Creative home of Mathias Olofsson

I’m not sure i’m completely satisfied with the theme here… might look into a redesign soon…

Alright, so last week i got a skype call from montréal, and as it turns out, the Sid Lee Amsterdam office has a lot to do this fall and I will be heading to Amsterdam for my Internship instead! Although it is a bit of a shame to miss out on Montréal and experience the culture and city over there, I am very excited to go back to Amsterdam and meet everyone at the Sid Lee office there again! and I loved the city the 2 weeks i was there last time so i’m sure it will be a great seven months down in Amsterdam, and hopefully longer!

Going to be heading off to the Netherlands on Sunday the 16th! then the apartment hunt and everything will begin… stay tuned!

I did an update to an aquantaince’s website. He’s a great dog trainer here in Sweden and people come from all over the country to go to his courses. I’ve been managing his website for a while now and he wanted to freshen it up a bit, so i made a Wordpress based site, where he can easily post news himself and have contact with his visitors.

link: www.jeppe.org

So my first year at Hyper Island came to an end a couple of days ago.
It was a sad day packing up my things in my apartment and handing over the keys to its new owner, but it is also the beginning of a new era.
At the moment i am back in karlskrona again though, at least for two days helping out with the recruitment of the new batch of Hypernauts! It’s a lot of fun meeting new creative people and showing them what we have done, discussing Hyper Island in general and answering questions they have about the school. I can see myself in them, a year ago i was the one sitting in that seat, being interviewed, watching student work and actually getting to know what Hyper is so it’s very rewarding being able to pass knowledge on to the recruits for DM11KNA.

Almost time for a new lecture and to show the next group some more student work from my class!

This is a book I made the layout and cover for, the author Jeppe Stridh is one of the most successful dog trainers in Sweden and holds courses for groups of people to teach them how to act to get a happy and obedient dog.
I used Indesign for the layout for the text and images inside the book and a mix of Photoshop and Indesign for the cover.
This was actually the first time I used Indesign so it was quite a experience doing a book the first time i opened up the program. But everything went really well and the book came out looking really nice.
The total time frame for the whole book project was around a year, where I attended meetings about the book, and then my producing time was two months.

I am going to Sid Lee in Montreal, Canada in August for my seven month internship! Happy Days! It’s exactly where I wanted to go after having been to their Amsterdam office for two weeks in february I fell in love with the atmosphere so it was a sure-choice for me where I was going to be applying for an internship and I got it! So goodbye Sweden hello Canada!

In other news it’s crazy busy here at Hyper Island, we’re into our last module now and I’m the “CEO” of our Agency “Husdjuret & Direktörn” (The pet and the director), we’re 11 people in total and we’re working with briefs from Disney, World Food Programme and Charity Rating. All interesting briefs and really cool people to work with. I have the responsibility for everything that comes out of our “Agency” and to do budgets, time reports, talk to the co-workers at Hyper, decide if we should take on a freelancer from another Agency at the school. All in all I am responsible for us to reach the goal of having a 10% profit at the end of the module. In between working on briefs we get opportunities to compete in pitching an idea to a client, if we win the pitch we win a certain amount of money for our “Agency”. It’s a real learning experience sitting with excel documents and budgets instead of being in the creative department.

And lastly, I worked at MediaMarkt this weekend where i am a salesman, and we had something called “around-the-clock-campaigns”. Essentially it was a new campaign in the store every hour from 8am to 8pm and it was insane. There were over 500 people lining up to get a mobile phone we had on offer, people were hitting eachother bloody over discounted xbox 360 consoles and general chaos ensued. But it was fun, i’ve never seen so many people in the store before and time went by fast, and I got myself some new xbox and PS3 games really cheap so i’m happy!

So i’m in stockholm, the wonderful capitol city of Sweden for two weeks.

Flew up here sunday evening directly after work in Malmö and now i’m living at a classmates apartment, now I was expecting a blow-up mattress of some kind but when I got in here there was an awesome REAL bed that is really comfortable! so i’m happy. The people who live here are all awesome and really friendly.

Yesterday evening I had a skype interview with one of the guys at Sid Lee Montreal, i’m applying there for an internship as a project manager this fall so fingers crossed!

Today we did something called SDI, Strength Development Inventory, a UGL type day course showing us what our strengths are and how to best use them.

As an end and goodnight to this post i would like you to check out this: Stand By Me Cover

It’s an awesome project making some very talented people work together to make something beautiful. good night!

For the Hyper Island class of digital media 2010 i was the Project Manager over the four different groups in the Marketing segment of the site.

I learned that i need to be a more active project manager during this time and that i shall not be afraid to step forward and make myself heard as well as voice that I have expectations on others to meet deadlines and deliver. I became a more active project manager after these three months and i learned alot. At times it really felt like i had bit off more than i could chew but in the end everything pulled through and we got the class site up and running.

We ran a pre-campaign-site a week before the actual class site went live that had a huge success. the facebook group for just the pre-campaign-site had over 300 members in 3 days. the campaign site consisted of two live feed webcams in two cells. We then locked up four of our class mates, two in each cell, and only let them out for bathroom breaks. People could then chat with them and watch them live from the site. It gave us huge attention and blogs and internet radios talked about us wondering what it was all for. All-in-all a huge success.

I was also involved in the sponsorship group making phone calls to different companies to raise a budget for the class site to even be possible.

We had a big releaseparty at one of London’s hottest night clubs “Movida” where i gave a speech in front of the guests that had arrived there and went through the website, explaining different aspects of it.

I am proud of what we produced in the end and that we made everything work. it was extremely hard to find sponsors during the financial times that it was but everything turned out alright in the end.

Timeframe: 3 months

Link to the class site: Visual Crooks

This was my first attempt at being a project manager.

In this module we were handed a technology type called RFID, we got a couple of RFID tags and a RFID reader that we could connect to a computer via USB. Our task: Create something!

So we started out by brainstorming, we knew pretty much from the get go that we wanted to make a game of some sort (everything was to be presented at a big event up in Stockholm with the Stockholm digital media class as well where we invited people from the industry). We came up with a memory type game, where you were shown a sequence of letters and then you had to drag each “physical” letter (made from wood with an RFID tag in each) to the “drop zone” on the game board where we had hidden the RFID reader underneath a sheet of plexi glass. I Began by making a To-Do list up on the wall with different tasks that needed doing and each group member had to sign up for a task they wanted to complete. this method worked pretty good because almost everyone in my group was motivated to learn and to create something cool to show at the event.

See a movie of the project in action at the exhibition here

Timeframe was two weeks production time and three weeks total project time.

Also for Motion Week we had to create a 7 second animation from a rigged template with a moving camera. All we got in the template was the moving camera and then we had to create something around that. I made all the props for this animation in illustrator and then imported everything into After Effects and animated it. Timeframe: around 5 hours.

Jungle Animation