Goodbye Storm Studios

Today was my last day in Storm Studios.
I've only worked there since last autumn, but for several reasons I already felt it was time to move on.
My next stop will be Gimpville. I'll join the talented guys in August after some weeks of freelancing and a couple of weeks off.
It's been a busy time in Storm and since February I've mostly been doing traditional animation for the first time in seven years which has been great fun. I can't really show any of that yet, but after going through my harddrive I found a few things I could share which I haven't shared before from my time in Storm.
First up is a poster I did for the "Kindergarden Day" which took place in March. Not really a common task to get at Storm, but I really enjoyed doing it.



Storm also did a Subaru commercial around new year. All the mountain scenes were done by matte paint projection on geometry and I was involved in most of the shots.
Here's one of the concepts I did as well as a more traditional matte paint showing the plate, the matte paint and a final frame.

27th World Wide SketchCrawl

The 27th World Wide SketchCrawl was arranged yesterday and despite rainy weather we managed to gather four people in Oslo. Not many at all, but we had a good time sketching in a café and in Oslo Reptile Park.
Here are some of my sketches:























Some photos:









(See more photos on Flickr.)

Tomme Tønner Matte Painting

The very first work I did when I started in Storm Studios in October is now showing in the cinemas here in Norway. It was a matte painting for the film Tomme Tønner which premiered last Friday.
In the shot a barn is being blown to pieces resulting in a massive shock wave. The exploding barn was a model which was composited in later.
This landscape doesn't exist anywhere so in this matte painting I stitched together several landscape elements from photos and removed some unwanted objects:



Then I added a layer of the damaged field after the explosion - which actually is more or less invisible in the final shot because of the shock wave effects:



The shot can be seen at the end of this trailer. For some reason it's running at double speed in this clip.

Japan 2009

Maja and me returned to Japan in November 2009. We were there from the 7th of November until the 23rd and spent half of the vacation traveling around. We stayed at Kanaguya in Shibu Onsen, the ryokan which was the inspiration behind the bath house in Spirited Away. We visited Takayama, Kyoto, Miyajima, Hiroshima, Kurashiki and Yokohama before spending the rest of the time in Tokyo. In Tokyo we attended the 25th World Wide SketchCrawl and met up with a bunch of great people in the Tokyo sketch group (check the post below).
Also this time I've made a blog from the trip with a selection of the few thousand photos I took:
Olve & Maja in Japan 2
Here are a few photos from the blog.

Kid chasing rabbits in Yoyogi Park, Tokyo.



Jigokudani snow monkey park.



Autumn colours in Kyoto.



Bamboo grove in Arashiyama, Kyoto.



Daishō-in, Miyajima.



Deer in Miyajima.



Oysters in Hiroshima.



Vanish roller coaster, Yokohama.



Iidabashi station, Tokyo.



Koi.



Girls blowing bubbles in Yoyogi Park, Tokyo.

2010

スケッチクロール

Maja and me came back from another trip to Japan earlier this week. And we were lucky to be in Tokyo for the 25th World Wide SketchCrawl last Saturday.
So we met up with the incredibly nice and talented members of the Tokyo team and spent the day sketching (and eating). We had a great time!
Here are some of my sketches from that day:







Some photos:










Also check out the Tokyo thread at the SketchCrawl forum for more sketches and photos.

Goodbye Funcom

So that was it.
I just came home from Funcom for the last time. This week I've been going through four years worth of stuff which has been piling up around my desk and on my PC including hundreds of sketches I've done during concept meetings and other meetings. (What do you expect to happen when you put a group of concept artists into one meeting room? :))
First out is a selection of sketches and caricatures I've done of my colleagues.



Then a selection of imaginary characters.
(Oh, before you ask... No, they have nothing to do with the game at all. ;))



I usually got the task to draw cards for team members who were leaving the company, got kids or whatever. Here are a few caricatures of some great artists who moved on.



And finally. A clip of me chilling out in the animation department during the early days of The Secret World some time in 2006. :)