GameJam Grenaa 2011

Sorry for not posting in a while and never posting the end of the Seattle Trip, but with limited time I have to priorities and the blog is currently low on the list.

From the 8th to the 10th April, I joined the first ever GameJam Grenaa, which is an event where we as groups compete to create the best game in 48 hours.

The groups was made by the judges who put people into 5 different groups at random. The event had 25 participant.

My group consisted of:

Tor  Esa Vestergaard

Thomas Andresen

Daniel Jürgyensen

Tobias Nielsen

og mig selv.

We made a 2D Platformer which can be downloaded and played here: http://www.mediafire.com/?6ieibn96nr8ks7b

The controls are:

Arrowkeys to move

Space to jump

F to pull levers.

 

You will have to experiment to see what the different lasers do, good luck.

My team won and we each got a xBox Slim as prize!

 

Weekend! Day 8 – Chilling with friends

Weekend! Day 8 – Chilling with friends and stomatch ache.

Yesterday I planned with Magnus to plan a trip to Downtown today for today with Magnus, Martin, Christian, Troels and Tobias. I woke up around ten and turned on my computer, neither Magnus or Martin were online, but Tobias was and I contacted him and told him about the plan. Later Martin came on and we did a little chat before I proceeded to eat Cerial and play Team Fortress 2 with my friends from New York and the neab clan. We had still not planned the trip at all and so Martin proceeded to send messages on Skype and calling me, resulting in Team Fortress 2 crashing and later lagging, which makes the game unplayable.

It ended up with me webcaming myself to Martin and Magnus while kicking Troels out of bed. We then had to wait like half an hour for our bus when Troels and I finally made it to the meeting place the others weren’t there!

We first guessed they also had problems with the busses as it is weekend and a lot of busses isn’t going, while we waited and began to become hungry, I suddenly came up with this genious idea! What if we walked in to the nearest Starbucks or Subway and got us something to eat or drink to pass the time and then IF the others already were there when we came back we could just lie and say that we had just arrived with bus!

Turns out that while I was excitingly explaining this to Troels and we were all like looking the way to the nearest Starbucks and Subway, while watching a smaller group of people walk down towards the bus station we were on, we suddenly came to realize that those people were them, they got here first and come up and executed the exact same plan!

Well, we got a little laugh and took the first bus to downtown, then walked  around for some time and checked out the comic and collection store with the Green Lantern Promo ring again, but no one bought The One Ring to rule them all.

We all took a bus back to the meeting spot from downtown and visited a center there and later ate at a Chinese restaurant that Christian had recommended.

Imaging you have 17,50 dollars (95 dkk), now buy the biggest and tastiest meal you can make/get for that, was that as big as five tables with various foods from crab, snails, oisters and mussels to hotwings, pizza, baked shrimps and deserts such as cakes and cookies and a sushi stand, icecream bar and even salat and decorations for the icecream bar? I don’t think so! And don’t forget there were free refills of your liquid too! They also gave great service and made the stay comfortable for us. That place is going to get a revisit or two.

Regarding the slow updates on the blog

It is taking a lot of my free time to write it and as much as I love writing it I can’t keep it up. And so I will stop writing at a day to day basis and instead just write up whatever major events that come back to my head whenever I decided summarizing the days. If I had a phone with an internet connection and a twitter app. I would have kept you updated about my everyday much faster and much more, but that just isn’t possible either.

I’ve also been updating the site a little with a broken frame of twitter for easier access for people who don’t have much online experience. I’ll look into getting it to work, else I’ll just make it go directly to twitter instead of it being in a frame, which I also will be making it do as a quick fix when I come around to doing that.

Weekend – Saturday

Weekend! Day 7 – Chilling with the hostess

 When it is weekend I’ll begin to show my true form, or rather not show myself at all as I’ll be sleeping all day! Troels and I first got up from bed when it turned post meridium.

Marysol had made some soup, I don’t know if it is meant to be eaten as breakfast, but I took some and it tasted great, it felt like there were millions of tastes jumping on my tongue the whole time, great stuff. The only problem was that the piece were too big so I couldn’t just put them in my mouth without some of it hanging out, but I couldn’t cut it with my spoon either, I was out of options and chose just to put the whole pieces in my mouth after I have desperately tried to chop it up in smaller pieces.

We later was taken by Vincent and Marysol around town and was shown where a lot of the rich and important people live, it was a pretty fun experience, I’m impressed how many big business people live in Seattle. They also drew us to Google’s Headquarters.

When we talk about a big mall, then we talk big in america, we entered the parking house, which had multiple floors (I think 5 floors) and on the way in there were signs that told us how many spots were free on each floors, sadly they all said they were full. But I don’t understand how they could count it as when we got ready to pay for entrance all we got was a smiley and a message saying it was free to park today, we managed to squish in to a spot on the fifth floor.

