#22

Flash game done... its pretty shitty. But looks cool, I like the visuals. Final 3d stuff rendering, thats gonna take 'a while'. Hopefully finished before leaving this island..

Meanwhile, I've found a way to entertain my host family, in form of Finnish national level hockey. Not that they care about the sport, but a mad fanatical Finnish fan screaming and swearing in a weird language seems to be fun for them to listen too. Stupid swedish referees...

#21

With every post its getting harder and harder to figure out what to talk about... This blogging thing is something I feel naturally very bad at. Anyway, time is getting scarce, and its soon going back to Finland. To be honest, I don't like it at all. Maybe I should start searching for jobs from Ireland instead from Finland? I don't know.

Finland is doing good in the hockey championships. Hope they keep up with that. What else to say? My flash game is not progressing. Can't get those sprite instance children to react to my mouse click functions...... its driving me mad.

#20

Less than two weeks left. It feels unbelievable, like I had just arrived. There's a few things I need to do as in terms of travelling exploration that I haven't yet done (visit the Arann islands) so hopefully I get to do that on the weekend.

The hockey world cup has started, so I get to return the favour to my host family of introducing rugby to me. Found this stream site on the web that let us watch the games with crappy video quality with a few seconds delay from the actual event. And on american commentary (which sounds extremely weirs as Antero Mertaranta's commenting voice is so hardcoded into the back of my head). So far, the Irish men seem to at least fake very well their interest in hockey.

#19

In school the exams are about to start so I need to find myself a project. Last week or been mainly fighting and arguing with the beloved maya in trying to finish my 3D animation, and banging my own head against a wall while trying to figure out how to properly script stuff in flash (my stupid game monsters refuse to react when I shoot them).

Hockey world championships are starting!! I really hope my internet connection will be good enough for streaming. GO SUOMI P******!!!

#18

Tomorrow its gonna be my host dad's birthday. I'm thinking about buying him a bottle of whiskey. Also paying the rent. I think they would appreciate if I paid the rent. It's so very quiet in the cottage with the girls gone. Don't know if I like it or not. There is solitude.. and silence. Both are things I enjoy and appreciate in life, but we are social animals after all. Now I need to socialise with the irish again.. sad.

#17

With my host's permission (who is also a teacher in the school), we (all the finns living in Spiddal) skipped school on tuesday to attend to the host's daughter's confirmation. It was surprisingly similar to what I remember how my own was back in the day (considering that this was a catholic confirmation and not lutheric). I was a little bit surprised that the priest talked in english and not latin (very progressive from the most conservative church in all of christendom). Day was great, I hear its currently warmer in Ireland on average than it is on the Iberian peninsula, so take that Irina! Enjoy you stay in Portugal hahaha...

#16

One of my housemaids (roommate) has her birthday tomorrow. I have no idea what to get her, but I'll figure something out.

Also, our hosts will take us to visit a sheep farm and a stables to do some horse riding and turf digging and other very irish stuff. I guess that is school.

School is like in Finland at the end of the term. Suddenly everyone has a rush to get everything finished by deadlines. I feel bad for my irish friends because here we don't have an option to stay in school afterwards to continue on the projects, and lessons are ridiculously short compared to the amount of work expected to be done.

And stuff.

#15

Film and TV part is progressing well, the ad is finished and now there is only a report to write. The rest of the projects need more work, especially the gaming. I discovered flash on the macs which means I now have a software that I can use for that too, which is helps a lot.

Weather is still good. Two of my housemaids (roommates) don't get along. Have to be peacekeeper again.......

#14

I'll keep this short  because im wriging on the phone. We got a day off of school to go to Dublin to vote in the embassy (me and a couple of other finns).  Note sure if its a good choise since the bus costs money and all the parties pretty mutch suck.

#13

Another week down. Not really mutch to say about school, everyone seems to be slightly behind schedule with pretty much every project, but not so much that a panic is needed. iMac softwares are finally starting to open to me, so I'm getting a workflow going on.

