poster or a website. This was gonna relate to 2 words we got to choose and put together, we chose danceband and the word beehive.. this is what we got
Last friday was the last day of our previous project. We were at the bank last thursday, presentating our idea, everything went well, we got the investings we were asking for. That felt realy good. It have been one of the most fun projects so far and we had a great time working with this, it's almost sad that it all has to end :)
Here is a movie from our presentation, might give you an idea of what we have been doing for the last couple of weeks.
Ok, so it's like the 31:th of October today, ages since I updated this. Anyhow, so what's up? We have done a lot since my last post, we got all our 50 ideas complete, managed to get a top 5 and choose one, not one of those 5 tho. We changed our mind after a conversation with our project leader who liked one of our "very risky darling" ideas so we decieded to go for that. TerraByte, that's our project.
So what's up with this crazy idea? We are gonna add a layer to Google Earth, and create a new way to browse the internet. We are selling spaces on Google Earth, in diferent layers, like first layer is "Buy a nation, second is buy a city and third is buy a quarter", roughly. And where your spot is, you will be able to do a lot of things, like hosting your own website, split it up and sell to others to earn cash and stuff like that.
So we are now sitting in our own "island" with tables working on our business plan, our concept book and our presentation, 100% speed all the time.. no wonder we are all very tired and sleepy...
Concept and development, that's the name of our new project, started this monday so I've been kinda slow to upgrade my blog, sorry about that. Anyways, first week have been all about ideas, how to get them, use them and develope them. So our first asignment was to get up with 50 ideas in 4 days, from those 50 should we sellect 5 and make a deeper dive, and upload both lists on our server.
To be honest, it felt realy far away to have 50 ideas in 4 days, but after two days and lots of cofee, we had our ideas, almost all of them. Friday morning when we started to sum it all up, we had 60 ideas, wich means we could remove 10 less good ones. That realy felt great, it raises the quality of our work.
The hard part was to pick 5 favorites. We simply let everyone pick 5 personal favorites and then we checked to see what each member had chosen and the groups top 5 was our list.
We all had to kill some of our darlings, but I think the final list is realy good and couldnt have been of higher quality thinking of the circumstances.
Time to go home, take a 2 days long rest and be back in shape monday morning.
Last day today, the exhibition yesterday went great. Got a lot of possitive feedback and a couple of suggestions that we should pitch this idea for H&M, we might do that. So today we worked with a video about or project.. we should promote it on youtube and try to reach as many as possible.
Everyone was realy tired today, so we went home early, trying to get back in shape til monday. All deadlines passed, so we can go to sleep with a reliefed heart :)
This is our video, contact me if you got any questions about it!
We have one more day to go before deadline, that feels great, we are 95% done, and just have the frame building and a lot of testing left to do so we get everything to work properly til tomorrow. We will make it, no doubt about that. To be honest, I didn't think we would make it last week, we stil had a lot to do, but we pulled trough, we focused and organised for all we were worth.
We bought tree and fabric today, to make our display. Our frame will be 2.5 x 2.0 meters and and keeps almost the same proportions as our stage does now.
We didn't manage to link together two diferent ourfits tho, so we can't show that in our prototype. We got it half way, we managed to load the second outfit, but as soon as you moved, it fliped back to our first outfit.
Nicolas don't feel so good, he did visit the doctor today, and is going back there tomorrow, I sure hope he'll be fine, he got the illustration work to do, not a huge loss if he don't manage to complete it, it's more important that he feels good, but still, would be great if he had the strength to finish it.
Off for now, will be back tomorrow and tell you how it went with our deadline, and Thursady it's showtime :)
My head hurts, strange huh? Was a great night yesterday, no doubt about that. And they already posted two videos about this event at Resumé's website. Check it out! I was able to chat with alot of people form our business and presentate myself, that felt great. The school was promoted and it felt like the feedback of the evening was realy good.
We had a progress check meeting today, was realy useful, got a lot of things sorted out, only a few more days to go, full throttle now, nothing else counts. We'll finish this with our standards high in the sky, our chests lifted high and with a coold healty breeze of air flowing trough our lounges.
Alright, it's finaly thursday the forth of october and just a few hours left til Resumébar opens it doors and the evening is on! We still have alot ot do, so this is the last thing I'm gonna do before I shut down my computer and get my ass into work.
