I’ve been experimenting with some atmosphere and cloud creations for my upcoming movie. While doing that I started to get quite happy with the techniques I’m using, so I made a still image of some other environment. Here is the backplate I’ve come up with.

The complete image with the foreground elements are rendering as I’m typing this, so I’ll hopefully have it posted to the portfolio tomorrow or the day after.

On another note, I added a software section to the website. I’ve been coding on a stats apps for some time, and it’s getting quite advanced and finished as well. So I’m tuning it for it’s release. So be sure to soon see the birth and appearance of Storm|Stats and it will be followed by some other apps I have in the pipeline when time permitting.

According to the very sad post about my dear friend Brent I posted yesterday, I’ve been talking with some of the other executives at IMA this night, and we won’t let Brent’s dreams and visions die with him, but we’ll make everything we can to make sure they will live on and let the show be a dedication to Brent’s memory.

My partner and the president of International Media Arts and Catamongus Studios which I’ve been working with for a long time, Brent W. Kingston, has left us all of a sudden.
He passed away this morning from an abdominal aneurysm rupture and massive heart attack in Los Angeles, where he was temporary working for our show.

Brent was the creative mind behind the complete concept, and other than that he had become a very dear and close friend of mine. I’ll miss him deeply.

And my deepest sympathies goes to Brad and Gloria.

I’ve been involved in the making of a 3D animated TV series for children for quite some time as the Art Director / Creative Director. The other week I did make the design for the website that will present the series. It’s mostly just the design at the moment. Actual content will be added with trailers, animated scenes from the series, character galleries and things like that as soon as all funding deals are in place and everything will be public.

Well, the site is there, and it will expand shortly, so it could be worth checking it out now and then, as some real cool and amazing 3D work will be available there.

Avery Smartcat - The Coolcats Animated TV Series for Children

You could almost think I’ve turned to the dark side of the force, becoming a web designer with all these sites popping up by me. But do not fear. My 3D projects are going forward as well, and the blog will get updated with them as well shortly. I DO keep myself busy. That I’ve realized.

Once upon a time back in the late 80’s and early 90’s where yours truly using the handle rioter and a member of a demo crew called Equinox.
Well I’ve spent a couple of days now creating a memorial site on the net to preserve everything we created back then.

If you have any interest in that kind of things with demos, music and graphics or the Amiga computer platform, take a few moments to check out the Equinox site. It contains lot’s of nostalgic goodies for the people into this kind of stuff. I know I shed a tear or two looking back into all those memories of past times.

Equinox Amiga Demo Scene Group

I thought it was about time I added a new entry to the Blog. It has gone a few days since the last addition. The movie production, There is Love Of Course, hasn’t stagnated, but are still running smoothly and progresses forward according to schedule. I haven’t got around yet finishing the dedicated movie site, but it’ll come soon. In the meantime I thought I should post another teaser of some concept art I’m working on for the movie.

I’ve almost finished all concept art for it. All characters are in place, and also all environments but two are in place. So all concepts will be finished next week, together with a final storyboard of the movie. Then I think it’ll be proper to open up the movie site, so there is some content in it from the beginning.

On another note, I’ve been feeling creative lately, and have started writing a smaller script called The Institution, which I’ll have storming around in the back of my head. Don’t wanna get carried away with that one until I’ve come further along the path with TILOC.

Todays Drawing Music: Karma 64 - Slow Poison

Another There is Love of course update. I made the final version of the script. Rewrote and fine tuned some details from some parts of the draft. I’ve also started drawing concept art for the characters that will appear in the movie.

I’m about to begin storyboarding the entire script during the next week, and then I’ll get to the fun part, sculpting, painting and animating.
I’ve decided to publish quite a lot of the material that I create during the progress towards the final movie, so I’ll also open up the dedicated There is Love of course movie section next week, where all the fun and interesting stuff will appear. Watch out for the link.

Concept Art Drawing Music: Anna Ternheim (Mmmmmm)

Set aside all my own small personal projects with images and single artworks, I do also have some more serious projects in the pipeline. Commercial contractors, works and also my movie projects. And to my more serious projects, I got a brand new injection.

Today I had the most fantastic and wonderful experience for I don’t know for how long? Forever? Well, anyway, I had so much inspiration because of that, so I sat down non-stop and wrote a new script for a four minute long movie. Serious Kudos to that special person that injected me with all this inspiration today.
It’s a story about lost moments, missed opportunities and all despair and sadness there is in life. Well, can’t put in to much in four minutes. But doing an animated movie with a one man crew doing everything from script - storyboard - design - sculpting - painting - animation - sound - music - editing and so on, I gotta keep the length down to make it manageable.

