The sessions were held at the beautiful Felix Meritis (an old school?) but also in a room at the nearby hotel Dylan, a really beautiful room, all white with a big softly lit sculptured wall. Four parallel sessions made it easy to find sessions that interested everyone but hard to choose. The lineup of speakers was really good and the topics covered a broad range from art and inspiration to hard tech talks. In focus were the new features of Flash CS5 and Flash player 10.1, the iPhone export and the multitouch capabilities but also Unity got a lot of attention.

Adobe let us see a sneak peek on Flash CS5 and talked about how the open screen project made it possible for flash player 10.1 and Air 2.0 to run on a large number of devices. It was fun to see Flash running on the Nexus One and other devices such as netbooks and a new prototype from Nvidia. Adobe also talked about how they continuously work on the flash players performance and how they have a dialogue with the flash community. They showed two impressing demos from the Away team. A fighter jet with high poly count and multiple light sources and a Quake style demo that was really smooth.

Mario Klingemann talked about math, patterns in life and his quest to find patterns not yet discovered. He also showed how he managed to send the portrait of Mona Lisa in a single tweet, 140 characters.

Grant Skinner and Mike Chambers both had a lot of tips and tricks up their sleeves about optimizing the code to get a better performance.

Erik Natzke spoke about his way from mega-timeline-tweening to coding his own tools to be able to make his amazing artwork.

Jared Tarbell talked about finding patterns in images and his experiments trying to make unexpected things to occur in his work. He had a lot of interesting samples of his work to show, both digital and analogue.

Frank Reitberger had a talk about the return of the blob. He showed some experiments with metaballs, one where he connected a pressure sensor to his computer and while shooting it with a water-gun he obtained cool effects in a flash 3D environment.

Wesley Grubbs from PitchInteractive held a very interesting session about information graphics. He talked about strategies for making information visible especially when dealing with very large amounts of data. http://www.pitchinteractive.com, http://www.devedeset.com/

The very inspiring Bartek Drozdz talked about his experiences of going from working with 3D in flash to using Unity. Unity seems to be quite easy to work with and we will see a lot of that in the future. http://www.everydayflash.com/

Ralph Hauwert held my favorite session talking about raytracing with Pixelbender filters. Lots of cool refereces to the demo scene and really good thoughts on optimizing and using Pixelbender. http://www.unitzeroone.com

Joa Ebert is always fun to watch, a real “mad scientist”, amazing what that guy can do, has he got 48 hours each day? Some fun insights on developing with Scala. I love it when he says things like “then its really easy, you can do anything…” and most of the audience hasn’t got a clue on what he just did. http://blog.joa-ebert.com/

Lee Brimelow talked about the new multitouch functionality in flash player 10.1. This is along with the iPhone export one of the most talked about features of the new flash player and it seems to work as you would expect it to. Some of it will be a bit tricky to implement though because of all the hardware and OS differences. The basic stuff seems to work in most cases. http://theflashblog.com/

Andre Michelle showed parts of the new version of Audiotool that he and Joa Ebert has been working on for the last two years. The performance of that is really impressive and Andre’s creativity when it comes to making visual interfaces for creating and manipulating sound is amazing. The new version will be released in a few weeks but If you haven’t tried the current version you really have to have a look at it. http://blog.andre-michelle.com/, http://www.hobnox.com/audiotool.1046.en.html

Chris Bird of United Visual Artists showed some nice installations and live stage visuals for bands like Massive Attack and U2. Massive use of LED, beautiful stuff. http://www.uva.co.uk/

Then our own David Eriksson finished off the conference with a talk that was very appreciated by the audience, really fun to see all that behind the scenes material from the Teamgeist project. We felt pretty proud sitting in the very front row when David had his talk about our way of life. Hats of for David! And we even got some goosebumps watching our showreel on the big screen. Great work everyone!

Amsterdam, we will be back!

So we are in Los Angeles California for a shoot. We use a local service company but the man pulling the strings behind the camera is our old friend and collaborator Ted Kjellsson. Ted has been on many of our projects from the very start of North Kingdom and it feels great to have this American/Swedish collaboration going on. We also brought along our friends Arvid and Julius from Stopp for some shoot supervision.

