More pictures!

I’m in a hurry so I can’t really explain them right now. But a picture says more then a thousand words. So read the pictures!

New Post

First I’m going to answer a comment I received:

lidokork sa "Men du kommer väl flyta?"

English translation:
Q: Lidokork said” but you will float?"
A: This is only the base sculpture. It will be made out of rubber later.

Alright, cards on the table: I haven’t been really that hard blogging lately. But it doesn’t mean that I haven been hard working! Now I just have to catch up with the blogging on the progress on my newly born dolphin.

Damn it’s looking good right now. But I’m not going to show you yet, that would be spoiling the ride... The next couple of days I’ll be retroactive blogging and today I’ll post a couple of pictures from the state it was in some weeks ago. A bit confusing but still ok.

dorsalfin!

side view

Fluke fin attached

The polystyrene balls go everywhere. Why didn’t I buy an overall???

On monday i`ll post more pictures so stay tuned!

More Construction

Here are some progress pictures of the dolphin coming
together; I have it freely hanging in the air on broomsticks!

Assembled...

Starting to smooth it out.

Pretty smooth!

turned it upside down and started with the flippers.

Getting there...

And then BAM! A white sausage with flippers.

Johan W Svensson's Story

The other day I had lunch with Johan W Svensson the diver but I didn’t bother to tell you until now. Johan has a lot of diving experience and it was a real interesting lunch. I first we talked some about the suit and the project in general and he had some interesting suggestions.

The suit will be quite deformed of the pressure in the water and really hard to swim with because of the weight he said. Also I have to think of a good way of balancing the suit so it doesn’t roll over, float or sink and he lent me a book about diving with some diagrams on this topic.

Almost looks lik he had the diving mask on during the lunch dont you think?

All of that was cool BÚT YOU WONT BELIVE WHAT HE TOLD ME NEXT!
JOHAN W SVENSSON HAS BEEN BITTEN BY A BOTTLENOSE DOLPHIN!


I took some notes on his story and now ill try to put together a story around them. Also keep in mind that I somewhat dramatized parts of the it, couldn’t help it;

It was on the border between Egypt and Israel and this time Johan was on a particularly hard diving mission. He had to swim in an enclosure where they kept dolphins, sharks and Swedish celebrity party planner Michael Bindefeldt. Well actually Bindefeldt was in the diving team and not “kept”, still a fun fact. The dolphins don’t like sharks and sometimes killed them by thrusting fast into their sides. So once in a while the sharks where replaced by new ones. After a while thrill seeking Johan decided to dive outside the enclosure, that’s where it happened.

He saw it in a distance but the dolphin closed in fast. He looked intelligently into Johan’s eyes. Johan looked back and it felt like they bonded over the species barrier. We are somewhat all the same Johan thought. Then the bastard bit him!

As blood floated out into the water, Johan tried to scream his pain out. But the diving mask and the water turned the scream into a blurry foreign sound. The blood looked green in the water, like green mist. I have to leave this ghoulish place he thought, swimming to the surface.


Later he was told that it once was a tame dolphin that escaped the enclosure now enjoying the freedom of the wild. That the closed hand Johan stretched towards the dolphin to greet was the sign for fish the trainers once used.

Another time Johan swam with Orca whales in Norway. That’s cool as well.

From 3D to IRL

The IRL sculpture is coming together fine, I just finished transferring the 3d sketch to slices. Today I’m a man of few words, so I just let the pictures do most of the talking.

I started with my 3d model.

Sliced it up. The squares are A3 format paper with 10cm distance in between.

Printed the slices!

Cut them out (I'm very concentrated here)

Stacked the up as I went along...

Got scared that I'm making the whole thing to small.

Finished cutting, this is all the slices. Maybe this is the world’s shortest dolphin.

Pinned it all to the polystyrene.

So many parts.

Me posing with power tool! I'm bad!

Cutting out the slices 10 centimeters thick.

Put them in stacks trying to be organized.
Started to glue them together but that's another story. Over and out!

Does this work?

Hey!

Get off my back Jacob! Anyway is anybody even bothering to read this blog?

Later today; Cutting paper and posting a 3d movie!

Lost in 3-D?

Ola, you should be proud of your skills in 3-D technique. It's very impressive. However, I am a little scared that you spend more time in the "3-D universe" than in the real universe. Also there has been requests that you speed up the process a bit, or atleast post more interesting bits about dolphins and how they communicate with each other. The request is mainly from me at the moment, but I am sure many more agree that it would be interesting. Over and out/Jacob, editor.

Size me up!

For me to be inside a dolphin I have to figure out how big the dolphin should be. So I asked my brother to size me up, even though I rather work with professionals. I was 2.15 centimeters long including my feet laid flat on the ground and 60 cm wide over the shoulders. My brother was pretty impressed by my masculine body, so was I.

Then I created a digital representation of myself from a free character I found on Luxology’s homepage and sized my CG-dolphin so it covered VR-me. The full dolphin suite will be around 3,1 meter long and maybe 70 centimeters wide depending on how thick rubber I’m going to use… That’s ok because dolphin males range from 2 to four meters, I’ll be an average bottlenose dolphin.

Going to the construction material warehouse.

It’s been a couple of days since I posted something on the blog. Mostly due to another project I had to do in between but I’ve also been spending time in my new workshop that the landlord lent me for the project! Hurray for the best landlord ever! It’s just a couple of floors down but I don’t have internet there. Good for the dolphin project but bad for youtube. But don’t you worry youtube, I’ll make it up to you by posting some videos later.