I kept the number of characters and environments down as much as possible, so this shouldn’t be another taking forever project on my limited time and budget, and ended up with a script I’m very happy with. I project a schedule for it to be finished in January 2005.
I’ll keep the progress in the blog for the first wavering steps, and then I plan to move it all over to a dedicated movie site.

Script writing music: R.E.M - Out of Time

I have had some serious hardware trouble the last week. First did one of my storage hard drives just die on me. And bad luck usually just doesn’t end up with one thing, so just a few hours later my CPU decided to die on me as well. Can I say panic?
Well, I managed to rescue all files from my hard drive, and then I kicked it hard down the dumpster as soon as all the files where saved.

The CPU, well, not very much to do. I started getting CPU hardware failure reports from my OS, and then the computer hardly couldn’t manage to boot up. Got a replacement CPU two days ago, and then the system where as rock solid as ever again and runs very smoothly now. Spent the last day reorganizing the files and cleaning up the mess that occurred during this disaster.
Well I’m back in business again, and will start posting work in progress images starting tomorrow or Monday. Oh well, life has it’s ups and downs. Just gotta go along with it.

I have just been chilling tonight (as well as yesterday). You know, celebrating I have my working environment in order again. Good food, good beer, good company! Ah, life is pretty good after all.

I actually just got back and wanted to do a little checkup on my stuff before calling it a night with the computer. Right now I’m listening to some wonderful lounge music, and enjoying my beloved Gin.

Chill Out Music: Jean Michel Jarre - Geometry of Love

Well, if I don’t have enough to do, I do make sure I keep myself busy. Guess who forgot to go to sleep tonight and found himself still staring into the cosy glow of my computer screens at 8 a.m this morning. I’m probably one of those mutants that have forsaken the term sleeping.
Anyway, I got rid of my own hacked together blog scripts and replaced it with the robust Blogger engine. Well, my scripts did work quite well as a blog, but they never seemed to get finished, and I went back patching up stuff in them all the time when I discovered problems or bugs. What made the cup tip over was a few days ago when I noticed in my server logs that the MSN Search Robot had indexed a couple of 1000 pages from my site. Huhu. Several 1000 pages? Do I have that? Nah, but the robot had discovered a loop hole in my blog script and indexed about every date from 1997 up until 2025 or something like that. Where all pages reports “this date contains no entries.”. So that pushed me over the edge, and late yesterday evening I decided to start using my Blogger account instead. From the beginning I thought it would be quite a painless transition, but hey, you know how it is, nothing is painless!

The problems came when I was to tailor made the blog output to conform with the rest of the design of my site. So I spent the entire night learning about Strict XHTML coding, XML, RSS and Atom feeds and everything else related to the new web standards. Well, never hurt to know about it, so well, I guess it was well spent time in the end anyway. So sometime in the early morning hours I started to get happy and began transferring all my old data into the blogger database instead. And now it seems like everything finally works just fine.
The Blog is much prettier now, better organized, more functions and possibilities. And if you are using a modern web browser (ie, anything other than Microsoft’s aging Internet Explorer), you can add a live bookmark to this RSS feed presented at this page, to get the bookmark to update automagically when this blog is updated. Pretty nifty don’t you think?
I also programmed an ASP parser tonight for the Atom XML files, to feed the frontpage with blog entries as well, and it seems to work just fine as well. So the site might not visually have changed very much, but the backbone is so much better now. There is still some minor adjustments for me to do, but they are just cosmetically like font colors, positions and sizes. So I’ll finish that tonight.

I’ve pretty much fallen in love with all the functionality that Blogger offers and all customization it allows for. If you’re thinking of starting blogging, I definitely recommend to check it out.

That wraps up this post. Got a pretty productive night after all. And when I was messing with the site I also took the time to update some design flaws here and there in the coding, so now every single page should validate with 0 errors no matter if it’s a strict XHTML coded page or a loose HTML coded page through the World Wide Web Consortiums Validator, as well as their CSS validator. And that I’m pretty pleased with.

Oh and not to forget, tonight’s music choice;
Working Music: Anna Ternheim - Unreleased “Demo” Album
(Her wonderful music and voice helped me through the late hours)

Okay, todays update. I’ve been refining lot’s of details with his body, and now I’m quite happy with it. Just have some things left to do on the head, before I add his clothes into the object and start the painting of skin and extra details onto him. Will get to that tomorrow probably.

Working Music: Conan The Destroyer Soundtrack
(Hey, why not! hehe.. This is fantasy!)