With a parking lot achieved we exited the car and entered an elevator and took it upwards, the reason I include this is to tell you that; there were elevator music!

Then we dropped out on a floor with an arcade, we entered the arcade and walked over to get some cards with points on that we had to use to play on the machines. Vincent and Marysol paid for our cards as generous as they are, the cards contained 3000 points each which is enough to play games for hours, they also joined in the fun themselves.

Troels and I tried out some interesting arcade games, the arcade wasn’t that impressive, they didn’t have a big range of titles and most of them (or almost all of them) was driving/racing games. But we had fun, I kicked his ass in Guitar Hero: The Arcade version while he beat me at.. nahh, he never beat me at anything.

What amazed me the most was a DC Universe arcade game, it was of the beat-em-up type where you scroll around the screen beating up weak enemy minions until you reach the boss, it was a coop game so we played it together. I chose the invincible Superman while Troels chose the weak human with no super abilities Batman and we began our adventure to save the world (or Metropolis and Gotham City?). Well we started in a desert-like level where we walked inwards the screen while beating up insect-humanoid-alien-things. The controls had Quick, Strong, Defence and Power buttons and a joystick, my quick button didn’t work so I couldn’t do any quick japs. A few seconds after we had started the game and we had beaten up a few groups of bad guys we realize that we aren’t as invincibleas we though as our healthbars was almost drained so we decided to just dash through the rest of the level ignoring the enemies, we actually managed to get to the level boss and while we fought him we magically got our health restored! But our health got drained quickly again, it was like every time we didn’t use the defense button to dash around the screen our health got drained and we couldn’t fight while dashing. We ended up losing against the boss even though we had found out an almost perfect way to beat him which was to dash around and then land a hit from time to time on him.

From all that the game sounds like an actually fun game to play, but the game itself was horrible with bad controls, bad hitboxes and bad graphics, it was just weird and hilarious how much fail it contained.

As I said, the arcade got almost only racing games and we ended up playing some of them, Need of Speed Carbon: Arcade version were actually a lot of fun to play as we always ended up in close games and even if one of us manages to hit a wall with the front of the car and makes a full stop we somehow managed to get back in the game and at times win. I got a feeling the game cheated a little and let a player who is really long behind have a boost without us noticing.

We also tried a car-game where we both had a wheel, but only one of us drove the car at a time, the game changed which player controlled the car as the player who controlled it made mistakes, weird game, fun, but it felt like it ate our points as both players could just play one at a time instead of paying twice as much to switch all the time making the game harder and letting the player play for half the time you could play alone.

With a lot of points on our card left we all went to turn them into tickets by playing games such as trowing basketballs and some kind of mini-bowling, our favorite was apparently the game where you just threw coins in and hoped more coins felt down than you threw in, which would then turn into tickets.

All in all we collected 810 tickets which we bought candy for. I believe I picked the most awesome piece of candy in existence, a JawBreaker with sour taste! It is so big that I believe you can’t close your mouth around it.

After the arcade we went to rent another movie on the way back and we also got us some food on McDonalds, Troels and I got us a Big Mac Meal each, we also bought drinks, I don’t know why we did that since we were going to take it back into the car and home, I guess I was brainwashed at the time and it was McDonalds fault for making me purchase something I could just have gotten back home.

When we returned home and had eaten our meals we put the movie on, I decided to be an asocial bastard and contact Magnus on Facebook and got his Skype, we planned to plan a trip downtown tomorrow, yeah stupid..

Weekends are tough as you just want to rest, but you know it is time to wash your clothes, but as generous as Marysol is she asked if we had anything that needed to be washed and she did it for me! My clothes has been saved from an experiment ones again!

Seattle Day 5-6 and more Host Family love.

 

Day 5 – Downtown and No Bus!?

I worked on my 3D Project the first part of class, but after dinner in NSCC we went on a school trip to downtown and into some kind of marketplace.

On ground level people mostly sold foods or typical ugly glass jewelry and such, we knew we could go down for more, but as it suggested there just would be more foods and jewelry down there we decided to go out of the marketplace and take a walk around the place.

When we came back and down to the second floor of the building/place we got us a surprise as it was filled with small shops that hold great treasures! We entered what ranged from a candy shop and a magic tricks store right to a shop that sells original old posters and magazines. But we still had the greatest place of all left, a comic-book store which sold figures, comics, books, clothing and even weird candy (like candy which tasted like bacon, it tasted disgusting and gave a weird feel of having a sudden field of smoke in your mouth, but it actually had a taste of bacon which was most frightening).

One of the most mysterious items for sale in that store was:

Green Lantern Promo Ring

Green Lantern Promo Ring (30 dollars, I found a site where they sell this for 15 dollars!)

 

 

The ring glows in the dark. It looks like typical china quality,

Green Lantern Ring

Green Lantern Ring (15 dollars)

but it cost twice as much as the ring on the right which was on the same shelf.