We had a group meeting today aswell, decided a couple of things that would make our project easier and take it forward. For example we will no longer use a mask to hide everything but your face in the webcam, we will simply "cut a hole" in our stage and let the person using it place his head where the hole is. We will also add some sounds for our "touch zones" so when you raise your right arm, it will go BOOM. Hm, not realy but you get the idea of it.
Gotta get some work done now, I'll tell you all about the evening tomorrow.
Once you solve a problem, you can be sure that it will generate atleast 2 new ones. But it moves in the right direction. We got the sencors working as they should, (atleast for now, who knows what tomorrow will bring). So what's up next? We gotta get some propper movie clips for our animations, what we got now is very very alpha, the only purpose with the animation we have now is so we can have a visual of what's happening.
We also gotta work with the masking alot.. we can mask one color, but since we can't expect the users to wear one color only clothes we gotta do something about that.
Tomorrow is also Resumébar, wich means less work with the project and more time prepearing everything so we are fit for fight when all guests arrive.
I'm off kinda early today, since my dear mother is in town so I'm going to meet up with her. She got some stuff with her that I need so a boy gotta do what a boy gotta do.
Before I leave for the day I've spent my day working with our animation, or more true is that I've mixtured with it. I did also spend some time looking for some errors in our flash, but Lars solved it before I'd even sat myself into the code, (was the first time I read it).
So what else have I done in the project. I've made all graphic work so far. That is pretty much the stage and the "touch links", made in photoshop. That took about 2 days to get an acceptable stage ready with all depth illusions and proportions needed to give a pretty real look.
The stage itself is made in layers with patterns and some low opacity color overlay, took alot of google work to find a good picture of a stage so I could see what it realy looked like and try to get that style on my own stage. The curtains are from a photosite, enlarged, and some color changing and an additional shadow to make the depth come true even more.
The stage background is also made with patterns, opacity and sice changing, together with some perspective changing and some warping. So it's actually two pictures, fliped horizontaly, and then merged together. I first tried with a darker background, but that didn't work, it looked to dark and to "scarry" and not what we were after, we wanted something lighter and more fun.
Anyways, I'm glad that my stage was liked by the whole group, so now we got our background and our "touch links" made. you can see the result down here.
Sunday today, was YKKY releaseparty yesterday, and to be honest, it was a disapointment. Or, that might be kinda rough to say but we all agreed that we had imagined something else then what we got. A realy small room, with two tables with magazines, and that's about it. Pay for the bear and no one greeted us. I know it's mean to judge and say that it was bad, so I'm not, I just say that I did expect something else, bigger, more amazing, that's all. So we went on to Karmen instead and had a realy nice evening together.
And for our project in school, well, it moves on in the right direction, but it moves realy slow, and we do have alot of disagreement in our group. It's nothing personal or anything, it's just that we got many strong wills and thoughts of how things should and could be done. We are working on it tho, so hopefuly we'll have sorted this things out monday at lunch and if we havn't, we will have some stress to deal with.
Also counting down now. Last september today, first october tomorrow, means that it's 4 days left til Resumé Bar, some more planing to do, and we got a lot of name tags to create tomorrow, well, looks like there will be a long day :)
Does anyone know how to create a webcam application with motion detection? Cause that's what's we are googleing for right now, finding some tutorials, none very good tho, but we keep on trying to get it to work. We also found some flash based games with motion detection, but no source codes. Mailed Daniel, our flash "guru" and asked for help, waiting for an answer, this project have started kinda chaotic but extremly fun, just as it should be!
Johan is still sick, and no sign of Nicolas so far, wonder where he could be... ZZzzz ZZzzz. Anyways, the world moves on as it should, we keep on spining nice and slow.
We have a meeting today about Resumé bar, wich by the way, is something you can read about at Resume's website, all in swedish tho, but for those of you who understand this, check in their right sidebar, and look for the Hyper Island motion, click it and you'll get all information needed for this event.
We also gotta bring up some things about the YKKY release party, they want a list for our closed company for a reason I don't know. And we also gotta start nagging both the Digital Media class and the Interactive Art Directors, about some payment for our student group so we get enough members and can access stockholm student apartments, it's getting kinda urgent since some students still don't have a place to live, or, atleast not in stockholm.
