Latest Flash-game, First sound design job

August 9, 2010

Double Joker Poker

My latest gig for PAF: I’ve been doing work for them for several years now and I made all the graphics and animations for this flash-game as usual, but this time I finally got to make the sounds and music as well!

For the graphics I designed a female Joker character – maybe a little inspired by Harley Quinn from the Batman universe. I also got a chance to experiment a bit with animating smoke and northern lights…
Head over to PAF.com and try the demo!

Listen to some of the button sounds, effects and music (in 128kbs mono) right here:

Double Joker Poker. Sound effects and music for online flash game. by alexunderstands ©PAF

Sneak-Peak at my animated short film

July 30, 2010

Animation Backgrounds!

“Fiskar-Olles Fest” is the Swedish name of my retro sci-fi children’s movie that I work on between paying jobs. It takes place in an archipelago that is an romanticized and nostalgic version of Åland, the place where I grew up. It’s about this old fisherman who is isolated but connected in surprising ways..

These are the first three backgrounds I made. It’s mostly “painted” with an Wacom Intous tablet and regular Photoshop brushes.

I used a photo of a wallpaper from my Grandmother’s old cabin as an texture on the second image, and the third picture was painted on top on a photo taken by my friend Jan Sundman.

Animated short: Old man waking up in his bedroom.

Here’s a tiny peak at the process for the breakfast background. The final movie will be in HD so you can see all the brushstrokes and details, but it’s very helpful to zoom out and use big brushes in the beginning to find the overall mood and lighting.

On the white curtains in this scene I used a custom brush I made that is basically just a thin gradient from translucent to white – just set it so it reacts to the angle/rotation of the pen and this type of thing becomes quite easy:

I have many more backgrounds already finished – so stay tuned… :)

Do It Yourself: Vintage Marriage Design

July 20, 2010

Just Married!

Welcome to this blog where I’m planning to show my work and talk a little about how it came into being.

So, my wife Jenny and I just came back home to Sollefteå, Sweden from our honeymoon in Paris – and what better way to kick off this blog then to show you some design work from the wedding!

To begin with Jenny showed me a lot of pictures from the blog Green Wedding Shoes. Most of the stuff there looked pretty expensive and everything was being made by payed professionals – even entire design studios where involved: Photographers, Decorators, Paper and typography experts etc etc.. Well, we set out to do as much as possible ourselves and save our extra millions of cash for something else.

We started planning almost 6 months ago, it was January and Sollefteå was ice-cold! But we had a lucky start: Jenny’s father had a tuxedo with a gigantic hat that an old boss gave to him some 20 to 30 years ago. It fit me perfectly and we took our car, our camera (a Canon EOS 400D) a tripod and a remote control and we went out into the woods to try and take some photos for the invitations!

It was -15°C that day and we almost died, but some of those 100 or so shots came out OK!

For the official invitation picture we selected this one below with us kissing. I used Photoshop to do some color fixing. I also painted on it with my Wacom tablet to hide my hand holding the remote control for the camera, and lastly I ran the “smart sharpen” algorithm on it.

Next I made some vector sillhouettes from that photo and searched for old paintings on Google to find a suitable vintage frame. In the background we went with candy-pink stripes and festive pennants that matched Jenny’s plans for the party location.

The wedding took place on Åland, in the archipelago where I grew up. I started to work on a hand drawn map of the area but I gave it up as guests arrived early and I wanted to spend time with them. Here are some of the places and things I drew:

We also made a program for the party with short descriptions of all guests. We used GoogleDocs to simultaneously work on the text from different computers. And whenever we came up with something funny to write, it was great to always have the latest version available. Lastly we included this photo of us that was a montage I made with PS: