Coding might be my nemesis

This is the last day in school; tomorrow I will go away for Christmas celebrating, family time and other nice things. I had hoped that I would somehow (I realize now that magic would have been required) be done with the coding of my portfolio so that I wouldn’t have to worry about that while stuffing my face with gingerbread.

But now there is only a few hours left and I am nowhere near finished. I am tired and a feeling of hopelessness is beginning to spread. I know what my portfolio will look like, I know how it will work, but I have no clue to how to make it work.

We also handed in our final decision on what specialization we would work on for 9 weeks next year. Fully aware that it would mean 9 weeks of solid frustration for me, I chose tech. Only a few hours of coding later, I am ready to kill myself.

Part of me knows that the reason I chose tech is so that I will be able to do these things in the future, another part if me wonders if I will survive…

Foiled by Flash!

It’s sad, isn’t it? That even though I followed 5 different flash tutorials to the letter my short movie doesn’t work. I blamed the tutorials the first 3 times, but now I am not so sure. My hate for Flash increases.

This is the “portfolio” module, which means that it is both individual and probably loads of fun since we can do what we want. I still haven’t purchased my domain though, seems like such a huge decision. It will probably be rebeccaberg.se (.com was taken), but the fact that rebecca.com is free is nagging me a bit. Maybe I should go with just my first name?

Here at the end of the world (Karlskrona) all is well. Every window has the Christmas candles lit day and night, making the town glow and the advent feeling spread. Environmental thinking has no place when it comes to Christmas lights apparently.

Creative people

All this effort, trying to think outside the box. Trying to be unique, go where no one has gone before. It seems all our lecturers are trying to tell us that the simpler the idea is, the better it is. But of course thinking inside the box would be the simplest solution? Can you tell I am tired yet?

I'd like to quote one of my favourite authors here;

I'll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there's evidence of any thinking going on inside it.

- Terry Pratchett

Wrapping up and new beginning

I have been bad at updating. As usual this has nothing to do with me having nothing to write and everything to do with the fact that a lot of things is going on and I don’t have the time to write about it.

Last week we made our pitch for the bank and the investors. It was more fun than expected, I felt so proud when we could actually answer all their questions. We almost got a thumbs up, they didn’t like that we had so many employees so they wanted us to limit our market so that we could cut down on them and by doing that, on costs. Of course.

It felt really good. Our prognosis on how much money we will make is a bit optimistic, but according to that we could all be millionaires in three years. Should we go through with it?

Now we have a new module; Visual Communication. The lecturers so far have been great, both entertaining and enlightening. Today we had a French guy by the name of Stevens Henri and his accent alone made his lecture worth attending. He went through the basic shapes and colours with us, a lecture that could have made us all fall asleep, we have all heard most of it before. Except we didn’t, that’s how good he was. Then he gave us brushes and paint and had us painting the entire afternoon. Can’t say I produced anything worth sowing to anyone at all, ever, but I have a feeling that wasn’t the point.

Autums are great for walks, walks are great for thinking

New module, this time we will explore the possibility of earning embarrassingly large amounts of cash by finding and filling a need. New business idea time! I have a new group as well, Jocke (the captain), Tilde (doc), Isak (ship drunk) and Peter (we don’t know what he is yet). The most social group so far, we seem to spend a lot of time in cafés and last week we had dinner at my place. The social thing is important to me after the last module where I sort of fell in between groups so I have been pushing hard for the weekly dinners. The others have been pushing for the constant tea and coffee breaks, so we are all good.

I have been thinking a lot about branding these past days. Not so strange perhaps considering the module, I guess I get no points for creativity by Teo Härén (we had a seminar with him via videolink two weeks ago).
But whatever, I am thinking about it. So much that I went to the library and picked up “No Logo” by Naomi Klein, I haven’t started reading it yet but I am looking forward to it.

I love the library here, the way they actually have the books I want standing patiently waiting for me on the shelves… In Lund, a city full of students who haven’t given up on books the way these digital media students have, the books I wanted were never in. Here I seem to be the only one visiting the library, which is both sad and practical.