 

 

Green Lantern Colour Rings.

Green Lantern All Rings Set (20 dollars or so)

 

But buying that would also look stupid as you could also buy (on the same shelf) all the different rings (and the green one looked identical in the set version) for only a few more bucks (20 dollars or so)

I really wanted to buy the Promo one just because I could, but I decided to buy something a little more useful (yet not).

Dynamic Anatomy by Burne Hogarth
Dynamic Anatomy by Burne Hogarth (26 dollars)

I don’t know how useful it will be for me, but I must admit that it is probably not very useful right now, I believe I bought it for a more symbolic purpose. I’ve wanted to start drawing for quite some time and I’ve always read and heard from artists that learning to draw anatomicaly correct first is essential to becoming a good artist and to create good art. The book will also help me in the 3D aspect as I’ve also been teached to make the flow follow the muscles for the best result. I’ve taken a look in the book and it’s contents ranges all from head to toe and it all in different poses so I can see and understand how the muscles work and react.

 
I bought it for 26 dollars which is the full price so it wasn’t any great purchase in that aspect.
 
What I’ve planned for the future is to learn to draw and try to get admitted into the Animation Workshop (http://www.animwork.dk/en/) on the Computer Graphics Artist Programme, which requires a big portfolio of different drawings, right now I have no chance of getting in with my drawing skills, but as it also requires what equals to a to a high school diploma /A-levels (in Danish: STX, HTX, HH, HF). I’ll be taking a HF which takes two years and I’ll hopefully have enough time to improve to an acceptable level.
 
Afterwards we had a little time on our hands before having to meet up with the rest and ended up watching an amazing magician, I wish I had a picture to post, I know that Martin got a few shots of him, gotta get those pictures at some point and post it here! But I’ll try to describe him; imagine a man in a chair with glasses on and on the glasses the typical duct tape (or gaffer tape). Now take a spongebob pillowcase and make holes for arms and head and put it on him, that is what I saw!
 
But when he began to do his magic tricks I saw a great magician! He asked us to leave some money, everyone gave some, except me, man I am a devil.
 
When we got back to NSCC Troels, Martin, Magnus and I decided to go to a mall and eat before taking the bus home so we rode a bus to the terminal where a mall was and entered the mall. When you enter such a mall you will see an open area with a lot of chairs and tables and a lot of food vendors, so we are all able to buy from each our own place and still eat together! It ranged from Chinese, Japanese, Thai and all the way to Italien and American.
 
Martin and I tried out the Japanese goods while Magnus took on the Chinese and Troels the Italiens.
 
Martin and I’s meals were perfect and tasted really great!
 
Magnus got a fortune cookie without a fortune with his meal, I guess he has no future.
 
Troels ended up buying a pizza a few sizes bigger than he expected and so was the price. He shared it with us and I took a slice, we agreed on it tasting nothing like a real pizza and trew half a pizza out right after what looked like a homeless had made contact with us with a greeting, he probably went head first into the garbbage can.
 
When we were getting ready to leave I turned my back to them a few seconds to trow out my drink and ended up losing them, weird enough my reaction was to calmly walk out of the mall and down to the bus terminal and wait for the next bus home to arrive.
 
They came to the terminal at the same time as bus 41 came which was one of the busses that I could ride homewards, I had to make a choice, wait for Troels and miss the bus so I had to wait for the 75 or take the 41 by myself!
 
I’m a good friend so I waited of course on Troels or rather; I’m a coward and would obviously have ended up lost on the road without him so I chose the safer route.
 
We got on the 75 after a long wait and we got off at the right spot! Troels checked the bus plan to see when the 214 would come and it turned out the last one had already driven by, we knew the way home and could just take a long walk, but Troels got the great idea to take a risk instead, that is to take the next 330 which we weren’t one-hundred percent sure lead all the way home, but we could always get off if it turned away and walk back and afterwards walk the rest of the way.
 
Now we though the bus would arrive after twenty minutes of waiting, but when we checked the plan again we realized it was the morning plan Troels had looked at and there were no more busses! So we had wasted ages on waiting for the bus that never was! So it ended up with a long walk home in the cold. But we/I actually enjoyed it, we joked along the way and it didn’t feel cold at all as we walked, the only negativity was that our feet hurt because we had walked around all day.

Day 6 - Visit to Monolith Development and Dinner with our Hostess at Kidd Valley

 Monolith Development is the creators of a collection of my favorite games and games I’ve played: Blood 1+2, Gruntz, Aliens vs. Predator 2 (they only made the second), No One Lives Forever and F.E.A.R. 1+2.

As soon as we got inside and up on second floor we went to play-test one of their titles, sadly I can’t say anything about the game, I can’t even say if I liked it or not, but I can say that I have no interest in buying any future titles of Monolith.

