Here is a cap of the first scene being made for Brute.  It is not sequentially the first shot, but it is from a scene early on in Episode 1.  It gives you an idea of the level of grit and detail I am going for, but the finished episode will utilize several different styles.  Some recognizeable, some with much more atmosphere and personal artistic touch.  It is about coming up with something new and not “the norm” for anime, but taking inspiration from some of my favorite works.  When enough material for a promo is complete I will release a promo clip & press release at that time.  But in short, I am running a small animation studio and the aim is to raise the profile of non Japanese anime, more specifically that produced in Scandinavia by myself and a small team - It is called Studio SCANIME.  Brute is our first production.  It is also being developed as a novel and possibly there will be some other interactive material if time permits.

The Enslavement of Beauty Perdition EP is well on its way to completion.. currently it’s about 80% finished, and we should be finished with production and final mixing within the next couple of weeks. They have an excellent video which will be released with the EP which will be a special edition digipack, it is the band’s first video and it will be for the song “Lush“.  For those who are EoB fans since their Traces O’ Red & Megalomania albums, Perdition in many ways continues where Megalomania left off, it is epic and only just the beginning of things to come..

I’ve been working on several other things also, like doing some work with the rock band GreyHalo, as well as resuming production on my Mistral yet to be named full length cd. There have also been some talks of mixing an upcoming album for Norway’s black metal outfit Tremor, so we will see how that goes.

Music aside, work continues on my book/animation project which shall hopefully soon see the light of day.. ;) With some vacation R&R time coming next month, there should be plenty of opportunity to sit and write under the shade of some tree.. also I must do some stuff to this site and update it more. I have hesitated to write any sort of personal thoughts etc, but there is a lot on my mind nowadays and I think that the importance of certain matters (and even just having an outlet to get ones ideas out there that can’t be easily contained in music or a book etc) outweighs anything else.. but we will see as time and desire permits.

New logo for a real estate company in MI, United States

 Okay.. I am a real lazy butt, I wrote an article over a year ago with a tutorial on creating widescreen drivers for your laptop, and mentioned I would eventually upload my driver, and maybe create drivers for people if they asked. I started to get more and more e-mails about it, really I was pretty surprised at the response.. unfortunately most of those people were asking about the paypal offer, and well to be honest it just isn’t as easy as I made it out to be. So you’ll have to settle for this, although one person wrote that after he tried mine he discovered one from Intel that actually worked - perhaps they’ve finally got their asses in gear.. but if they haven’t, give this download a shot.

Intel 82855 GM/GME Widescreen Driver

 Instructions:

1. Extract ZIP to any temporary folder
2. update all instances of your Graphic Controller with ssigd.inf from the folder.
3. Reboot
4. Pray.

You may also have to manually enable the external display in Graphic properties and select the desired res from “Advanced” before it finally displays the res you want.

 If you have any success with it, please leave a comment. 

Names, names… what’s in a name? In this case, I think I came up with a good pair of them that describe this business. I want to keep it simple, so from now on, services such as album mixing and cover artwork (formerly MetalHQ) will be done under the Scanimetal imprint. Our inhouse animation projects will continue to be done under the name Scanime, and the series BRUTE is still heading toward release.

Stuff that doesn’t fall into these two categories… well we’ll see I guess.

Mistral is slowly but surely heading toward completion as well - so much to do, so very little time…

I’m currently busy with mixing the latest from Norway’s finest metal band EoB.  It will contain 6 tunes, and they are shooting their first video ever, for the song “Lush” which should appear in the next couple of months.

New site under construction.