But back on track, I haven’t come to anything that might be considered a conclusion with my thinking so far, but I do have a video for you guys. Microsoft made it, probably to get management to stop butting in on all their good ideas…

Frustration land

There is frustration in the air, it has been there all week and it is slowly driving me mad. Nothing works, if feels like all I do is wait. I can’t go anywhere cause something might happen, I might be needed, I can’t let these people down. We have so much to do, but we never seem to have all the components to actually be able to do it. It is so frustrating and so maddening.

We finally got a Printfabriken as a sponsor for our print yesterday. A huge relief I tell you, we had just about decided to just print everything here at school and were all very depressed when they called me back. But now everything is jammed again (of course) because there is no communication. Not one that works anyways. Not between us, the press group, and the design group; responsible for the poster design, and not between us and the teachers; who are away in Stockholm and has to clear everything before we go to print.

Now I am going to get the press release done at least, although I have no great pictures to put in it, not even after both mailing everyone about it, and asking around. But then my mail have been bouncing mails for some reason, so a lot of mail have probably been lost.

I am not in a happy place right now.

End and new beginning

We had our presentation today; it went rather well I think. I think all the groups did a great job, everyone has really gotten better at presentations, better rehearsed, better PowerPoint presentations, more structure. The feedback afterwards still needs working on though. We also got our new assignment, to make an interactive exhibition with sound and light. None of us know anything about the technique so right now it feels a bit hopeless to be honest. We will also set up a group blog that I will link later, a magazine and a lot of organisation…

Today I put up some inspirational links on this blog, this if from one of them, Peter Callesen, a great paper artist.

Baby Steps

We are pretty calm over at Hyper at the moment, presentations tomorrow but this assignment was only a worm-up really so everyone is taking it easy.

We had a lecture today; Mattias Nygren and Magnus Giritzlehner from GamePort. It was fun to talk to people from the gaming industry, which I find rather interesting. They showed us movies from a game called The City of Metronome (which, by the way is the first google suggestion when you have typed “the city of m”), and it is wonderful. This is not the best trailer, but the only one available on the web at the moment. God, I hope they will get the funding to really make it one day.





In group news we have actually rehearsed and timed this presentation. That is a first. We are taking baby steps towards perfection.

Experience Technology

New module this week. Today Jonas Stangel visited us, a product designer that introduced us to the art of designing objects, real things, not just design on a screen but toasters and drills as well. It was fun and interesting, it is always exciting to see design of products that never reached or have yet to reach the market. Or just look more closely at the design that did make it, but whose geniality you never really considered. Got some nice tips about the thought process and some inspiration about what to do with our current object designs.

This is a Ford Concept Car he showed us, designed by Mark Newson. If I could drive and had the money, I would buy it just because of the trunk.

End of Information Society

Hours and hours of presentation today, not surprisingly everyone was very tired at the end. I got myself an awful headache. Being locked in a dark room with no air and a big, shining screen makes my migraine come forward. But no more complaining now.

The presentation was rather mixed, some was really good and informative, some were funnier than others, some really made you feel sleepy. I was rather disappointed in the group that had the British Isles, they mostly talked about the other media, an agency whose founder we already talked at length to. No information about Scotland or Ireland.

The Scandinavian group was great, as was the one that had Africa and the Middle East.

We got a lot of positive feedback, which felt great. Our presentation focused on Japan and Singapore, and so other countries had been pushed back. That decision had been necessary, it was very difficult to find information about agencies in the two countries we choose. But that suddenly seemed such a poor explanation.

Our written presentation took a beating though. And rightly so, we had not understood the assignment. Ah well… We live and we learn. We weren’t the only ones that had missed some of the finer points.
But all in all, our presentation got a good reception and I think we really did a good job.

Kong and guilt-ridden thoughts about advertising

Some words about Kong, who kindly came to see us, to talk to us and to et us to soncider an internship with them on their newly founded agency. Them, in this case, are Jacob Vijn (creative director) and Sean Chambers (planning director).

