Finland, part 2: Helsinki!

I'm in Helsinki, and unfortunately can't upload any pictures at the moment. But Stage Two of my trip is over. I just had a great five days working with Anna-Maija, Heidi, and Tuula at the Lume Center/University of Art and Design Helsinki/Animake and presenting both a paper and a two-day workshop to European film students at the Illumenation Film Festival with my co-teacher, special effects artist Timo Pekko Niemenen. Many of those who attended were from Finland, but there were also some students from around Europe. Things went pretty well, considering that we didn't know who our students would be or what aspects of 'Applying Animation' they would be interested in, so we tried to present a lot of different elements, from discussing 2D animation (my focus), including After Effects, Flash, and some traditional methods such as sand, charcoal, and pencil, to 3D animation and effects (Pekko's focus), including a demo of 3D Studio Max and a presentation of the effects work in Finland's largest effects movie of all time, "Jade Warrior" (a Finnish Kung Fu flick), of which Pekko was the Effects Supervisor.

The students were amazing, really focused and hard working, and I was impressed overall with their level of interest in what we were doing. I thoroughly enjoyed the work, and I must say I thoroughly enjoyed the beer at the end of each day with Tuula and Pekko, too. I put in a lot of overtime working on the workshops; I really wanted things to go well and to give the students something to take away that would really be useful to them, so after Pekko and I met on Monday to discuss the overall plan, I worked for about five hours setting up my lecture for the next day. And after meeting the students on Tuesday, I completely changed my plan for Wednesday and worked that evening after the students left for a few hours as well. The students were very quiet about whether we did a good job or not but I heard later that people really enjoyed the workshop and that no one has heard anything bad about it, so that is about as good as we could have hoped for!

Don got here this morning (Thursday the 19th) and it was fun to tramp around Helsinki with him and see the sights that I haven't had a chance to view yet; we saw a lot of really beautiful old massive buildings and churches, and wandered around until we discovered the harbour and the market square, which was really cool. I feel good being back at work on the project after the break at Illemenation.

Everyone here is just amazing, and whatever I needed or mentioned I got handed to me. Out of the kindness of her heart, Anna-Maija arranged for an actor, Juha, to meet with me and Don and go over the script and pronounciation of some of the lines with a thick Finnish accent, and then Juha, who had only just met us, took over half an hour to read every line in the script into Don's mini recorder. We both almost cried a couple of times hearing some of the lines read finally in the real accent. It was amazing. Don said that as an actor he had never gotten a more golden gift. And Tuula has been so sweet! She arranged for me to get a copy of an old Kalevala animation from the `70´s, which wasn't simple as it needed to be digitized and then burned to a CD, but she made it happen overnight. And she did research to help with our trip to Turku, to help make sure that we get a lot of useful research done there. Tuula is like my Finnish kindred spirit sister; it's rare that I meet someone with whom I feel such an easy and sudden bond. We have a lot in common and I wish we had more time to get to be friends. Perhaps we will see each other again. It seems too soon to say goodbye to my new friend.

So work is over, and it's back to touring, studying, exploring, painting, reading, writing, and searching for all of the things that will ultimately complete the essence of Sukanen.

Until next time...Sisu!