We also got a little tour around the place, Monolith is owned under Warner Bros. Games which also owns a few more studios so the place was really big! We saw all from concept art to yet a few glimpse of yet another title. There were a room or section we didn’t have permission to see which hold yet another title which they wanted to hold secret.

I was pretty sad to see posters, pictures and front-covers of magazines with Blood, Aliens vs. Predator 2, No One Lives Forever and F.E.A.R., but not a single mention of Gruntz! Yet I would reeeaaally like the Blood stuff.

When we got back to the NSCC we came right when the dinner was at the end and the only foods for sale at the NSCC canteen were noodles, bakery and chips, Magnus and I ate some noodles, but we were pretty pissed as before we went to Monolith we got told we were going to eat dinner when we got back to the NSCC, but no one told us we were going to eat what everyone left behind!

Our host family took us out to eat at Kidd Valley which is all about being an adult which still feels like a kid. The food was great and Marysol paid, we also went to a Bowling place, lucky for me the place was filled up, even though there were fifty lanes! And the waiting time was forty five minutes!

We ended up going to a store to rent movies from RedBox which let’s you rent a movie for one dollar a day, you can return it at any Red Box in the whole country! You can also rent games for consoles there for two dollars a day. Troels ended up getting himself some Chocolate donuts, I’ll be hijacking those tonight while he sleeps in.

A Thanks to the Host Family

I would like to thank the host family to be as open as they are, as we can eat when we want and what we want (which also can be a bad thing since I have no idea what it is I am eating at times) and they are servicing us all the time, with all from driving us around to making breakfast, they are really kind and social compared to their dogs.

The dog Lulu always barfs and at times marks it’s territory indoor, Vincent says that the reason for that is because the owners of house had dogs too. We already have first-hand experience with it’s excrements as it took a dump on the sixth day, right in the one room where we sleep in. We got a hunch that it was aimed at us and it wants us to leave the house, BUT NOW THE WAR IS ON! And We’ll be peeing and shitting everywhere, our first target is it’s bowl!

I’ve not been very social with them myself and I don’t like speaking English, it’s hard for me to bring the whole sentences in my head to life, I always end up spewhing out a few words in a confused state. If my host-family at some point ends up reading this they’ll probably be surprised by my English skill level and begin to ask me to speak up more often.

 

 

 

Trip to Seattle! (Travel + Day 1-4)

(DISCLAIMER: Having to write most of this while sleepy after a hard and long workday and over multiple days, getting behind schedule all the time; IT HAS NOT BEEN PROOFREAD AND THE STUPID KEYBOARD ON THIS LAPTOP’s SPACE BUTTON DOESN’T WORK HALF THE TIME WHEN TAPPED! )

 

Trip to Seattle!

 

From the 12th February we will be in Seattle for a month! My class, the entrepreneur class, will be lectured by a woman called Isabella McPeak, who owned and sold a multi-millionary firm. We will also work with our teacher from Denmark, Kasper, who will teach us general thread and basic Adobe Aftereffects together with one or more teachers from the US.

The classes we will be attending will all be at the North Seattle Community College (NSCC for short).

We will also be visiting three game companies; MonolithDevelopment, Valve Software and Microsoft Games, Monolith has created some of my favorite games such as Blood 1+2, Gruntz, F.E.A.R. and No One Lives Forever! While Valve Software has managed to make me buy almost all their games up until now if not all, while Microsoft games is pretty dull for me as they probably produce for the xBox and will probably show-off the Project Natal, or now known as the Kinect.

There will also be some sightseeing and time for us to hang out with our host families, one of my goals is to try all the bigger fast-food places, such as McDonald, Taco Bell and KFC! I also want to get an haircut while I am here as I could really use one.

 

The Unfortunate Travel

 

Bus arrives at Grenaa 10-20 minutes before estimated leaving time, we leave 10-20 minutes AFTER estimated leaving time.

3D College do not know how to board a train and makes the train leave a few minutes later than the estimated leaving time.

One of the doors in our train suddenly doesn’t work correct (I think it wouldn’t open) and the train ended up on a hold, an announcement said that we could leave with another train to Copenhagen if we didn’t want to wait for the repairer, but since we were in a big group and we would arrive a few hours before boarding the plane we decided to stay in the train.

Sadly, a few minutes after the train in the announcement had taken off another announcement came in which said that the train wouldn’t go any longer as they couldn’t fix it fast enough.

We ended up boarding another train and in that train we had to wait a little longer at a station because a person were in a condition where he needed a doctor and the personal of the train repeatedly asked if there were a doctor traveling with them in the speakers.

We finally arrived at the airport and checked in, we ended up getting called over to the boarding area from the speakers.