They came last Monday, but Monday was hell day motion wise, so they didn’t get the attention they deserve in my blog at the time.

Anyway, they said a lot of interesting things; they talked a lot about the values by which they were going run their agencies. That was interesting since we are working on our own values for the class at the moment. Personally I thought they had a bit to many of them, I like it when you have just a few words to always keep in mind, instead of a long list.
The first one was about trust; “hire people you trust, trust the people you hire”. This is important but hard, I have never hired anyone but to know if you can trust him or her after a few interviews must be close to impossible. The second thing I really took to heart was “add value to the web”, there is a lot of crap out there. It goes together for me with “do work that has real value”.

And this I want to talk more about. Value is important to me. During this “lecture” I got the distinct impression that many in our class (I do not say all, but the part of the class that made the most noise certainly) is interested in money above anything else. They do not really know yet what they want to do, but they want to make money while doing it.

I on the other hand am suffering from moral qualms about the whole industry sometimes, but mostly about advertising. Most of us will end up there, or so it feels, in the countless agencies around the world, tapping into our minds to make us desire things. In an industry who’s job it is to sell people things they don’t really need, adding to the materialism and exhaustion of this planets recourses. That may be taking it a bit to far; I am exaggerating a bit to get my point across here.

I talked to Jacob about this after the lecture and he said that the only way of avoiding the guilt is to do things that you feel have value. It might be doing a campaign site for the Red Cross, or it might be constructing a function that will make things easier for its users, but it need to have a real value.

And I think he is right. To do that with every job you get might not be possible, but I will try. And I will also try not to end up in advertising.

This is Hyper Island calling...

We started calling at 6 am, which is about two – three in the afternoon over in Japan, and slightly earlier in Singapore. Both Johannes and Alva faced their demons and picked up the phone today. The recording worked this time around as well, which was another plus.

I did what I think was a very good interview with Chris Lee at “The Asylum”, we talked a lot about trends and digital design in Asia. It felt really good. All my interviews with these slightly smaller agencies have been good I feel (and by small I mean that they don’t control 30% of the market), but with the larger ones (like Dentsu who do control 30% of the market) it is just hopeless. All you can hope to get out of the poor, confused secretaries is a more personal mail address than that for general inquiries.
Now we will start to work on our presentation.

Motion, motion, motion

Last Friday was presentation day for our motion. Despite some technical difficulties at the beginning the reception was good. Some pointer to think about, mostly about body language. It felt great that they liked it as much as they did; there was a lot of really good animation being presented. I was surprised and amazed at the variety of ideas.

And today was the personal 15 sec motion deadline. And I failed to turn it in on time. I was very disappointed, partly of myself partly of the circumstances. I had thought I could work in After Effects but because of circumstances out of my control, I couldn’t. So I was forced to rethink everything in the last minute. And of course I screwed up and didn’t save as often as I should have and lost many hours of work. I felt so tired and stupid.

Well, it is handed in now; I learnt a lot about Flash thanks to Tore who helped me. And even though it wasn’t carried out in a very good way, I feel I had a good idea, which I could have realised. I am disappointed that I didn’t but hey, that is life.
I am impressed with a lot of the motion I have seen from my fellow classmates so far. And by how helpful they can be even though they have their own problems.

Ah... I love the smell of deadline in the evening

It’s a cold and clear deadline night and there is that certain buzz that only people on a deadline, long after they usually go home and it is dark outside, can produce. Most of us aren’t very useful, just hanging around in case we might be, supporting the ones still struggling.

We are doing an animation in After Affects, I have done frames of moving hands and brick walls, and all the key frames of the little white gnome-thing and now I am just hanging around, waiting for the whole thing to be put together. I am very curious to see how Kasper has managed to time it, and how Johannes and Fredrik’s sound effects will match the whole thing. I am a bit afraid that they will sound to videogame like…

Alva helped me do the last frames, something I am very grateful for, might have cracked otherwise.
And now there is only waiting. Tomorrow we will hold the presentation, and then I will spend the weekend trying to make my own 15 sec piece.