Hey everyone, just thought I’d write a little something right before the new year. Well, I’m STILL here in Thailand and having a good time, taking photos every day and posting them in the gallery (make sure to check them out :)). I don’t really know what to write here, but I wish you a happy new year!

Oh, and by the way, check back tomorrow or on Tuesday, will have some big news by then!

Hey everyone, writing this from Thailand, where I will be staying until next Thursday. I have just started thinking about some cool new movie projects that I will have to make during 2007.
The biggest one is Showdown, which is now going to be divided into 3 parts, to be released with a few months in between. Well, that’s pretty much all I can tell you now.

Remember to check out the gallery each day to see the latest pictures from Thailand

Hey hey, writing from my laptop using a WiFi connection belonging to the hotel I’m currently staying at. If you might have noticed, I have uploaded some photos onto the “Blog” Gallery (found, of course, in the Gallery section). I will be uploading new photos to it daily showing some cool stuff I shot while on vacation here.

I also want to take this moment to say Merry Christmas to all of you, I hope you’re having a good time

That is pretty much all I have time to write right now, it’s about midnight here in Thailand and I’m soon going to bed, just going to call a few friends and family back in Sweden first, the time is only about 18:00 there (GMT +1 in Sweden).

Take care everybody, and keep checking the Blog Gallery for new pictures! (and remember to comment on them :D)

Hey everyone, just wanted to let you all know that I (probably) won’t be writing anything for the next 2 weeks, since I’m going to Thailand on holiday. I finished the first term of my new school today, and it’s fun to finally be done with it…although it’s pretty sad to leave all my friends (if only for two weeks, but anyway).

Check out the gallery section, I just opened the Behind-The-Scenes gallery, which contains some images of my videocamera with a lot of gear and technical stuff on it. Also, keep your eyes open and check back often for the blog gallery, which I will be finishing later today. I will post images from my vacation. Now again, have a Merry Christmas and a very Happy New Year, and I’ll see you in 2007!

Hey everyone! As you might have noticed, 2006 is almost over (no way!!). I decided to create this pretty cool long post here to tell you what my experiences from the past year have been. So without further ado, I guess, here comes THE BIG POST!

So, in terms of movie-making I’ve been trying to make as much movies as possible this year. It started off pretty early with releasing Showoff in early January (some of you might remember it, basically gunfights, lightsabers, wigs and a pool in France). I got pretty good response from making that movie so me and Nils B started as fast as possible to plan the sequel, which was going to be called Showdown. We wrote the script together during a couple of months, and we planned to shoot it during the summer vacation of school. When we eventually finished it and were basically ready to shoot, we just couldn’t. What I mean is that we got pretty tired of just playing the same roles over, and over, and over again. How much fun is it really to shoot a action/comedy when no-one is really in a comical or creative and inspirational mood? Also, the script was written in this really, really epic way that demanded some very nice looking locations and a pretty huge cast compared to anything I’ve worked with before. So we decided to basically scrap the script (whoa, that rhymed!) and start creating another, more serious version. Actually, before doing that, I got around to shoot a scene for the movie. It wasn’t really a long scene, but it’s pretty epic and spectacular, and I’ll probably post a video of it here someday because I actually finished both music and grading on it. We did actually try to shoot a party scene also, but we never got around to, because of various complications. So, as I said, the script is currently being re-written, and is planned to be filmed the upcoming summer of 2007 instead. Although I can pretty surely say it won’t be called Showdown when it’s released, but at least we’re using that for a working title and project name.

I’m going to try to go through each and every movie-making journey I’ve embarked on this year, so I guess I’ll continue with “Last Stand”, which me and Nils B shot soon after we finished watching “Transporter 2″ which had some pretty cool (if although, a bit over-the-top) action sequences. The goal for that movie was originally to make a horror movie. We wrote a script for that one, (which I’ve kept, since it was pretty good) but due to time constraints we didn’t have time to shoot that movie, so that’s why Last Stand was made. We shot it using the Canon XL1s, which proved to be a pretty bad choice because the lens was really dirty and we had some pretty major frame dropouts in a few scenes (basically, the video casette didn’t like to work normally). It was freezing cold and very windy, which was one of the reasons why we didn’t finish the movie. But the “real” reason was that when we were going to film a scene with me just having picked up the gun shooting at Nils B, the gas-powered gun we used just didn’t feel like working. Nils B tried to fix it and it would work fine every time except for the times when we had the camera shooting for real. In many ways I think that the movie was a good experience (such as stunt stuff, rolling down that hill was really painful and led to some severe bruises the day after).

The biggest project this year was without doubt the school documentary I made for my (now previous) school. Since me (with a few other students, including Johannes) were basically done with all the subjects in school we got an assignment which pretty much told us to do anything creative. So everyone did what they wanted to. Johannes made a awesome RSS software and I made a movie. So, I started filming early April if I’m not mistaken and I soon realised how painful it would be to edit together a 5 minute short from the massive amount of footage I shot. It was pretty fun to work wih a video camera in such a unusual setting as a school, but it also had it’s times when I just wanted to give up and go home. Basically, every time I tried to film something, most people would either come running like maniacs into the camera, or like maniacs running from the camera. So I had a pretty good mix of people that wanted to really be on film (I really should tell you that it won’t get you anywhere looking into the camera, I’ll just edit it out later on) and people who hated everything that had to do with movie-making. To get back to the filming process, I believe I filmed about 12 tapes of indoor footage, and 2 tapes of outdoor footage. I also filmed about 3 tapes worth of footage at my first school ever, to compare them to eachother. The movie was meant to be a kind of advertisment for my school, and I’m pretty sure most people liked it when I finally finished it early June. I got to show it to a bunch of students and parents, and most people seemed to like it a lot. Of course, there will always be those who don’t appreciate what you do, just so they can think differently than most other people, but honestly, who gives a damn?

