So that was it. I just came home from Funcom for the last time. The last couple of days I have 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.
My last week in Funcom didn’t turn out as expected. Yesterday morning the company announced that they had to cut 20% of the staff and our main office here in Oslo was hit the hardest. It was incredibly sad to see so many of my extremely talented friends and colleagues one by one getting the news that they had to leave. And the messages kept ticking in on Facebook throughout the evening. I wish them all the best for the future! I wish Funcom good luck too…
Everything comes to an end. It’s four years (and two days to be excact) since I started working as a concept artist in Funcom. Monday I handed in my resignation and in two weeks today I’ll have my last day here. The first concept I did in Funcom was an alien-mushroom-thing for the Anarchy Online expansion pack Lost Eden where I ended up designing the entire mothership interior. I also did a few little things for Conan inbetween. Then finally production started on The Secret World during the summer of 2006. It’s been fun to follow the project from the beginning, see the team expand from just a few people and to work with such a bunch of great people. I have a note on my wall which I believe I wrote during our very first official TSW meeting. On top it says KICKAZZ in big red letters, a keyword which still is being frequently used to describe the game. I wish my team and the project all the best. And I certainly hope it will be really KICKAZZ. So what’s next for me? I’ll return to movies and animation – which is closer to my heart I guess. The place is Storm Studio where I will be a part of the art department together with some extremely talented friends of mine. Storm Studio did Norway’s first CG-feature Free Jimmy which was released in 2006. They did special effects for some of the recent most successful Norwegian movies like Max Manus and Død Snø (Dead Snow). They also produced and did the effects for Peter & The Wolf which was awarded with an Oscar for the best animated short last year. I’m really looking forward to it. I’m sure it’s going to be great fun!
Here’s another book cover from me. This is for Norwegian author Endre Lund Eriksen’s latest which is called Super and it has just been published by Aschehoug in Norway. (And, yes, the Kill Bill reference is intended. ) Hope you like.
(And post number 100 on this blog! Yey!) I did the storyboards for the second TSW teaser and again I grabbed some screenshots from it and compared it to my storyboards. And they match up pretty well (apart from the train scene which wasn’t executed the way I intended, but that’s not a part of this selection anyway). I’ve mixed boards from several parts of the process. Some are coloured (we ended up colouring the entire storyboard for this teaser), some are rougher and some, like the last two, are from the very first super rough draft. In fact, that she fires the gun was later removed, but made its way back into the final cut. Enjoy.
Since Funcom just published a few of my concepts for our game, The Secret World, I might as well throw them in here too. There’s not much I can say about them apart from that they’re relatively old. If you haven’t already, do drop by the game’s website for more info on the game, more concept art, new screenshots and a forum – which always is a lot of fun to read.
The second teaser for Funcom’s The Secret World is out. I did the storyboard on this one as well based on a short synopsis from director Ragnar Tørnqvist. Designs were done in Funcom as well as the sound. Digic did the modelling and the animation. Enjoy.
I jumped on a plane to Mumbai (or Bombay if you like) and spent one week with my friend Shank and his family in July this year. Here are a few photos from the trip. There are even more in my Flickr gallery. Feel free to check them out.
Except from returning home from 2 weeks in Ibiza, not much mentioning really.
But what’s cool though is that some of my work has finally been released First of all Me and Øyvind Holen’s book ‘Hiphop’ was printed in July. Looking forward to be able to post some samples from it when it’s been released (which should be now in August).
I also did 4 T-shirt/hoodie prints for Lilia GjerstadsJLH-label (Johnny leave home) last fall for the 2010 winter collection.
I’m awaiting some samples so stay tuned for some better pictures.
This was my fisrt Inspector Morse novel to read, the only one I've been able to find State-side, and I absolutely loved it. This is book 12 of 13 so some of the sub-plots I was not privy to. But It was an amazingly well written and planned ...
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