Beautiful girls and nice furniture

Just woke, fiddling about with a cup of coffe and feeling good about myself. Had a great time working the last crazy hours of a project that is launching next week.

This is somewhat of a sneak peak, I hope that no one gets their panties in a bunch about it.



Skaargarden.com

It was a really long time since i saw some quality material put in the pipe. Hope that they fare well in todays competitive market.

Sandvik Coromant gives birth to A new insert generation

Major site release this monday. Been literally working my ass off on this one. The project extended from April all through September. The site is up and running and looking good.

Don't miss out: http://www.newinsertgeneration.com/

Case: Spelaspel.nu redesign

About a year ago, our company started pondering the idea of developing a free flash game site. 6 months ago it was finished, but lacked a vital visual finish. About a month ago i took on the job of redesigning the earlier quite retro site to a rounder more modern feel. If this change has some kind of impact on the usage of the site is yet to see, since it's really hard to measure the impacts of Visual improvements.


(The designs seen side by side, left: old, right: new)

The site can be enjoyed from here.

Case: CSI-Training Camp - revisited

Posted some of the best pictures from the finished game here.

Case: CSI - Training Camp

Early October Extrude Interactive got commissioned to do a game themed around the hit tv-series CSI by Kanal5 (Sweden). So we had to go ahead and do it in swedish, although it feels like a heresy.
We figured that we'd make an old style drag and drop game with a bit of a twist. The interface is based around a toolbox / actionbox with wich you interact with the crime-scene or your suspects / evidence. Every action updates the interface and feeds you back results i.e. DNA-test results, Questioning logs and so forth. When you got enough to book somebody, your performance will be evaluated.
This game was released on December 5 / 06 and currently it contains one case to solve. Work is nearly completed on case 2 and case number 3 & 4 is under heavy writing.
Work on this game has surely been interesting. There was a programming challenge in building a cross-referring system that checked all the evidence and interacted with the state of the game that i almost banged the skin off my forehead on. And then there was the 0-Euro budget for photography that had to be overcome. So I had to develop some kind of trick to make my photos feel like high-end production photographs. Here are some examples:


At the start of each case theres an intro-sequence containing 4-5 photographs. Image on top is from the first case where the owner of a small transport company is murdered. My boss had some ties with people that worked in a similar environment, so we found this setting perfect. This photo is shot with a Nikon D200 digital camera with a Sigma 17-35mm 2.8-4 lens at: ISO 400, No flash, 1/30s @ f/2.8. Got lucky I could hold my hand steady enough.
Punched up the contrast / shadows / saturation and fooled the camera raw plugin that i was photographing tungsten lights, when in fact not (as you can see) to get that green feeling. Also added some vinjetting to close the image up and pull out the important details.

This trick is used constantly throughout production to keep the mood constant. Sometimes the white balancing is modified to get a different color-sceme.

Shooting at night with non-existing lighting required stationary subjects and sometimes a big imagination on how to modify the existing lighting in a scene. Failed to mention the trusty tripod for those really hard shots with 10 seconds of exposure.


For the interface we bought a lot of stock photograpy available from StockExchange and Stockxpert. Those sites are invaluable. All the icons are almost 3 times bigger than the original so that they keep absolute maximal sharpness. A lot of retouching, and i mean a lot was done.


Then there was the matter of getting suspects to pose for camera. At first people where relatively unwilling, so my boss and some of his aquaintances posed for the first. This changed later when the game was official, now theres no trouble in getting people to pose at all.
As you can see alot can be done with minimal resources if you take the time to retouch everything thoroughly.
Same trick here as in the crime scene photos. A lot of contrasts.
All in all, hope you found some of this interesting.

Case: Furniture Commercial

Did a commercial for a local furniture company recently. It contained a bunch of fun shots to work with. There's a ball bouncing to the beat of music through the store while a speaker sells the concept to the audience.
In the beginning we had a bunch of shots of the store. Thing is that at the time of the shoot it was midwinter. And when we finished the commercial all the snow had melted. So I had to revisit the site and take some more. Problem was that it kept raining all the time.
So basically I worked up some photoshop magic and got that summer look digitally.
The complex part of this tv-spot was the shadow and lighting of the ball.
Since the ball was bouncing all over the furniture i constructed a low polygon mesh of the scene and matched the camera to the real shot in 3D. I then matched the lighting and animated in the ball. The whole spot contained about 10 shots of that kind. So it was a bit of work. This commercial is now circulating locally in Gävle. So the audience is quite slim. But i think it will do the trick.

Case: Product Photography

Recently a snack bar owner approached our company and wanted some lit menu-signs with big colorful picures of his different snacks on them.
I took the boss's car and drove out with some reflex paper and 2x500w halogen construction lights (ooh the proffessionalism). We had kinda fun doing this as the manager and I joked around doing the different setups, between shots i got to eat as much as I wanted. Can't say anything else than that this was a dream gig. Can think of a few gigs that would be cooler, but nonetheless I love my job.

Case: Promotion Photography

December 2005 i snapped some model shots to promote a scooter that Brynäs was sponsoring (those hockey guys again). This was my second photo-session that actually contained people. Previously i found it reasonably hard to direct people. But its getting easier for every time as i learn what i want from each shot and how to verbalize it in simple instructions. A good sense of humor is also required to get the models to relax.
This shot is originally photographed in a really dirty garage with a white wall. I pulled the background using photoshop and kept some of the shadows along with my own painted ones to create a somewhat believable illusion that my company actually owns a photo studio. The scooter was eventually sold and everyone was happy, except for me that got some axel-grease on my suit pants just before a meeting.

Case: Monzta Grand Prix

Writing this post mortum. Because i kinda lack the time to actually update this blog realtime
February 15:th, i completed the game for Brynäs, a very popular hockey team in Sweden. Two months later it had doubled the hits on the website and later on exceded 200.000, with over 20.000 unique players.
The game was made in flash, programmed with object oriented actionscript. This is a racing engine i have been working on for quite a while, with the help of one of my ex co-workers. The graphics are made by me in Adobe Photoshop. Roughly a combination of hand painting, texturing royalty free asphalt and dirt textures from www.sxc.hu.

Swedish, boring architecture

Some swedish summer fauna 

A walk through Gävle

Newfound joy in my recently aquired Canon 350D...
Took the scenic route home from work and snapped some of the wonders of Gävle along the way. The results where kind of cheap, but at least i got to try out my new camera.
Surely there will be more of theese kinds of excursions in the future.