Solid Snake reads Fifty Shades of Grey part 1

Pilot episode of a new series where famous characters/actors reads erotic stories

Let's Play Drawn the painted tower ep.2

Let's Play Drawn: The Painted Tower ep.1

Me and Megamer joins together to play Drawn: The Painted Tower.

Banana Split ep.2

New episode of Banana Split that I forgot to post on my blog.

Riff: Women Worker (1944)

New riff from me and Maryann

Women Worker riff - 1944

Skyrim Weirdness 2

What Makes A Good Party (1950)

A new riff from me and Megamer. This time, "What Makes a Good Party" from 1950.
http://blip.tv/megamer-letsplay/letsriff-what-makes-a-good-party-6109494

Lets Riff American Citizen

Riff of American Citizen

Predicament of an Animator

Exactly six months ago I came to England to study animation, after I decided to drop the idea of working as a live-action director. In just six months of animating, I’ve learned more about modern cinema then I did in three years as a film scholar.

What I’m talking about is the behind-the-scenes aspects of film making. Have you watched a movie recently and seen details look fake or out-of-place? Most likely, that’s because of animators like me who sit in front of the computer and create the scenes. The intention of course is always to make it look real, but because of studios pushing for quantity over quality, you’ll often see really bad CGI effects in modern cinema.

Why this predicament? As an animator going into a modern industry, I am of course in favour of increased use of digital effects. However, I am also against it.

Let’s look at movies like the Star Wars prequels. Imagine the hundreds of artists who worked hard on making those movies look good visually, only to have it speed right past you and you never even notice the details. Every second of those movies are the products of months of hard work for the visual effects department. The surprise is that all of the special effects you see on big budget movies probably took a CGI artist only a few days because the studio pushed the artists to have them done in time for release. And as such a lot of corners were cut to make it look as good as possible with as little effort as possible. Kinda like a cardboard bar covered in chocolate.

This is why, as an animator, I like Pixar. They use CGI purely as an animation tool. When you watch a Pixar film you already know everything is fake, because it’s animation. It is an animated feature intentionally, while movies that add CGI just use it to make special effects cheaper and faster. And that is why I’m in a predicament as an animator working on digital animation. There are really good ways of using it, but also really bad ways.

As a writer, would you use digital effects—if it were possible—to make the reader ‘feel’ like it’s an exciting story?

Lets Riff; 3 Little Pigs war prop. ft Animation Viking

Three Little Pigs war propaganda riff

Movie titles in Norway

For random amusment. English movie titles that's been changed in Norwegian translation, in which I will translate back to English.


Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me 
Austin Powers: The Spy Who Spermed Me


Shawshank redemption
Rain of Freedom


Deliverence
Picnic with Death


Curious George
Curious Nils


Silence of the Lambs
Night swarm


A Streetcar named Desire
A Rail Wagon for Desire


Spinal Tap
Help, We're In The Rock Buisness


Monty Python’s Life of Brian
The Prophet Brian's Life and Story


Wheels of Terror
Death on Larva Feet

Banana Split ep.1

Me and Maryann have started a podcast called Banana Split, where we discuss everything geeky in the world. This is the pilot episode, so hope people will listen to more episodes in the future.
http://spacemonkeymafiastudios.com/2012/02/07/banana-split-podcast-ep1-2.aspx

Skyrim Weirdness

Here's some screenshots of various glitches I've found in Skyrim. Plus some screenshots that are just pretty.

and here's the pretty ones!

Riff's, with me and Maryann

Couple of months ago, me and Maryann decided to make riff's on old videos that opened themselves to funny remarks. These are the three first riff's we have done. So check them out, and check out Maryann's blip.tv site.

Lets Riff; The Gossip

Lets Riff; Trouble with Women

Lets Riff; tax propaganda

Vampires and Literature: Why So Feminine?

A few months ago I was visiting my hometown, Skjetten, in Norway, along with my girlfriend. I decided to take her to the mall in the neighboring town of Strømmen, since it has several game stores and we both love to scrounge the places of used copies of games for out-dated game consoles.

As we strolled through the mall I saw a bookstore, that I remember had a small, but very extensive line of books in the fantasy genre. Disappointment struck hard when I saw that the entire fantasy section had shrunken to a single tall bookshelf in the corner of the store, and every level of that bookshelf had nothing but various paperback issues of the vampire genre. Every single one of them written by female writers, for a female audience, with poorly photoshopped book covers to boot. Among these, there was one book that caught my eyes with its immensely bright golden half-naked man on the cover, and a shamelessly huge quote by Stephenie Meyer.

This book was City of Bones by Cassandra Clare.

Apparently what I was holding was the first book of a already big series where a fifteen-year-old girl gets caught up in a war between foul demons and the most attractive demon hunters that perfect genealogy can produce. The last part is not something I pull out of thin air, the demon hunters appearances are very well described down to the very last rippling muscle and pouty lip.

My girlfriend immediately recognised the book I was holding because her sister had read the series and absolutely hated it but still found it amusing to read. That’s when my interest took hold, for I am a sucker for things that are so bad that it’s good. A breed of entertainment that seems to be growing quite rapidly in this generation. So I opened the book and read. On the very first page I found a section that completely baffled me in how badly written it is, and yet congratulates the author for how far she goes to describe every characters appearances.

It goes something like this:

«Aw, come on.» The kid hoisted the thing up over his head. It looked like a wooden beam, pointed at one end. «It’s part of my costume.»

The bouncer raised an eyebrow. «Which is what?»

The boy grinned. He was normal-enough-looking, Clary thought, for Pandemonium. He had electric-blue-dyed hair that stuck up around his head like the tendrils of a startled octopus(…)

When it came to the startled octopus, I was quite rolling on the floor laughing, I must admit. As luck shall have it, this is not the only absurd sentence describing the people in this book’s world as well as their actions, which often question the author’s sense of the reality of this world.

I can bet that I am not the only one who saw the massive surge of vampire and paranormal novels that appeared after the huge success of the Twilight series, by far most of them written by female authors. I have absolutely nothing against female writers, with Robin Hobb and Margaret Weis being among my favorite writers in the fantasy genre, but it is clearly a marketing decision and that is why I feel it hurts other women who want to be taken seriously in the industry.

This is not a review of the book because I haven’t gotten around to finishing it, but perhaps in the next blog I will do a detailed review of the entire thing. This is just a question mark on the effect these kinds of books have on the creative community of female writers who strive to write great fantasy novels but get dragged down if they aren’t writing books for teenage girls that include hunky supermen and perilous situations where the very young female is the center of attention.