Easter is here! A much appreciated prolonged weekend with good Friday and easter Monday being free!

#12

I humbly apologize to all the dear readers about the silence. The internet in my accomondation didn't work for a week, and I was too occupied with projects at the school to remember to update it here. I finally have Maya to work with 3D, so I can ditch that abomination called blender and actually get some stuff seriously done.

There has been requests to add pictures to the blog. I have no idea how to add pictures from a Jolla phone to a computer, but I could add some random go-pro videos once I get those edited. The promblem with that is again that I dont have an editing software and in school I don't really have the time to edit them. But I'll get them there, even as raw if I have to.

Weather continues to be random. Usually we have fours seasons in a single day. My host's cat gave birth to a bunch of kittens. Everyone is exited about easter, guess its bigger here than in Finalnd.

#11

Back to normal day to day life.. for a few days that was. Then st. Patric's day came. The locals had hyped it so much to be "grand" and "unreal" that I thought it could newer live up to the expectations. I was happily proven wrong. Paddies truly was unreal, easily one of the craziest days and nights of my life.

Not many made it to school the day after.

#10

Work experience weeks are done. We didn't finish our stopmotion, but that was to be expected, because we emphasised on real industry level quality rather than rushing it to be completely finished. It was a good experience over all, though the many times we had to re-shoot entire sections of footage just because someone had touched something on the scene by accident, and that was sometimes quite irritating.

My only regret was that we newer got to the point of actually applying the backgrounds on the greenscreen, because those were largely made by me. The teachers seemed pretty happy with our work though overall, so there shouldn't be anything to complain about i guess?

Waiting for the dreaded Paddies day...

#9

Alright, we are doing a stop motion project now for two weeks. The teachers who lead the effort seem professional, and we are doing all the steps you would expect the industry itself do, which is great!! After we were finished with character concepts, i got in charge of making the backgrounds of the animation, which will be green-screened later, once shooting is done. I don't think we will ever reach that point though, as the progress is way too slow to be finished in just two weeks. The teachers seem to be fine with this though, its more important that we learn and familiarise with the actual steps of the project than rush everything hastily.

#8

Rag week. School was off, but I found a guy who is setting up his own media company, and I am helping him setting up a visual image for it. Didnt have any access to computers though, so my 'work' was mainly doing scetches by hand.

#7

So, Toni and Toni from my homeland arrived on Monday. Hey are neat fellows, stick mostly to themselves, but so do I so we get along fairly well. Drinking was heavy the last week: on thursday I had to show Galway around to the finns, thursday was students night out (met some cool swedes), on friday this one chick from an art class I happened to randomly run into a couple of weeks before had a birthday party, and on saturday I just had to take it easy.

School? Still the same projects. This week I was very pleased that the tempo of studying is much easier than in Finland. Also ran into a fellow who is starting his own business. He might give me some projects to do for building up his firms visual image.

#6

02.02.2015-13.02.2015

A week went by so fast I forgot to update the blog (woops). Nothing super special happened, but it was generally a good and fun week. On Monday, we continued with the ad. I got to the editing phase, and realised that summarising three movies in a one minute ad is insanely hard. I edited one punch line with a conversation from two movies and had already used 30 seconds.. this is going to be a serious tetris challenge...

3D continues to be a challenge, not because the assignments are hard (in fact they are much easier than anything we did in Finland) but blender continues to speak a different language than me. I really miss my Maya. On other courses, we are learning script writhing and storyboarding in debt, something that we lacked in our education back home. So while studying here is not as fast paced, I feel that I am getting something of it, which is good.

As far as health goes, I have finally killed of the otitis, but now a some kind of tumour has grown under my left eye. So yeah.. from one problem to the next. I really hope to avoid having to operate it.