A short note, but pretty cool one indeed, is that I made this cardgame movie (which we never finished shooting) which had a goofy plot and some pretty weird characters. Well, that wasn’t the special thing about it. The cool thing was that it had me work with 5 other people. This is by far the most people I’ve ever worked with on set. Anyway, let’s move on.

The next movie I made was “Weird Gunfight”. This was actually the first time I really used the Sony HDR-FX1 HDV camcorder for a movie, so I tried to create some extreme close-ups in the movie of the actors, so that you could really see the nice looking image. It was shot on one of those “Argh, I’ve got nothing to do…I know! I’ll make a movie”-days so we really figured out the plot as we went along. I only really decided how it should be filmed in terms of angles and lighting, while Alexander, Johannes and Emiliano pretty much came up with all of the goofy ideas. Some things I even made up while editing the movie, such as the fact that Johannes really has two (!) weird voices in the movie, which I think a lot of people found pretty entertaining. That was by far the most improvised movie I have ever made, and I think that it turned out pretty good, and I’m pretty happy with it.

The movie which has been called my best movie so far by a lot of people, was actually the latest movie I made, “Cell”. It was made for a halloween contest called “Hauntfest 2006″ on FXhome.com. I had never entered any sort of movie-making contest before this one, so I had absolutely no idea of what to expect from the other people entering it. So what about the story of the movie? Well, a lot of it was improvised on set by me. I never really told Johannes that though, since he wanted me to have written a script so that he didn’t have to improvise at all…lazy bastard ;P Heh, not really though, I think he made a great job in it and he should be proud of his performance. But obviously I didn’t improvise everything. I had some small ideas from watching the “Saw” movies and a few other amateur movies. So to be honest, I did have a pretty good idea of what I wanted in the movie, I was just not sure how I wanted it in there, how it all would tie together and how I should film it. So we shot it for the first time on what I believe was a Wednesday. The shoot went on for about 2 hours and 30 minutes, and I edited it all together later that evening. It became pretty good, but one problem soon became appearant. Johannes used chewing gum throughout the movie, which was a bit of a problem. At first, we were only going to go back a few days later and shoot some missing stuff, like him finding the chewing gum, but we ended up re-shooting basically the entire movie. I would say that at least 95% of the things you see in the movie here on the website is from that re-shoot. You can in a few scenes actually see that Johannes is using chewing gum, but I won’t tell which ones, I’ll leave it up to you to find. So, after basically re-shooting the entire movie, I edited it together on my laptop at Johannes’s house. I also went in and manually colour graded each of the shots, which is something I’ve never done before. In 9 times out of 10 I basically just leave it to some kind of automatic preset of program to figure it all out, but it really looks a lot better when you put a bit of effort in it. So, the movie was finished and uploaded 4 days before the deadline, and I actually won against the other entries. I didn’t really win anything in particular, but I didn’t mind. Just the knowledge of winning a contest and that people liked my movie was good enough.

I guess this pretty much sums up the movie-making side of this year. Now for some other stuff!

I really got involved in creating so called “Presets” for the software available from FXhome.com. So what is a preset? It’s pretty hard to explain, but I’ll do my best. If you’re using any of the FXhome products, you can find that it can be pretty hard to make a cool looking effect all from scratch. Well, I have to this day made almost 130 different presets, which any members can use (if they own the right version of the program, that is). Me creating all these presets led to me getting a few notices in news posts written by the team, and finally into me becoming a Superuser. So what’s the real difference between a normal user and a Superuser (note how I even capitalize that word)? Well, there’s not that big of a difference. You get a nifty banner beside all posts you make, and you get access to a special secret Superuser forum (where nothing happens really, but it’s cool to have). And you do get the priveledge to feel awesome, which is pretty cool.

I also started in high school, and I’m in the best class with the best and nicest classmates ever, which is really great! The only downside is the amount of things to study, which means I’ve had to spend a little less time movie-making lately. This will probably change a lot next year by summer, when we get to remove certain subjects that we don’t want, and add our own personal selects. I’m choosing Movie-Making and English!

I really don’t know what else to write, but before I end this post I do have one big announcement…THE GALLERY IS OPENED! That’s right, you can now click the “Gallery” link at the top of this page. After a lot of experimenting with trying to implent a Flickr.com gallery into a wordpress system (which is what I use) I decided to make it as easy as possible, and simply put up links to the various galleries. Currently the Crew gallery is up, where you can find some pretty cool looking images made by me, Nils B and Johannes. This is not everything, though! Soon I’ll be launching two other galleries as well, a Blog gallery and a Behind-The-Scenes gallery. In the Blog gallery I will post various things that doesn’t have to do anything with movie-making. It could just be fun images from vacations and stuff like that. In the Behind-The-Scenes gallery I plan to put up images from when I shoot my movies, so that you can see how it looks from behind the camera, and so that you can see what equipment we are using.

So, this is really the longest post I have ever, ever written. It was really fun to write down everything that has happened to me in the last year, and before I stop writing I just wanted to thank all friends, family, all the members of FXhome, everybody who has helped me in making these movies and everyone who has actually asked for autographs in the streets! Heh, I’m up to about 20 autographs in total, and it’s really cool when people come up and say hello, and to hear that they’ve been watching my movies. It’s really, really appreciated.

Now, stop reading this and have a Merry Christmas and A Happy New Year, and I’ll see you all in 2007!

(Just realised that I’ll probably post more this year, so the ending isn’t really as epic as it could have been, but I don’t care!)

Take care!

Heh, just found a link on FXhome.com for this awesome YouTube.com video. It’s all shot with a still camera, and that makes it really weird and really cool..and pretty hilarious.

Tony vs. Paul