Piñata is looking for a highly motivated producer to fill in for a one-year maternity leave. Visit www.pinata.fi for more information.
We just wonder who got to pick the outfit today - Sari Vierula of Piñata or Sam Schingler of Woodpecker Film?
By popular request - and by popular we mean more than one person has expressed their interest - here’s a little behind the scenes peek on making of a Lego scheduling tool. BTW, judging by the feedback we get, we should include a lot more content about the painkiller Tramadol and obtaining it online, but we feel it would just be too off-topic even for our liking.
Getting the desired Lego pieces together is now easy as pie since Lego has introduced their Pick A Brick-shopping option online at lego.com. Besides the base plates, where the 48×48 sized extra-large gray plate is really the only option, you can just go wild with your imagination designing your calendar.
We went with classic 2×4 sized bricks to represent half a day of scheduled work. 2×2’s or 2×3’s would work very nicely if you need more days on one plate and 1×4’s for example would let you split a day in four if needed. Or alternatively double the amount of people you can fit on one weekly plate. One of the core ideas behind this calendar is the ease of modifying and updating it, and we feel going too small with 1×1 pieces would defeat much of the purpose.
Lego don’t really offer a huge number of different colours in all of their Pick A Brick-pieces and the number of standard colours isn’t enough to represent all the projects we have going in an eight week period, for example. We solved this the same way we did the lines on the base plates, by colouring over the dots with a flat permanent marker. We don’t have really long road tests yet, but so far the colour seems to stick very nicely even on the bricks that are sometimes connected to each other. No wear, no spill and enough contrast to tell the projects apart.
We ordered a bunch of custom made black ABS-plastic plates, glued the base plates on and hanged them on a wall. The colour black was chosen because we already had a black wall at our studio and the coloured bricks look way cool on it. We’ve even played with the idea of adding black light to the equation, please let us know if anyone has the chance to test lego bricks compatibility with UV light.
Besides the half a day task bricks we’re using 2×2 round bricks to represent certain milestones such as versions, reviews and deadlines as well as days off. The great thing about using Legos is that you can connect anything with everything. If you want to use a black 1×1 piece to tell something special about a certain deadline, you can always connect it to the round brick connected to the task in a certain project. Pretty sweet!
We use a Dymo Label Manager PC to print out the labels for week numbers and dates for each week. This is a dull repetitive task and tiny backlit LCD screens would be so much cooler, but we just had to stop somewhere. Again, anyone can do it, and if you feel it’s too much effort, we suppose you don’t have much experience in managing a dozen people’s schedules to begin with.
Storing the task bricks in a neat fashion in piles of ten seems like the best idea to us. If you need to lay 26 half day tasks, you don’t need to go through a bucket of bricks and count each one to get there. Or better yet, disassemble some creations your colleagues have built from the loose bricks lying around. You should just get another set of bricks for that.
Mikko Vormala and Henri Tani of Piñata assisted fine artist Johanna Kiivaskoski in creating her first animation film. Johanna hadn’t animated anything before and had heard of Mikko from his previous animation assistant. She wanted to create a very realistic nature animation of a fly getting eaten by a carnivorous plant. She had chosen Francesco Cavalli’s song “Delizie Contente” by Cecilia Bartol for the music: “Gentle murderer - Lead me to my death on these beloved arms.”
The animation is drawn on traditional animation paper with coloured pencils and then digitized into a computer. The backgrounds are hand painted with watercolours. “Mikko walked me through the basics of animation and sent me home with a pile of animation paper.”, says Johanna. “Every now and then the guys digitized a bunch of my frames and we reviewed them as an animation. The first movement I created was the fly moving it’s wings.”
“Guiding Johanna in the animation process was challenging especially with such a tricky style.”, says Mikko. “Luckily Johanna has excellent drawing skills and a lot of willpower. She inspected real flies with a magnifying glass and waded around swamps sketching real plants to get the facts and mood right. All the plants in the animation have their real-life counterparts.”
Johanna took care of all the animation work with the exception of Henri animating the camera movements while compositing the final film. “It was great to have the opportunity to concentrate solely on the drawing and painting with Mikko and Henri taking care of all the technical aspects.”, says Johanna.
Tuomas ripping it up.
Just imagine walking into a meeting so proud of your new shirt. Here demonstrated by Mikko Vormala of Piñata and Kalle Kotila of Woodpecker Film.
Scheduling projects is always a pain in the ass, and there’s just no way to avoid the work that goes into building and maintaining the schedules with all the changes happening on a daily basis. A good scheduling tool is most of all easy to use and understand and helps you focus on the main issue: how to fit all the projects around each other in the best way. We at Piñata have decided to go all Lego with our scheduling.
A Lego-based scheduling tool is so easy to use that it can be updated by anyone. It’s also highly customizable with every kind of piece you can think of from apples and checker flags to skulls and coffee cups.
We still think Lego is a tad post-nine-elevenish with some of their naming policies, though. They’ve decided to call this piece “a camera”. Oh come on now, just call it like it is: it’s a friggin bazooka!
Tuomas, Mika and Rami visited the digital media school Hyper Island in Sweden January 29th-30th. The guys held two full-day lectures in Stocholm and Karlskrona about Piñata and starting up a new studio, some of our previous projects and our plans for the future.
The afternoons were devoted to Tuomas’ concept art and his unique workflow. For icing on the cake Tuomas held a 60-minute live painting session during which he created a concept painting from scratch while explaining his way of working.