3D College had also accidentally overbooked the plane and four had to wait for another plane, WHICH got cancelled and they had to sleep the night in Chicago (?). One of our students managed to forget his baggage three times at the airport. It’s odd how that ever since we arrived in the US we have managed to come on time and with no accidents.

We was driven by bus to the NSCC where we met up with our host families and they drove us home.

 

My Host Family

 

I’m living together with my friend, who is also a student on 3D College Denmark; Troels, at a host family in Lake City Way, our hosts names are Vincent McIntosh and Marysol Kellogh, they have another exchange student from Saudi Arabien who have been in Seattle for a week before we arrived, his English is very limited, but that shouldn’t stop me from inviting him to a video game and kick his ass. They both have children, but they are all grown up. They also got two dogs, the dogs names are Lulu and Gizmo.

Day 1 – Space Needle, Duck Ride and Experience Music Project

 

The host family drove us to school as we didn’t manage to find out the bus plan in time.

Space Needle

A tower where you can watch the view, you know the drill. Now, what I found interesting about the Space Needle was all the merchandise they had, as there were hundreds of clothings and different sculptures of the Space Needle, you could find almost anything with their logo on or having the shape of the tower. There were even a big pepper grind in the shape of the space needle.

There were a great view, you could really see how gigantic the city is and we had good enough weather to see all the way to some mountains. There were a Car-Wash sign in the city which had text big enough for us to read all the way from the Space Needles top without using any form for telescope. There were also a pretty big Pepsi logo I hope those advertisements are aimed for the Space Needle visitors, yet I can’t see how much it will help a car-wash.

Duck Ride

You could probably guess that I were skeptical about how fun it would be as for the weird and childish sounding name, but I was actually positively surprised as it was great fun and we had a great tour guide.

The Duck Ride in itself is a tour in a vehicle which can drive on land and in water.

The guide entertained us through the whole tour by putting hats on, joking, putting themed music on for various situations and even some interactive entertainment.

Most of the tour was actually on the ground and not in the water, the part in the water was actually also the most boring part as the next thing the driver would talk about would be farther away and we moved slower, but it was also great to get a break from all the fun, it made it much easier to tell how our driver managed to make time fly by.

Experience Music Project

A weird blob-metal building that is supposed to resemble a smashed guitar holds information about various talented and widely known artists like The Beatles, Slash, Kiss it was mostly in the rock genre, it is just pretty sad how there is no mention of smaller, but yet very talented groups, everyone knows the bands mentioned and all their information is widely spread already, wouldn’t it have been better to make a music house for showcasing of lesser known groups? But I can see it from a Nirvana fans perspective and it would be cool to see one of the smashed guitars that were used and then smashed by ones favorite guitarist, I just found it pretty boring how a lot of my favorite artists wasn’t mentioned ones, it was all about those widely accepted artists, it makes rock feel like pop-music with every track sounding the same.

There were places where you could sit down and listen to some music in one of their headsets, but when I went to listen to some relaxing blues I got an headache as it was too loud and it had a bad quality, probably because of the volume. I couldn’t find a way to change the volume, I guess there weren’t a way to do so, pretty useless, but it would actually explain why all the headsets always were available while the place where you could try to “play” “music” was filled up all the time and 70% of all the visitors were there at all time.

Day 2 – Using Social Medias for Business and Bus Trouble, Worrying Hosts.

 

The host family drove us to school and we followed the bus so we could see how the route was.

Our first real school day introduces us to the business coach Isabella McPeak who owns and runs the site http://www.peakbusinesscoach.com, she ones owned and operated a multi-million dollar professional services firm that specialized in distributors and manufacturers which she ended up selling while it was profitable for millions. She started coaching five years later and my sources give me a hint that her first appearance as a coach on the webs were at the Action Coach website.

She had a page under the Action Coach website: http://www.actioncoach.com/isabellamcpeak, which have later disappeared, I am guessing she took it down when she opened her own site, my source is http://biznik.com/members/isabella-mcpeak. Her last activity on biznik were March 08th 2010 and she registered Dec 12, 2007. From what information I gathered from looking at biznik I’ve found out that she wasn’t an active member on the site, she “only” registered 4 event hosts of her own (notice how it says 1 under her profile picture, the site probably got some issues) and been attending someone else’s event ones. Her last activity on the site was to promote an event called “Business is Booming”, the day before that it was also registered that she joined Grant Robins network, Isabellas own network on the site was of a size of 11 members.

Here is a few more facts about Isabella McPeak, taken from http://biznik.com/members/isabella-mcpeak/about (please note that her last activity on the site were a year ago and there is a chance that she has achieved more since she wrote that in the about page and that people tend to not update their about pages.)

