Welcome Humphrey! Our First International Intern!

Alright, here's my blog entry:

Humphrey Erm here, I'm a Swedish animation student from The Animation Workshop in Denmark.  From what I have understood I am the first international intern that Smiley Guy Studios has ever had, so I have by nature of my geographic location made history here.

I've been here a workweek now and am so far simply impressed and pleased with my internship.  The studio itself is nice and large, capable of housing quite a few professionals.  There's a comfortable meeting room and even a rec room with a ping pong table and table football which I'm looking forward to trying out.  I even get my own desk and computer to do all my work at which is much appreciated.

The people here are also really cool.  Everyone is working hard on separate tasks but they have all had time to give me some pointers or simply showing me what they're up to.  They have done a good job making me feel welcome in this studio and I for one appreciate that.

The work so far has been manageable, starting off with a tutorial on how to create a Flash puppet.  Working through that I got many great tips from Joe Lague regarding how to better organize the symbols as well as subtle changes to the design that makes the character look more dimensional and volumetric without sacrificing the ease of use for animation.  I'm now placed on Flashifying (taking a bitmap picture and translating it into Flash vectors and symbols) character concepts for the online show Teleporting Fat Guy.  It's working out really well so far thanks to the amazing feedback I've gotten previously, though there are still improvements here and there that I can do.

That's it for now I think, I'm looking forward to 12 more weeks of this in the beautiful city of Toronto!  Have a good one everyone!

~Humphrey Erm

David Does Design

Hey everyone David again,

I can't believe that its almost been 2 months since my first day interning at Smiley Guy. Time definitely flies by! So this past week I've still been designing props, but have also been given the chance to design some characters as well! I was super excited about getting a chance to do this ever since I got to spend time here. A week into do this I'm still excited! Even despite another learning curve I'm going through with it. There's a lot of little things you need to keep track of while doing character design for flash animation that my brain was just not looking for when I started out.  Luckily Joel and Joe (who are the design crew here at Smiley Guy) have been kindly setting me straight at each pass on a character I take. So thanks to their patience I'm getting better....slowly. 

Also at this moment the the National is interviewing people about Captain Canuck behind me. Maybe if I'm luck the back of my head will get on camera and I can finally do my mom proud!

I mustache you a question...