Good Evening,

Long time since I updated. First off, is a report of my experience of FMX 2010 in Stuttgart, Germany, which I came home from this Saturday.

For starters, FMX is a conference aimed for the visual effects industry, simply put, for the guys who make all the cool stuff you watch at the cinemas. And me, who loves that stuff. It was a week filled with interesting events and masterclasses, boring weather and “networking”.

For my own personal pleasure, I will now list all the things I went to see:

Day 1, Tuesday:

2012 Tidal Wave Sequences – Thomas Zauner – Scanline

A talk about the sequence where the tidal wave sweeps over the airport in the mountains in the end of the film, where you can see the Airforce One among other planes. Really epic stuff, talking about the workflow and how they developed the shot.

Recruiting Presentation – Framestore, Blue Sky Studios, MPC

Went to a lot of these, where the companies told us what they wanted from the people they employ. In the reels, what vacancies they currently had and so on.

Recruiting Presentation – Animal Logic, rise | visual effects, Mackevision, Lucasfilm

35 Years of ILM – Lynwen Brennan – ILM

She talked about all the amazing work they’ve been doing since the start of  the company.

Alice in Wonderland – Ken Ralston, David Schaub – Sony Pictures Imageworks

They talked a lot about the fx work on the film, showed breakdowns and so on, really nice.

Shelley’s Eye Candy Show – Shelley Page – DreamWorks

She showed her favourite CG pieces that had been released recently, really inspiring work.

Day 2, Wednesday:

Recruiting Presentation – Trixter Film, Ubisoft Studios, The Mill

Visualization in the VFX Production – Kevin Tod Haug, Ron Frankel

Talk about how they can show the backplates and such to the people on set, in real time.

Recruiting Presentation – DreamWorks

SideFX – Go Procedural With Houdini – Jeff Wagner

A quick walkthrough of the workflow in Houdini. Really cool stuff!

“Shutter Island” VFX – Ben Grossman – The Syndicate / Cafe FX

A walkthrough of a lot of the matte work and model work in the film. I really like the whole model making process in movies, something that isn’t as widely used anymore due to us 3d people..

Next Limit Tech – New Dynamics and Fluids in RealFlow 5 – Florian Koebisch

A demonstration of some of the new features in RealFlow 5. Looks good, but didn’t impress too much. They had some trouble with the machines so we never really got to see it simulate anything really fat.

Day 3, Thursday

Recruiting Presentation – Double Negative, Red Vision, MPC

Recruiting Presentation – Sony Imageworks, Blue Sky Studios, Cinesite

Building Pipelines – Hannes Ricklefs – MPC

A walkthrough of the pipeline at MPC, very impressive.

The Making of “Avatar” – Joe Letteri

A talk about the work on Avatar, breakdowns and so on.

Day 4, Friday

Procedural FX Pipeline – Mohsen Mousavi – Pixomondo

They talked a lot about their work on different films, such as Ninja Assassin and the awesome blood effects they had there. 99% of it done in RealFlow btw.

VFX of Iron Man 2 – Ben Snow, Mohen Leo – ILM

Breakdowns here as well, really awesome stuff. Downey JR. rocks btw.

The Tornado Speaks – Don Marinelli – ETC, Carnegie Mellon University

A professor and a great, talented speaker. Really motivating and awesome guy. He talked about the industry overall and his unique school concept.

The Visual Effects of “Avatar” – Paul Kavanagh – ILM

More Avatar goodness.

“Avatar” – Layout – Shawn Dunn – Weta

Even more Avatar, talking about Weta’s own workflows and systems for producing the movie.

Learning the Weta Way – John Bruno

A guy who worked close to James Cameron on Avatar, talked about how he got integrated within Weta.

AAAND that was it! Extremely interesting and inspirational. You need that sometimes when working in this business since it can easily feel like every day is the same, as in any other business I guess..

Apart from FMX here’s some other news:

I’ve gotten some freelance work now and I can’t talk too much about it, but it will be posted here when it’s done. I’m also getting my next diving certificate soon! Advanced Open Water Diver! After that, I’m going to the Sweden Rock Festival and I will spend the rest of my vacation getting my drivers license. The summer is filled with awesome stuff, maybe more on that later

Today, I’m gonna write something short about keeping the visitor numbers up. Just some thoughts I came up with.