Education

MBA Univ. of Phoenix, Global Trainer for ActionCOACH,
Certified Action Business Coach,
Business Coaching – New York University,
B.S. Catholic Univ. of America

Experience

Worked with over 250 companies in professional service, hospitality, distribution and manufacturing.
2007 Global Award Winner for Best Client Results
2007 US Award Winner for Passion & Inspiration
Ranked within the top 10 of 1200 Action coaches worldwide
Started, grew and sold a multi-million-dollar software company and realized that software was only solving 10% of the problems in any one company.

Later we ate at the NSCC’s dinning area, we had each been handed a 7 dollar ticket that we could buy for. The area were really impressive, you could buy various foods and drinks such as Pizza, Burger, Sandwich, rolls and so much more! If you would rather have some sweets then they even sold that all from muffins to chips. The 7 dollars ticket could buy a Fish and Fries menu (6 dollars + 1 dollar if you want fries) and a can of soda (1 dollar, obviously without the fries then), I bought two pizza slices and the small cup soda (same as a medium, I think they only have two sizes available) and I even had around one and a half dollar left, pretty sweet. The Pizza slices were really large and thick and it all did a filling meal.

After the great meal we began what we all love the most, the 3D class, our teacher was Kasper and he would be the teacher the following week as the american teacher who should have been there rejected the offer a few days before and they didn’t manage to get a new teacher, well, not for the first week, they did find a new and even better teacher, but he is first available a week after we began.

I managed, with Kaspershelp, to begin work on the new lighting of my scene, since I am not working with Final Gather I will have to add Bounces manually which is light that when it hits something it bounces off it like reflections on a mirror and lights the room up, it is what we call indirect light.

When school was over and it was time to go home I stood with a problem: Troels had been selected to be in the first group to go to the game developers Monolith Development, but they would first get back to the NSCC hours later, I chose to keep working in the classroom until the time I though he would be back, at the time I walked out of the class and to the frontdoor where we have been meeting up until now I got told that they first would be back in yet another hour, I then chose to go to the dinning area and work there, actually, a lot of students tend to sit down and study everywhere and it really had a great atmosphere. Troels ended up walking up to me twenty minutes before the estimated time of his arrival, it was lucky that he came to check in the dinning area.

While I was packing my computer Kasper Haagensen (a Student from 3D College Denmark) came and asked if we knew where his host family partner were, we didn’t and told him to search a little more and then he should just go home himself, he then left saying that he will probably leave very shortly. But when we were walking up to wait for the bus (it should be noted that I were really slow at packing my computer as there were a render I let finish, my renders takes approximately 10-20 minutes to render) he came up from behind asking if we were taking a bus or walking home, we answered we were taking the 75 bus, his reaction was hilarious as it came out like he was expecting to take the same way as us, we began joking about him being lost and sleeping at the school.

Now, we got on the 75 and all we had to do was to get off at the stop where we could get on the 312, but it was dark and I am horrible at navigating so our only chance of getting it right was Troels magical mind, but, sadly, Troels mind was playing tricks with us that day and we got off too early, yet we were saved as we knew where we were and where to go to get back home (well Troels was 100% sure while I had my version of the world which is incorrect and though I knew where to go). We ended up boarding the 312 after walking/sightseeing for a while and got home faster than expected.

I would like to remind you that we actually had a Phone that the host family gave us, it was low on battery when we got it, so we decided to turn it off and only turn it on when absolutely needed (this was known by the host family), we chose not to use it in this situation because 1) We had no idea when they expected us to come home and we didn’t feel like much time passed by as we actually enjoyed our little trip. 2) I had the phone and I never put myself in the host family’s position. 3) We never expected the host family to do what they did even though they had been extremely nice up until then and we should obviously have realized that they would begin to worry even though we had the phone. 4) Because I have no clue what is going on around me, I even though of dinning before going home AND dinning ones more.

When we got home we casually walked in and said “hi” to Marysol who opened the door while looking really relieved, she then told us how they had worried and Vincent was driving around looking for us (I think they ended up telling us he had been driving around for hours), you could probably guess our reaction to hearing that after walking in all casually, well I can tell you that you are wrong, as I was still all casually and just appoligized with a “sorry”, I’m pretty dull at that stuff, but I did still feel horrible for making them worry that much.

Day 3 - Motivation and Business Speech

 

In our Business class Isabella was teaching us the importance of knowing what is valuable for you and your firms success, how it is important to make the customers happy while you still profit and enjoy yourself, we had to choose some keywords for what was important for us when we think about running a firm, I choose Flexibility as my most valued, as I found being able to satisfythe customers needs while it still remains profitable would assure my survival. There were some funny choices to choose from, one of them was Victory, wouldn’t victory be the most obvious to choose, if anything bad happens it will be a lose and defeat which will be the complete opposite of victory so victory will always be a win, the same goes with flexibility, it is all about how flexible and victorious you are, if you go to extremes you will be a perfect and successful firm, so none of the words really had a meaning except from encouraging us, none of them were more correct than others. Another example is Friendship; if you have good enough friends, that can be both in numbers and quality, you will be able to survive by having them happily and freely run it all for you while you harvest all the income for yourself.