#5

23.01.2015 - 28.01.2015

I got otitis for the first time in my life (newer had it as child), which raised a fewer. Also, I couldn't sleep at all the first few nights as the pain combined with an irritating high sound continuously and mercilessly annoyed me. On monday I got to see a doctor who said my ear was a complete mess and put me on antibiotics.

29.01.2015
The otitis is still a nuisance, but with the combination of antibiotics and a mountain of painkillers I finally got the fewer down and was able to return to school. We did 3D modelling with blender, which is a nightmare coming from maya, but I struggled and held on. The teacher said he'd see if I could get a student version of Maya installed on one of the computers for me to use. I really hope it could, blender is cancer.

#4

20.01.2015

First half of the day we learned how to set up question that provides us with proper goals and constraints on our games. We got some pretty neat and original game ideas as a result.

On the evening we continued with the presentations. I decided to also participate and started on my presentation, but didn't finish it today.

21.01.2015

We continued with Stage to make 2D animation characters. On the evening we had sound engineering, and learned how to record sounds in the studio. Nothing special, but it was fun.

22.01.2015

The expedition to Limerick finally happened today. We visited LSAD first and the city's art gallery later. LSAD's gaming and animation course presentation was really interesting, enough so that I took that to a consideration as an option to study in the future. The art gallery didn't impress me, but I'm the type of guy who rarely enjoys visiting them.

#3

16.01.2015

We did brainstorming on game ideas it was fun and simple. Afternoon the others did presentations on game/movie/animation related subjects, I just watched and listened because the rest had begun with tose before I came to Ireland so they didint require me to keep a presentation.

weekend, none of your business what I was doing.

19.01.2015

My course has mondays off weirdly enough but I decided to come to school anyway because I'm a workaholic in that way. I signed up with a film course that works on doing a short film trailer thats gonna go up on GTI TV at some point (if I understood the teacher correctly, the irish accents still gives me troubles). They only work on that on mondays so that's a perfect fill for me.

#2

14.01.2015

Maybe its just that the school is going easy on me in the beginning, but this school doesn't feel that hard as its Finnish counterparts. We are doing 2D animation. Nothing new, reminds me of flash, but the programs are new so there's at least that to learn, and repetition newer hurts.

15.01.2015

We were supposed to travel to Dublin for an art animation happening of some sort, but a bit of sleep falling from the sky shut down the entire infrastructure of the island. So no school, but that was alright as I was hooked on Dan Browns Inferno, and finished it despite my severe dyslexia. A very good read!

#1

12.01.2015

Flight day. Mother had taken all the stress form my shoulders and hadn't slept at all during the night. Wakeup at 0445 hours finnish time. We drank a cup of coffey and left for the airport. Outside was -12˚C, cold enough to make me more than eager to leave the country.

An hour and a half later, we arrive at the airport. Check in has already ben made the day before, so I only had to send my luggage away and head for the security check. As an employee, I was certain that all my stuff was going to be searched (its a prank among the employees). Suprizingly, that didn't happen, but I had a friendly chat with a collegue and my boss.

The flights themselves went smoothly and on time. The plane arrived in Copenhagen before scheduled, and I had 100 danish kroner left from my inter-railing trip back in summer, so I ordered some food while waiting for the final flight. I arrived in Dublin a few hours later, and to a pleasant suprize had no trouble finding the bus that would take me to Galway. The bus was 10 minutes late, but that was alright as so was my host who had promised to pick me up there. I got to eat at with their family, and felt welcomed to Ireland.

13.01.2015

First day in School. Half of the teachers were sick, so the first hours I bounced from class to class as the staff was trying to figure out where I should be. In the end I was set with an animation & gaming class, who's teacher was also absent, so the day was very easy. On the evening I got to explore Spittal village, the small town just outside Galway where I was staying. Food prizes are quite the same as in Finland, but the beer is definitely cheaper, and there is stronger boos and vine in regular stores! Horray for no governmental monopolies!!