Let’s say you have your fancy fine portfolio home page finally set up, great work! I know how much you had to go through to get there. Believe me. You are looking at version five of my homepage, and I’ve only had one for around two years.. It’s very easy to spend more time on the design of the page rather than the content

This is the first one I’m really satisfied with. It has taken a lot of reading and researching to come up with. (Kudos to Smashing Magazine for a lot of the information and ideas I’ve based it on).

Let’s get to the point I wanted to make.

A regular portfolio webpage from some random unknown artist like myself might not get that many visits per day or week or month but there is a way to change that, I’ve noticed. You gotta be REALLY ACTIVE. Especially on discussion boards, twitter, facebook, other communities etc. It works. If I announce an update for my page on facebook, I get around 80-200 visitors within the next 24 hours. Sure, most of them are from people who might not get too much out of looking at my dishwashers. But the fine thing is, that SOME of the visitors actually might. That’s the good part. For example old classmates or persons you met at Siggraph that year. THAT is valuable.

Then, if some recruiter or alike visits the homepage and notices a living thing, it all suddenly gets a whole lot more interesting. At least that’s what I’ve heard/read/noticed

So stay active! Don’t let the page die.. yeah I’m done there.

Other updates: I’ve been adding a lot of work from 2009 now and more might come soon, not sure about release dates or anything though. Some cool personal projects are currently in the making as well!

I also want to add that I’m available for freelance work.

And by the way, 9 months ’til I turn 23! Don’t forget to write that down!!

Good evening!

Good evening, so yeah, I got a small update I thought I’d post!

First of all, this week, I joined the FXPHD january term. There are a load of classes to choose from, the ones I chose were:

DOP202 On-Set Lighting

DOP210 DSLR Cinematography

MRY201 Production Rendering Techniques with Mental Ray

I think they will fit my career ambitions very good since lighting and rendering is what I do nowadays.

The DSLR Cinematography class is held by none other than Stu Maschwitz, check out his blog at www.prolost.com

He is famous for working as a visual effects supervisor on movies such as “Sin City”, “The Spirit” and many more. It’s about his concept of guerilla movie making and such which is really cool! I’m a huge fan of his book “The DV Rebel’s Guide”. It’s a good read for anyone almost.

The Mental Ray course is held by none other than Master Zap from Sweden! He’s been working on stuff like the skin for Benjamin Button and more over the years. Great Mental Ray-guru. He also has a blog! Check it at www.mentalraytips.com

The On-Set Lighting course is held by Tom Gleeson who is known for his lighting TD work on movies such as “Happy Feet”.

Really looking forward to this!!

That’s that, I have one more new thing to say before I stop writing, and this is pretty cool. Today, I was in the city on an important meeting, it has a lot to do with the future and is about something really cool!! I won’t say anything more than that but keep your eyes open this spring!

Will probably add comments to the blog as well, so if you wanna, then feel free!

Good evening.

Good morning,

one of the final things I will do this year is to get the blog up and running. That is what I am doing right now.This is the typical first post.

This version (something like 5.0) of the homepage have taken almost six months from start to finish. Now, finally, I sit here with only final touches left and it feels really great. I’ve been doing a million things this fall and the work on this important part of my career has fallen of the priority list many times.

Everything is controlled with WordPress, the theme is designed by me and coded by my dear friend Oscar Karlsson (www.antaru.org). A special thanks goes out to him for always fixing and realizing my ideas in lightspeed, whenever I come up with them.

The purpose of this site

is mainly to display my portfolio and the work I create everyday. I currently work as a lighting ninja at a visualization company close to Gothenburg called Spark Vision, so most of the work here will be stuff I worked on there.

This blog though, will not only be about work, it will also contain other stories from my life since I think it’s easier to have everything in one place. On the other hand, I will also discuss work, of course.

I know there are a lot of people new to 3d and that stuff out there who enjoys reading info about getting a career in the business and so on (including me) so I will try to share some of that as well.

For now, have a happy new year!