So, what it was actually about was to make her see how we think, she asked some from our class what they had chosen and why they chose those options, I noticed that a lot had chosen the options that is all about the enjoyment of working and none which is focused on the profit and growth, now remember that the words has no meaning, as if you enjoy your work enough you should be able to profit and run what is a perfect firm, think of it as an extreme, imagine enjoying every single part of what you have to do to run the firm. But have these people actually though of that? Or were they just so simple-minded that they only though of enjoying themselves without taking in consideration what is needed to actually run a firm, all the paperwork, management, PR, etc. and how you actually end up doing only that if it grows big enough, which they hopefully aim for, there has probably not been a single though on how they are going to make it enjoyable to do that. Most also wrote Creativity, now creative solutions can be great, but can also be your downfall, this again can go to an extreme and make a perfect and successful firm, but what people probably though while they chose that option were not even related to running a firm, but it was instead chosen just because they know that the branch they work in is a very creative branch or even worse they just wish to be creative and do art, which is all technical.

The technical part, which is the work that there have to be done by the workers to create the product will end up being one of the least important parts of your job, it is important that you know some of what is going into your product, but you don’t necessarily have to be an expert in every area of creating the products, the focus of a leader, a boss, the chief in a kitchen is all about managing and making the people under you effectively do their job, which is to create the right product and satisfy your customers while still being profitable.

Let’s try to take the chief in the kitchen and create a picture of what I mean: You are the chief, you have orders to deliver some meals, you will hold the orders and tell them what to cook and you will also be telling your customers when they can expect the meal to be ready, that will be the deadline and if you miss it your customers will be dissatisfied, you will also have to observe your workers at all time or else they can end up burning the meal or making it tasteless or taste horrible, so you as the chief will be taste-checking as much as possible, while also making sure your workers actually work. Your workers can be better at making the meal than you, but if they slack or you got some bad workers you will end up in a position where you have to teach them and remind them of their current situation and show how they can end up losing their paychecks. Now you find out you have done a mistake, the products to create the meal are bad and rotten and you will have to find a solution to the problem before the deadline. There is no “right” solution to this problem, but there are different types of solutions, like a creative one; you decide to run over to your competing restaurant and get the meal for your customers from them (maybe even ask someone to keep your customers entertained). Or you can choose to be honest and tell the individual customer that you are out of *the meal*, while asking if they would like to order something else, but without giving any unnecessary information as that will only dissatisfy the customer. You will be doing all this (and more) without making a single dish yourself.

 We were also asked to imagine we had won some kind of nobel prize or other kind of reward for having a profitting company and make a Speech which will tell about our firm, like how many employees it has and how many locations we have offices.

Here is what I wrote:

I would like to first of all thank all the employees who have put their heart and soul into this and making this moment a reality, thanks to that, we at Polyboom, have been able to create story-filled and beautiful worlds such as Redbot’s last mission and our newest release Eyebots.

We have been able to help and work for other big movie-studios at a freelance level and helped in the making of various movies such as A,B and C. Our main income has been from freelancing and working with other companies.

Polyboom has grown from just a single man’s dream to help visualize others fantasies and dreams to a company with offices in Copenhagen, London and Washington with hundreds of employees in just a few years, it is hard to keep up and there have been problems at times, but I haveto keep up or else I could end up regretting my decision, I’ll never give up and just keep moving forwards while carefully cleaning the way before us.

One of the reasons for Polybooms success was because of its visibility, I had from the beginning in mind to use the interwebs to advertise our services and started out creating my own site in .aspx while I still studied at 3D College Denmark, I liked that site, but I am happy to have let someone else take over administrating it and made a fresh new design with much more accessibility and functionality.

Our revenue isn’t that great we only just managed to keep it positive, but we have grown healthy and fresh. We have taken a lot of risky choices, but with that we also made sure that all risky choices in the future will not be as critical on us.

When I first decided to do Computer Graphics I actually decided on it because I found my classes too easy and wanted to start over on a challenge with no relation to any of my classes. I’ve always been interested in managing something big as it will require for me to always be at my best to succeed and I believe it won’t feel repetitive for a person like me.

I would like to end this with a big thanks to all of our partners and everyone who have helped us on our way and I hope we can keep doing business in the future.

 My meal at the NSCC this time was a Cheese Burger with Fries and a large cup of Coca Cola.

The laughable incident with Kasper yesterday returned to light when Michael Tott revealed that he had helped Kasper’s partner home as he found him on the same bus as himself and was “kinder” lost since he had taken a bus and was only able to communicate what streetname he had to get to, so he ended up at the end of that street (It should be noted that his English is very limited). It is still a mystery if Kasper managed to get home.

Day 4 – Pure 3D Day and Birthday party?