The project we are working is assigned by Saatchi LA and will be launched later on this spring. Overall you can tell how well-oiled the film industry is over here. From the prop-master to the electricians, everyone is very very professional. But there is another reflection worth mention – since the client is based here in LA. Meeting people in person is so much worth. Our clients are from all over the world and we are very used (and comfortable) with working remote, with huge time differences. But just starting off projects with an in-person meeting means a lot. Just to have a face to the voice on the other end of the line.

Rob sent out a very interesting email about this the other day:

Human communication is formed by three main factors. What we communicate is made through:

Words =  only 7%
Voice = 38%
Body language = 55%

So never underestimate the power of some face-time these days to make things even greater!

Download soundtrack — Creatvt (North Kingdom) (mp3)
Download typeface — Black Nun Bold (Illustration file) (.zip)

When we did our showreel for North Kingdom last year we also made our own soundtrack together with Andreas Lundmark. I have used his music before when he was a part of Elodie, a great group from Skellefteå with a original style. The last thing I wanted for our showreel was a high tempo pop/rock/techno tune which almost every showreel uses today. Instead we wanted to give our reel an odd story with a calm pleasant feeling.

The soundtrack turned out so good so I wanted to give it a proper record cover with our Dear Deer Lady. I tried a new, quite fast, technique where I painted (with Wacom Cintiq 12wx) on top of a photo I took a few years ago. To fit the graphic profile of North Kingdom I made it black & white.

Download wallpapers — Dear Deer Black, 1920×1200 px (zip)

I have to recommend the latest issue of Computer Arts Projects, “A decade of design”. It’s about how the design industry has changed since 2000. A decade where myself have been most inspired by Büro Destruct, The Designers Republic and Attik. It’s sad though that I have not seen so much from these agencies the last 5 years, and the worst is that 2009, after 23 years in operation, TDR closed for business.

I have worked as an Interactive Art Director back in 1998, so the section “Decade of web design” gave me some reel nostalgia because Computer Arts have chosen one site/project/agency from each year that they thought woiuld represented that years internet evolution best. Who didn’t remember when 2Advanced entered the scene 2001 or Praystation back at 2003? Facebook represented 2006 and 2007 by Wordpress.

The coolest thing was to see our own Vodafone Future from North Kingdom represented 2004! If you would told me that back in 2003, I would think you where insane! I mean, we where just a tiny tiny agency up in the north, doing our job.

“When this website launched, it portrayed the future of technology through a progressive and innovative design that went on to be one of the most highly awarded sites of all time. It was also the only site ever to pick up both the FWA Site of the Year and FWA People’s Choice Award in the same year.”

And to correct CA; it’s not true that Vodafone is the only site ever to pick up both SOTY and PCA the same year. Our “Get the Glass” did the same 2008, not to forget :)

Yes, we have moved into our new Stockholm office but it’s still a lot of work to do before it’s all set. One thing I’m looking at right now is a fireplace that we will build in the foyer. We talk a lot about storytelling and how we use it at NK, as it is an important part of what we do. The fireplace would be not only a symbol, but also have a real purpose as a gathering place for the storytelling.

The picture below was taken in Svansele, outside of Skellefteå, where we had our Teamdays in 2008. This was the picture that gave us the idea to build a real fireplace in our office (with gel fire of course), so we in a near future, hopefully, can gather around it for storytelling and creating new great ideas.

Svansele 2008. North Kingdom tell stories…. Hans Eklund, Daniel Ilic, Klas Kroon, Mikael Forsgren, David Eriksson, Mathias Lindgren, Daniel Wallström and Lucian Trofin.

Inspiration for the design have been found from old fireplaces in north and from the lovely “Zero” from Ak47 in Italy.

The idea of our new showcase is to show off our work, without any clutter and fancy animations. We will be adding “behind the scenes” material to some of our cases so you can follow our journey and how we work, from start to the very end. Hopefully that will inspire you. And there will also be other posts about things that are happening around us, trips, thoughts, tech-talk and all that jazz. Stay tuned for more folks and thanks for your patience while waiting for this launch.

For this years FWA SOTY, we had amazingly two (out of 12 sites) on the short list.
Our adidas teamgeist site came in second place, which is really fantastic. It is always hard to finish second, but considering all the nice sites that have been featured as site of the day, it is quite amazing that we could finish second.

