Last performance at the Fire Club, Berlin

My musical alter-ego, Mr Abbey, played his last wednsday session at the Fire Club, Berlin, this wednesday. A big thanks to Chris Asteriades for having pulled the strings for this amazing arrangement over the past year - And a big thanks to Jens Fussan for taking these amazing pictures at the scene.

Live photos by Jens Fussan, Berlin

Heyaaaa bloggers & Tweeters!

This has been a really crazy week. First the Animation Tag Attack got picked up by the Cartoon Brew Crew, and now Matt Lambert at Motiongrapher just blogged my "Bear Untitled" catapulting it onto a ton of different blogs and tweets. That is so weird that this silly little 2 days project is getting so much attention. But the reactions has been overwhelming and I am truly flattered by all the positive response. I have even received a few emails from festivals asking if I would submit the movie to their program. Thank you all! I can feel the summer coming up...

AH - Summer at last.

What a day today! Even though I was beaten and battered by a great Jam Party yesterday containing superb musicians, far to much beer and an evil willed bottle of Jägermeister, I still managed to get out of bed to profit from the late afternoon. It was the first REAL summers day. One of those days where you can bike around wearing nothing but your good mood. I ended up sitting under a tree by the Spree and doodeling in my book. Afterward I stopped by the crazy Open Air Karaoke in Mauerpark, and now I am off to the El Hamra Open Stage together with Eva Adore, Peter Ploch & Christina Maria. It Doesn't get any better than that!

A one hour sketch I ended up doing of the Berliner Dom

Finally new illustration on the homepage

I have had such a bad conscience about having a crap temporary homepage, that Ive been giving out cards spelling out the name of my blog. And lets face it: The name of the blog is waaaaay to long for someone to actually punch in all the letters. Today after several sleepless nights I finally pulled myself together and redid it. Eventually It will need some specifically designed sub-pages, but for now I am just happy that I am not ashamed of it anymore. Phew! The title is 8-bit skeleton.

tHUMBNAILS

I was sitting in the U-bahn yesterday and realized that I haven't been doing any background-work for a long time, so I whipped out my sketchbook and my aquarells and just started smearing thumbnails on a page. Here are a few of them. In the book they are around 7x7 cm big.

"Bear Untitled" & hommage to Mr O'reilley

As I previously stated I have been playing around with GraphicsGale and creating really strange small pixel animations for my own pleasure only. The above video is the result of two days (around 16 hrs) fooling around with the program - and my first endeavor in the 8 bit realm since the early 90'es.
 
My good friend producer and musician extraordinaire, Henrik Sjørslev, did the sound design and got totally free hands. Unpurposely because of the bitcrusher the sound became very David O'reilley-esque. A thing David figured out quite early, and one of the many reasons his works are so great, is that there is something amazing about emotional conversations acted out in ice cold monotone voices. He has been able to get under the skin and display true emotions on very synthetic characters in very synthetic universes. After a bit of pondering I decided to keep it. Mainly because Henrik did a killer job on it, and I cant stop bursting out in laughter at the end of the clip every time I see it (I didn't have that before the sound, mind ya - I thought it was funny, but not haha funny) + I think it fits very well to the mood and style of the animation.

If you don't know Davids work, you should definitely go check out his homepage - and go through it all! It isn't just his animations that are quite refreshing (especially PSS, that won him the golden bear at last years Berlinale - and about 800 other prizes) but also his approach to animation in general - such as his theories, his dogmas, visual observations and manifests...


What are you still doing here? - GO!

Oh, glorious Cartoon Brew

It just came to my attention that Cartoon Brew  blogged the Animation Tag Attack yesterday. How awesome is that? Calling our work "remarkably fresh and sophisticated" on top. Don't just sit around go check it out!

UPDATE: It seems the coverage of our little pet project is picking up. Several smaller blogs are starting to blog us and some bigger fish are joining in as well. As for instance the all-knowing Dekku over at noFatClips, Ehrensenf online tv (from 1:08) - even Norwegian radio P3 did a small featurette on us.

I must admit that I am extremely happy with this much positive press after just 4 episodes + there is a growing interest from some really skilled people to be part of the project. Hourray for the internet! Imagine having done this back in the era of the videocasette...

GraphicsGale Ver. 1.93.12

Last week I got an urge to do some pixel animations and I downloaded a small freeware program called GraphicsGale - I've spend the past few days playing around with it, and it is so much fun. Main part of that is the fact that the limited resolution leaves you with a way faster and more intuitive work flow. And limited animation has an old school feel to them - which further reduces your time schedule. because of the primitive state of the program I do miss some tools from time to time, but for now Im just a fat boy in candyland.

Ive already finished one 1,5 minute short and Im playing around with another one right now. The first one is in Odense, Denmark with my good friend Henrik Sjørslev to get a sweet layer of 8 bit sound added. I will post that during next week. Stay tuned.

I just spend the past 2 hours doodling while watching ultimate fighting. These are a few of the endeavors.

Lasulk.a

As previously mentioned I am currently working on a small 5 page comic based on a short story written by Idyll Wilde for her Luci.a Variations. I just finished the 2 first pages and thought I would share a bit of process with you guys...

The Animation Tag Attack Episode 4

Once again my baby-pet-project the Animation Tag Attack has been updated with yet another excellent episode. Ned Wenlock, New Zealand animation director, is doing a great job tying the 3 first episodes together. Go check out his stuff! I love his bedbugs odyssey...

Following is all 4 current episodes together... And more on their way, so stay tuned.

To sum up; the creators are as follows:
Myself
Mads Juul
Andreas Normand Grøntved
And of course Ned Wenlock

Talk to the fox - the dwarf wont listen!

I don't want to go to prison!

Yesterday evening just before going to bed we watched Scorseses "Shutter Island". And what a ride. But as I woke up this morning this picture was stuck in my head together with the title; "I don't want to go to prison!" - Strange...

This fox is playing cards...

Mauerpark!

I spend my entire day today at Mauerpark. Getting up at 5.30 in the morning, carrying a bunch of my originals plus a ton of prints 20 minutes by foot only to get a crappy stand in the most remote part of the marked. I was there for 8 hours and sold...; 1 F"#%¤ print. = 5 Euros. Jeeez.

The upside though was that I had a really nice day outside and I got a bunch of killing-time-aquarells done...

I am a fool!

Yesterday was the first of April. The idea was to call up my girlfriends parents, and drop them the bomb that Eva is pregnant... And then later shortly before midnight reclaim it as an April fools day joke - and see how far the news had gotten. Eva found out my fiendish scheme and talked me out of it. Seen in the rear view mirror: Maybe that was for the best...