 

Marysolmade Scrambled eggs with ham today. I like the big variations between the choices of breakfast in America, they are all so different and they all are tasty and easy to make. I still remember yesterdays breakfast where I tried some of their cerial, I think it was Vincent’s favorite Cerial, the closest you can compare it to in Denmark is Havre Fras, but it still had another feel to it and it had frosting on it. When I compare this to Denmark I only see bread and Cerials in Denmark while America has so much more, but then again, in Denmark I know what to put on my bread, here I just try whatever I find in the refrigerator.

Now the horror began, They’ve found out that I have birthday the 18 marts and even though I am back in Denmark there, they want to trow a birthday party of some sort while I’m in America, I think it ended up with some Bowling and afterwards an Arcade, I guess it just means I’ll let them win big at the Bowling making me look weak and then humiliating them at the Arcade! (My only excuse at sucking at Bowling, k!)

Today I got a lot of work done on my scene, I had some problems with a modifer called Linked xForm (kinder funny, I had so much trouble trying to link my modifer called xForm to an object and the solution was that there is another modifier called Linked xForm which is the exact same thing, just that I can link it, I wish they had called it xForm (Linked) instead so I could have found it while going down the list to xForm.) and my objects which I had instanced. The Linked xForm kept breaking apart every time I wanted it to link to another object instead of the old one and so I had to put it together again. And thanks to me instancing the objects I’ve had to make them unique and do it all again so they don’t all link to the same object.

We had decided to “maybe” go to a mall with Martin Lønne and Magnus Lund today, but sadly Magnus Lund was ill yesterday and ended up not coming to school today, so we have post-ponded it to another day.

A short animation test

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AL9P5DAkmBM

Just a short animation test of the claw that is going on the purple robot.

I’ve done a little work all around and there is a lot to be done before I got anything particular cool to show, but I’ll update whenever there is something that I find worthy for your eyes.

Polyboom.dk is up!

The site is finally up and running, not just as a blog, but as a whole, well, almost.

  • I find the frontpage in an acceptable condition, I still need a new profile photo and redo some of the text.
  • The portfolio page needs a lovely flash which let’s the user see my renditions and watch my videoes.
  • The services and Contact page needs some images and text to stuff them up.
  • And the blog needs some minor changes and I’ll see about making or getting a custom theme.

I’m working on an action filled and kinder big introduction sequence for Red and will fill the blog up with information as it comes along.

The homepage is ready!

The page that is going to be located at http://www.polyboom.dk is ready, but I will have to wait before I can move to a new host, until then I will mostly concentrate on preparing for the exam, doing the last pages for polyboom.dk and most of all studying 3D.

Polyboom.dk only need a few pages and those will mostly be of text and a few images, the hardest page to do now is the Portfolio page where I show off my renders and videos, my deepest wish is to get it all made in flash and as customizable as possible.

Site update

I’ve found a solution that will let me have PHP and aspx, the solution is that I will be moving the site to a new host called surftown, which only allows me php or aspx, it will be aspx.

The blog will then still be hosted on this host, but will be moved to another domain name, I will then make a site (like blog.polyboom.dk) display the site where the blog is on.

Which means (site -> blogsite -> blog).

Hopefully I will be able to make this happen today and I will be able to upload the actual site on Polyboom.dk!

The homepage of Polyboom almost looks like the .psd by Michael Christensen now, I only need the flashbanner and a few buttons.

Check the todo-list to see what else has to be done! Here

Regarding the short-film..

The heroes in the short-film are the 5 robotic characters (image link)

I will be making 4 short introduction videos, one for each character (except Blue and Yellow, which will have one together), what I want to obtain by making those is a better understanding of the process, learning some cool effects and tools and expressing the characters to myself.

I currently have 2 of the shorts in the works, Greenbot and Whitebots.

Here is a list of the introductions and a short description of what they will contain.

GreenBot
Description: Greenbot will be showing off by rolling down and ending in a slow-motion jump towards the camera, the Greenbot will be showing nervousness and look cute.

WhiteBot
Description: The scene will be a house which Whitebot has crashed down and into, it will start in bird-perspective and end in bird-perspective, the camera will start off slowly moving down to Whitebot as he will be making attention with his eye, as it will be shut off (no light) and half way down begin to flicker on and off right until the camera gets close to him and his eye will turn on and blink, afterwards the tempo will increase and the camera will be showing off the environment and end up looking at the sky. (Whitebot flying up like a rocket?)

RedBot
Description: This introduction will be filled with action as RedBot will be in his past on the battlefield, he will be shot and his speakers will be damaged and that will be the explanation of his growling.

YellowBot & BlueBot
Description: Will be dancing together and performing a song, I want to make it look like they sing the song even though they do not have a mouth, I will do that by nodding the head and by blinking with the eye (both actual blinking and light).

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