Yeah yeah writer blah blah director blah blah blah, but where are the expensive cars, the top models and the red carpets? Where are the things THAT REALLY MATTER??

For now we’ve managed to appear on TV. A couple of weeks ago two teams from Televisió de Catalunya visited us and filmed us doing this and that. The first of the teams was making a video for the channel’s production bulletin and the second one came to shot an item for the evening news.

Here you have a link to each video, both of them spoken in catalan:

1.- Producion bulletin video

2.- Evening news video

Enjoy!

Hello!

I’m updating today to let you know that our company’s website recently uploaded a video I edited to promote our Motion Capture studio. It features a few new Virtual Room images. To watch the video click here, then on “TECNOLOGIAS” on your left, then on the “Captura de movimiento” tab.

If somebody out there has some motion running around and annoying the neighbors, and wants it captured, just call. Special discount for being a friend of this site.

Everything else is going just fine. We keep working on the series and thinking about new projects. Waste Days is almost finished script-wise, and now it’s time for Eloy to start worrying about production and planning and all those stressful things.

About a month ago I wrote a draft for a short film that should become a graduation project for my ex-university. A very nice guy called Eloy Calvo, who’s in his last year right now, had the the original idea and will be directing.

The teachers supervising the project seemed to like my draft so now I’m officially on board I might as well give the thing some publicity. Eloy has created a blog, which you can read here:

http://wastedays.wordpress.com/

And that’s pretty much all. The TV series are looking good. It’s really cool to finally watch the episodes we’ve been working on for so long, and to think about how cool the next ones could end up being.

Rejoice, people!

We were editing it two weeks ago. It was a hard battle against time and Final Cut, but we finally made it.

If you want to see the result, this time with wonderful moving pictures, just click here right now:

I hope you like it! Thanks to everyone who saw the previous one and left a comment. Which in the case of the english version of the site is absolutely no one… I’m not an international superstar, I get it.

Cheers!

I’ve REALLY been working in an animated TV series for some months. And now I can show you something. Here it is:

www.sweesters.com

There you’ll find the teaser trailer we edited about three or four months ago. We tried to make the best of what we had back then, which was not much at all. Now we’ve grown. We’ve got animators now, running around the building! So I’d like to welcome the very nice Pepllu, Lluís, Marc, Carlos, Amaia and Ricard from the animation department.

Anyway, everything’s going well at Sweester’s Manor. We’ve seen the first animated shots, and we are delighted to hear the constant hammering of the construction workers that are building something fancy and expensive for our production company. It’s been kind of difficult getting used to all the things we’ve got to do now, and combine animatic-making, voice-recording, technical-scripting, animation-checking, screenwriting, music-picking and all those little things that will look awful on screen in front of (hopefully) thousands of people if they’re not done properly.

I’ll keep you updated!

PS: Congratulations to Lluís Brutal, who recently won a Goya award for the special effects of The Orphanage. He’s a great guy and I was really happy to see him up there!

Three posts in a week. I’m going insane. I’ll try to keep up from now on.

The London eye is a big observation wheel that I have never been to. It’s next to the thames, on the opposite shore to the Big Ben. We walked around there at night, after seeing The 39 Steps (which I recommend) at the Criterion Theatre. There was a man looking calmly at the London Eye and I took a couple of pics.

Here they are, two of them:

Two days ago we had an important visit at work and things turned out great. To celebrate, two more pictures of London.

The first one was taken in an alley whose name and geographical situation I don’t remember. The second one was taken from the Southwark Bridge.

Another gratuitous line of text, because otherwise the image on the left messes up the centering of the pics.

They’re almost here.

Now!:

How’s it going? I’m doing fine, thanks. The animated series are doing fine, too, and I’m waiting for my bosses to shout “Now!” so I can post something about them here, like some pics, or the title, or something. I’m very happy with the work we’re doing. Things are looking better every day, and I’m really having a lot of fun writing, directing and editing the episodes of those series that, some months ago, looked a little different from what I usually enjoy watching.

Litos just created a blog talking humorously about our experiences at work, without talking about the actual project. The blog is called Wakamanimation, honouring the expression “Wakama Natuchu!”, pronounced by the hovitos tribe at the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark. The sentence was popularized at work by Ingrid, our production manager.