Michael Ballack, the captain of the German national soccer team, concentrating before a film shoot and Rene Adler, the goalkeeper, is doing an interview in front of our scenography. Cologne, September 2009. A couple of exciting days for us from North Kingdom when the film shoots for Adidas Teamgeist took place.

Here is my personal thoughts and pictures from this autumn. These “Making of” parts have been very important for me to me to keep when I want to collect parts of the process, which never is seen in the final result and to have something to look back on when we work with new projects in the future. Working as an Art Director for this kind of projects can be pretty difficult. Big complex game campaigns for big brands, where lot of different parts runs parallel. You need to keep everything in the same style and quality, and you always have a client with very high expectations. Times like that, the most important is to have a well working team, which we have in North Kingdom! Many of us at NK have been working together over ten years so we know each other very well. Nobody is afraid to say what he or she thinks. A project will never turns out good if people in the team don’t say what they have in mind. It is so true that the details will betray you, so when Marcus Ivarsson (our Project Manager) said “Every single pixel need love” I couldn’t agree more.

I’m pretty happy with the final result. The sound and voice overs are absolute fantastic! DinahMoe did a great job! They handled all sound dynamically at runtime, all integrated and affecting each other. Visually it is almost perfect. With little more time I think we could make the game itself a little harder in the last two chapters and with more variations. But still, we had over 500,000 games played the first three weeks, chosen FWA Site of the Month, and a very happy client, which is most important. However, I have to admit I wasn’t totally sold about the game idea, the strategic style, but it gave me even more reason to try to make it as visual outstanding as possible.

My first rough concept drawings from August 2009, showing how the white takeover would look like, how the players would transform to these white “ghosts” without any identity, history or power.

During the project I worked with two very talented illustrators; Therese Larsson (intern at North Kingdom), who did the covers and Anton Eriksson, who was in charge of backgrounds, based on our 3D sketches. The graphic novel style came from 180 Amsterdam who did the very cool “Spark” movie for Adidas earlier this year, which gave Adidas a new mystic, dark feeling. I wasn’t so fond of the rest of the campaign they did, when their graphic novel style was too lame and to regular. Adidas let us make our own style within the genre which we both loved and thought would be necessary for a great outcome. Basically I got free hands with my illustrators. Why can’t all clients be like that?

— STORYBOARDS

As usual we start to make some very rough storyboards of our ideas. These drawings, by Anton Eriksson, are showing the prologue. As soon we got thumb up from the client we continue with rough animatics.

A couple of weeks before Cologne and the film shoot I visited Gothenburg and our 3D master Mathias Lindgren to finish the animatics. These rough movies have been an important part of the process in the last year projects when we do more and more film productions.

— DESIGN IN PROGRESS

One of the concept sketches for the environments. Here can you also see an early design of the interface. Not that far from what we ended up with, except we used a fullscreen solution at the end.

It was lot of 3D to be made so we outsourced some parts when we couldn’t manage everything inhouse. If we would outsource we could focus on other parts we thought. However, the first weeks become a nightmare when this new 3D partner, with really good references, wasn’t even close to the artistic level we where looking for, neither possible to work with. After three weeks we unfortunately had to shutdown the collaboration. When the was running out we choose two new agencies close to us in Stockholm; Fido (who would work with the environments in the movies) and Important Looking Pirates (who would make the white takeover effect in the prologue.

Work in progress from Fido, who helped us out with the city and gave us exactly the execution we wanted. We had “Sky Captain” and “Sin City” as our references which would give us the dark style we was looking for.

— FILM SHOOT IN COLOGNE

Director Ted Kjellsson from Direktörn & Fabrikörn (Skellefteå) helped us out with the film shoot in Cologne. Here above he is working with Lukas Podolski and Philipp Lahm, surrounded by a film team that made a Behind the scene movie for Adidas.

Bastian “Schweini” Schweinsteiger is having fun of Ted.

David Eriksson (North Kingdom) is going through the storyboard for the players. Ted Kjellson, David Grehn, Clemens Dopjans, Michael Ballack and the rest of the team are listening.

Two pictures I took on Lukas Podolski and Michael Ballack during the action shoots. Some quick color corrections in Lightroom.

Simon Rolfes gets some make-up.

Our client from Adidas, Clemens Dopjans, in a discussion with Ted Kjellson.

Rene Adler in action.

The days where very intense. Over 130 people where on the call-sheet. Cameraman David Grehn, Skellefteå, is focused.