A new project is born, it's time for the inventors to step forward. Experience technology, in groups of 4-5 members given a certain technology we are suposed to create and build a new experience. First week we got no information, just alot of lectures about technology, user experience, interactive design and other similar topics.
It was a very interesting week, alot of knowledge and "aha" experience to take in. A code mod day, where we were suposed to take an application very similar to the jazz-ball game, and re-write the java code so we got something else. It was very useful and I realy got to take a good look at the code, how to structure it and that it's easier then I actually imagined. Still hard, but not that impossible that I've imagined before I tried it.
At the end of the week we got our first group task, to greate a group blog for this very project. You can find our group blog here. all written in english so everyone can understand it. We chose the easy way and used wordpress when creating our blog. Anyways, this is where you can follow our progress and read both our personal toughts aswell as our group thoughts.
Alright, I havn't realy done my job here. I've got alot to do and when I finaly had some time on my own, I've been way to tired to write anything in here. Anyways, a short brief on what's been going on the last two and a half weeks or something like that.
Motion week, Was very interesting, got 2 interesting tasks, a group task and one individual task. First out was our group task, to create a 30second long motion using either Flash or After Effects (or both) containing only 1 kind of shape. Our group got triangles so we created "our Big Bang theori".
It was a stresful and chaotic project with so many wills and not very much time to make them all come true. We still managet to pull it all together pretty well.
The Process We started of with a meeting, deciding what we wanted to do, shared our ideas and draw a storyboard so everyone could follow what we were talking about. We did pretty fast decied what coulors we wanted to have, a spacey and kinda druged theme on the colors. Shining blue, pink, purple, red, green, orange and so on.
We realy had our hands full of stuff all the time, all from doing each movieclip to editing the music and manage to pull it all together in a nice way. The problems we had was our symbols, since we didn't name our symbols, they automaticaly named themselves "symbol1" and so on, so we all had symbols with the same name. And that kinda killed eachother. So we had to put it all together in after effects, working our way around the problem.
There was some emotions during this process, since some in our group had very diferent ideas on how this was suposed to be done. And we even got some real anger and an uppsesed person when he got voted down because of our lack of skills in flash/after effects.
Anyways, we managed to pull it all together and we displayed our project for the rest of the class and our examinator and got some good feedback, so no hard feelings afterwards. We could all breath out, go home and prepeare for our next task, our individual showreel.
View the whole video here (click on the image to start the movie, right-click and chose "save as") Note that it can take some time to load the movie.
Ok, so after that we started to work on our own 15seconds showreel or motionreel or just any reel actually, about ourselves. For this project, we got exactly 24hours, so panic panic panci, to sum it all up.
View my personal showreel here (click on the image to start the movie, option, right-click and chose "save as") Note that it can take some time to load the movie.
Yesterday we had a group evaluation. Back to UGL in other words, sitting down in our project groups talking about the project, what went good and bad, why, how did I feel and stuff like that. After that we got started for real with our bransch tree. We got our design ready and started with the heavy stuff, css, databases and some php. It felt like we got almost nothing done even tho we worked for hours.
Today was all about catching the deadline before it caought us. A lot of hard work, some missunderstandings we managed to pull it all together (more or less) and were able to mail in our url like 5 minutes before deadline. PUH! You can view the result at TheTree.
Deadline passed yesterday, today was time for our presentation infront of the rest of the class and our co-operators. It went realy well, we presented our video and got some nice feedback. Was a lot of creativity in the class, I was happy to see that. Ok some work was done in PowerPoint but that's ok, we know different stuff and are used to different things. Best part was that each group had put a lot of effort in their research and creating their presentation in a way that should be as informative and fun as possible. "Be interested, but don't get filled with our stuff, we want you to wanna find out more about these countries/citys that we researched about".
Was a long day, I got the Project Managing roll for our final part of the project, to put all our information together into a bransch map and get it up on the web. So something additional to do as a side kick for 2 days. But I'm pretty sure we'll manage to pull it all together, I got a great time to work with on this so I'm very happy with it, and don't mind at all to put in some extra hours/work to pull this whole thing together.
Last day for the project, and some more After Effect work to do. As I just said, it was our deadline today, so alot of stress with everything, putting all together, get everything to work together, video, photos, music, effects. A lot of work, but we finaly managed to pull it all together pretty well. We are happy to "eat our own dog food".
I also spent alot of time in After Effects today, working on a 3D rotation, went realy good, kinda got the hang of the program now. Not a big questionmark anymore. Felt good and we managed to hold the deadline, even tho we had to turn in our project on a dvd since it was 1,2gb big and would have taken all night to upload to the server.
A couple of meetings some cutting, photo editing and a lot of After Effects work, me and Axel sat with a After Effects tutorial most of the day, trying to learn how to create a light animation, went realy well and we got a pretty big idea of how it all worked depending on what changes we made. Got all the video cutting done aswell, so all that's left tomorrow is to match up the video with our effects and photos and then we are set.
Spent a few minutes to brief the group about the report aswell, and we filled in some common areas so we could make sure everyone agreed on some points, no hard feelings here, lucky for us :)
It's sunday now, but 2 days ago, friday the 31:th we had our last interview with Ottoboni Group in Gamla Stan, Stockolm. We met a guy called Daniel that talked with us about their point of view of the business. It was very interesting and by far the most human place we had been to, atleast for me. It was very bright and nice, calm and quiet and alot of people wanted to talk to us and say hi.
After that we headed back to school, had a couple of meetings, to talk about the rest of the process now when we had our material. I sat down and wrote the first part of the report, and David, Daniel and Axel went out to shoot the "dog" part of the presentation. Nicklas sat down and started to cut our material into something that we actually could presentate for the rest of the class, "eating your own dog food".
Alright, Lowe was here today and talked alot about advertising on the web. Was very interesting and fun to listen to. After that we had our interview with KING Solution, was great to be there, se their place and talk to them, our videocamera ran out of battery so we had to use our digi cam only and write down his answers, wich Daniel did fast as the wind. We got a whole new point of view of the business and heard so diferent things but still similar to what we heard before.
We decided to take the rest of the day of cause of some personal stuff people had to take care of and pick up our project again tomorrow. All but David headed back to school for some blogging and try to figure out what Daniel had wrote during the interview, Niclas was gonna start see if he could solve the problem with the vide camera transfer to a mac. Let's pray that he solves it.
Alright, we are in the middle of the week and got our second interview done today. We droped by Lowe Brindfors and met up with Patric and Patrik, a manager and a web AD. We had a great dialog with them, at first Patrik said that he only could stay for aprox 10 minutes but after 35minutes of intensive interviewing he was still there talking with a fire in his heart. That felt realy great, we also got a quick guided tour around the place and were able to take some more pictures and clips for our presentation.
A quick lunch with a realy nice steak it was time for Mattias Hansson to enter the stage and talk to us about internet history and media history at the web. An interesting speach that helped me get a larger view of the business.
Videocam trouble, that kinda concludes the whole afternoon, it's 19.21 now and we just found out (trough google) that our brand new videocam that school have bought not is supported by Imovie 6.0.4 but we need to upgrade to 8.0, wich cost around 80 dollars for a company license. Thank God David S have a pc so we can transfer our clips to an extern harddrive and try to convert the format into something accepted by a mac.
We had our first interview today with Tony Högqvist from Perfect Fools. Everything went very well and we got about 25minutes recorded, 3 more interviews to go! We also talked abit about how we where going to cut it down and create our aprox 1-1,5 minutes long presentation, got a few ideas discussed and agreed with some After Efects work atleast, something like the "why Hyper Island" video on hyperisland.se
Today was the kick of for our first project at school, after 3 weeks of introduction and individual/group developing. A short presentation of the project and then of to the meeting room. Information Society is our first project, to place the worlds point of view of the business on our own Hyper Island business map. We chose to work with Stockholm as our geographic area and started to look for som big and interesteing companies with focus on web, illustrations, motions, print and so on.
The phones got warmed up pretty fast after alot of phone calls to diferent companies trying to get a meeting with them, we did also send out a mail to some companies wich we couldn't reach by phone or the person we where looking for was simply not avaliable at the time. Wile we were waiting for answers we started to put our heads together and think of some questions to ask, starting with the 4 pointers we got during the presentation of the project.
After a quick lunch at McDonalds and some more phone calls we managed to get a total of 4 companies to meet us this week for interviews, and still waiting for a few more to answer our mail.
I'm Björn, a 20-years-old Digital Media student at Hyper Island, Stockholm. I was born in Kalmar 1987, after high school I moved to Jönköping to work at a company as Web Developer amongst other things.