Aside from that, I’m starting a new section. Some weeks ago I bought a digital slr camera. I’m not an expert, but I’ve put to use some of what I learned at photography class about five years ago. I visited London for four days recently and I took a lot of pictures, some of which I’ll be uploading here. I’ve been debating myself over the retouching/not retouching dilemma, and I’ve decided I’ll use photoshop a bit. No strange filters, just the curves, levels and contrast.

The first one was taken at Hyde Park, and the second one, in front of the Tate Gallery, is an sculpture by Louise Bourgeois.

To see a bigger version just click on them.

The day jayouth7 broke my heart was a lot of days ago, because once again I got lazy and didn’t translate the post inmediately. Anyway:

I decided to upload my short films to Youtube. I’ve been avoiding that for a long time because youtube turns any short film in “just another short film on youtube”, and I made this website to be able to present them in something of a “personalized” manner. But oh well, youtube is very popular, and it might get me some extra visitors, so I decided I’ll give it a try.

Another reason why I was not willing to post them on youtube is probably thinking the amount of people posting short films on youtube that must be a ten times better than me. I’m afraid of them, bloody competitors. But whatever, there they are now, and if a hamster on a piano can get more than six thousand views, maybe my short films will get two or three new viewers, and some of them might take a look at this site afterwards.

The afternoon I uploaded some of the videos I got very excited when I noticed someone had subrscribed to my channel. It was jayouth7. I was just about to make a post in his honor called “jayouth7 is my best friend”, but while investigating a little deeper in this appearently charming and wonderful guy, I discovered this comment on one of his videos:

“thats all we need is another spammer, that subscribes to everyone just to get the same back”

And that was that. Jayouth7 had let me down. It was not unconditional love as I once thought it was.

That was the day when jayouth7 broke my heart.

I’m back from Scotland having seen Ricky Gervais and with loads of good intentions. One of them is the intention to publish the second chapter of “The kid that never finished what he started”, a post I had left, oh the irony, unfinished. So here it goes:

Spielberg and Lucas are working on it as we speak, but somebody had the idea a long time ago. 12 or 15 years ago, give or take, Indiana Jones began a new adventure, but he never managed to finish it. He didn’t because the kid that never finished what he started (hey, that’s the name of this section!) did just what you’d expect a kid of his kind to do, which is not finish what he had started. It seems back then I thought Henry was spelled Jenri. At that point in my life I was very proud of knowing that Indiana Jones’ real name was Henry, even though, as I realise now, I didn’t know how to spell it; so I called my comic-book sequel Jenri i l’estatua d’or, which is misspelled catalan for Henry and the Golden Statue.

Harrison Ford was my favourite actor when I was a kid. Probably it was not that important, but I have had the feeling for a long time that my interest in watching films and learning the names of their actors and directors kind of started the day I realised Han Solo and Indiana Jones were the same person. If I’m not mistaken that happened after watching The Empire Strikes Back at my grandpa’s. I was a complete fanboy, to the point sometimes at school kids picked on me by questioning my sexuality regading the “Fordgate”.

Youth traumas aside, the comic book’s prologue went like this:

“Indiana Jones will have a new adventure after the one he spent whith his father in “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade”. Now, Indiana Jones is going after the world’s biggest piece of gold, the golden statue or the “TUTANKAMON” statue. The black dragon, who is egiptian, wants to be the king of the world and… he only can do that with the golden statue, the most powerful statue on earth. Indiana Jones has gone to the bank, the banker has read the newspaper and told Indiana about the robbery of the golden statue. Indiana Jones will have to find Nadia.
Afterwards he’ll have to look for the black dragon, first he will find one of his servants in a bar. Many of his servants are japanese”.

That last thing sure needed to be pointed out. The following pages of the comic book, some of them coloured, include, among other things, the following elements:

- Indiana’s thrilling pause to get breakfast.
- A medieval statue inside an egyptian pyramid.
- Outrageous spelling mistakes.
- Plenty of stealing from the movies. The giant rolling rock is now a giant rolling wheel, the crossing arrows trap and the closing stone door from Raiders show up, Indiana hangs from a tank’s cannon, there’s a chase secene with a sidecar involved, and a little asian kid.
- Indiana Jones punching a gorilla.
- A scene that actually belongs to the trailer of The Fugitive, a movie I had not seen back then, “ingtegrated” in the story.

If you can handle so much excitement, you can take a look at this forgotten jewel called Jenri and the golden statue right here. It’s in catalan, but you wouldn’t understand it if you were able to read the language anyway. It makes no sense. Just look at the pretty pictures.