“Please Mr Lahm, look more badass.”

Before the film shoot it was very important that I had a clear vision of how we would use the material. Here is an early sketch I did before the shooting and how the end result turned out.

— MAPS

Building a regular campaign and building a game campaign is two different worlds. A game campaign is so much complex. This kind of maps help you out a lot for you as an Art Director and for the team.

— THE STADIUM

A round stadium, like Colosseum, felt more unique as soccer stadium. This stadium would be the center of the whole story so it was important to make it as interesting as possible, something that would match a dark graphic novel. From the beginning we had all players running around like a regular soccer game, but it never felt right when this is actually a strategic skill game. To bring more chess feeling we placed the players on small plateaus.

Teamgeist Stadium — Final art.

— CHARACTER DESIGN

The Germans had to replay the three World Cup finals they won to get back their history; 1954 vs Hungary, 1974 vs Holland and 1990 vs Argentina. When we couldn’t use any historical persons we had to came up with something else. I wanted the opponents in the same style as our white German player so I made them with mystical faceless heads with symbols on. They all had to look the same cause of the file sizes so therefore I gave the team members the same number; the number of the year they where represented.

Some other concept drawings to test different solutions, this time from the talented Therese Larsson. In the end it felt best to keep them clean, big and rough.

For the mini games we used a classic motion capture.

- 3D, WORK IN PROGRESS FROM IMPORTANT LOOKING PIRATES

Yafei Wu, Head of 3D, ILP
“After hearing the initial brief for this project we were very excited. Transformation effects, does it get more fun?

As with any project there are always challenges. In this case we knew there was going to be very little time to find a unique look since delivery was tight and we knew we were going to have over thirty limbs and heads in the sequence to match move and apply the effect to.

We decided that the most effective way was to make a simple tool that would allow animators to easily create transformation effects without having to know any scripting or programming. The tool kit was done in two days and after the first day of letting the animators play with it we had about 25-30 different transformation effects to show to the client, success! The final effect ended up being a combination of two of these tests and from that point it was “just” a matter of applying the effect to thirty-ish limbs, and then light and render the scenes.”

— BEHIND THE SCENE MOVIES

Adidas had an own film team in Cologne during the shooting days for their Teamgeist blog.

Me and David Eriksson (CD/CEO, North Kingdom) had for a long time wanted a project where we could build something physical, something you have not seen earlier, and when we first heard about the new Got Milk? project we understood that this would be the project! I guess Goodby thought we where a little bit crazy in the beginning but when we described the idea they loved the idea.

This is what we got from Goodby, showing the rough concept idea of a digital boardgame with a 3D feeling.

First we started to figure out how this island would work, ofcourse. The left map is the first rough one I did in Photoshop. Later on Ted Kjellson, who would be in charge of the building, made the one to the right. With this solution we would save lot of time from our 3D artists who now could concentrate on characters and other 3D elements which we would add to the island.

Next step was to build a rough 3D island so we knew exactly how all areas would work, and so we could set camera angles and discuss solution with Goodby. The picture is showing some feedback and work in progress.

Nine days before filmday. We did the building here in Skellefteå with Ted Kjellgren as supervisior.

Six days left. Focus on the castle which would have a big role in the game.

Three days left. The only time I was worried during the week we did the model building was when we got a call from our client; “The castle is no more a castle…” This was three days before the filmday (which we could not move). Our client had at this point get footage of how the “castle” would look at in the TV ads. However, the new style turns out to be much better, it gave the whole island a totally new character. I felt bad for Ted though…2

Meanwhile Ted and his team worked on the model I made a first rough interface sketch.

Two days left. The new building on place which gave the whole island a complete new profile. We loved it!

One day left. The most stuff is on place except for lot and lot of details.

When we arrived next day for our filmday we where all very impressed of the final version of the island. They where still working on details as you can see. All shooting was made during this one day.

The sky did I paint in Photoshop. One of my first Photoshop paintings actually.

Our 3D guys also had the pleasure to build some really cool vehicles. When the TV ads were not ready at this point we did not have so much to go after… but maybe that was for all good.

We also started to look how the characters would look like. Anton Eriksson made some early concept sketches before we started to build them in 3D.

The logotypes and the card design was made by Goodby, Silverstein & Partners.