Anyhow I lent a car from a friend and went shopping for material. First I filled the tank and then the silly gps guided me down into some tunnels and lost contact with gps… It was really crowded in the tunnel and the traffic was completely still because of some construction work. The Gps freaked out and showed me driving randomly inside houses narrated by a bad Homer Simpson copy even though I stood completely still. I was trapped in traffic for about an hour and a half and the warehouse almost closed before I could arrive. But I made it in time! So here are some pictures;

The new Workshop! Thanks supergreat landlord.Thanks Kalle S for the car!So much PolystyrenePolystyrene inside workshop, mission accomplished!

Today’s to do list

On today’s to do list there is a very important to do, I’ll have to buy material for the base sculpture. I’ve been lent a big car and later I’m driving to the construction warehouse to get polystyrene. Then even later, I’ll tell you all about it!

On tomorrow’s to do list I wrote “do nothing”. Take this advice: Never work yourself to death, don’t forget about life!

Welcome to the world computer dolphin!

Using the programs Lightwave and Zbrush I created a pretty realistic computer dolphin. I used Lightwave to build the basic structure and get all the fins and stuff anatomically correct. I found quite a lot pictures on common bottlenose dolphins online to use as reference. Not that surprising, if I saw a dolphin I would probably take a picture of it and put it online. There seems to be a lot of people thinking like me on this subject.

All the fine details were created in Zbrush. What a great program, so much smartness put into that piece of software. In just some hours I turned my simple mesh into something quite believable. Have a look:

Perspective

Top

side

front

First I just thought that ill use the renders for measurement reference on a paper, but then I surfed some trying to find a good material for the project and ended up on a site with some guy building a car from scratch. When he created the exterior, he made silhouettes for each tenth centimeter or so from cardboard, the silhouettes showed the basic shape really good when put in place. Then filled the blanks with something similar to polystyrene and the body was good and symmetric. So as soon as I bought some good material I’ll create and cut out paper silhouettes from the 3d model!

New hope for Yangtze River dolphin?

The probably extinct Yangtze River dolphin has been sighted by a Chinese guy! Not day fresh news but still news to me! Thanks for this hope building tip Lina T.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/30/world/asia/30china.html

Facebook group!

Join the Dolphin transform group on facebook!

What does a dolphin look like?

Dolphins basicly look like big grey fish, right? But I will be needing much more detailed information when I create my sculpture. So today I’ve been searching the local toy stores for a super realistic dolphin replica that I could use as reference. I found a couple and even bought one even though it wasn’t all that lifelike. Could still come in handy at some point, maybe as a gift for some ones forgotten birthday! Plastic dolphins make great gifts.

So for reference I’ll mostly be using pictures instead. From them I’ll build a 3d model to get the anatomy correct before starting to sculpt in polystyrene or some similar material.

So, next stop: Virtual Reality!

Welcome Editor Jacob!

Now Jacob is able to post and edit my posts on the blog. So from now on my blog isn’t the lawless land of the free it once was. I feel a bit like brave heart when he screams freedom just before the evil knight pull his arms ad legs off. Maybe I’m over reacting; Jacob is a nice guy after all. Welcome to the blog Jacob.

Information gathering 1

Maybe I’ll go to the library later, could be a fun trip. But for now I’ll browse the web a bit instead.

Here is a mini essay I compiled from stuff found on the web.

Dolphins – by Ola Persson

The origin of the name dolphin comes from ancient Greek, and looks like this: δελφίς
It means “with a womb”. Fish don’t have wombs because their not mammals. There is a lot of different dolphin species, about 40 or so. Some dolphin species recently became extinct like the Yangtze River dolphin that probably died out in 2006. A lot of other river dolphin species face an uncertain future. So if you don’t want the species to be more 30ish donate some money for dolphin research. Maybe at http://www.wwf.org/

The dolphin I think about when I think about dolphins is usually the common bottlenose dolphin. Also the common bottlenose dolphin seams to be the one commonly held in aquatic zoo parks. This is the dolphin species I’m aiming to become.

Some more facts then, dolphins are considered smart, even though people you consider dumb are probably smarter then dolphins. They have great hearing, far superior to humans but probably hear trough the jaw somehow. They have echolocation capabilities but no smell. Instead of smell they probably taste the water. Be sure to write all this down, you never know when stuff like this comes in handy…

Dolphins are a pretty new thing species wise; they evolved about 50 million years ago. They actually used to be land living animals and returned to the sea to fill the niche of big surface dwelling predators that had been empty since the dinosaurs disappeared. Japanese researchers found a Bottlenose dolphin in 2006 with the remains of back legs, and it caused quite a stir in the creation/evolution debate. I’m not taking sides in that debate but I didn’t find so much information about how god created dolphins on the web so this essay will mostly be on the evolutionary side.

Anyhow I will create my dolphin as a polystyrene sculpture and then create a mold and cast it in some sort of rubber. If someone thinks of a better solution I’m up for a debate.

The to do list

1. Find out more about dolphins.
2. Build dolphin suit based on my newly learned information.
3. Find someone who has dolphins and talk them into me swimming with their dolphins. (If it doesn’t involve me dying. Or is too dangerous for one reason or another.)
4. Send invoice.

Also I’ve been informed that an editor has been assigned on my project. Jacob Åström of Great Works. Let’s hope this blog is big enough for us both.

In an Absolut world I would be a dolphin.

When I was younger I used to be a diver. Once a week I went to the bathhouse and snorkeled for an hour. I always loved water and even more so being deep down in it. I used to watch the movie “The Big blue” a lot because it’s about diving and also is a good movie. It’s about a couple of divers pushing the world depth record of diving without tubes. Somewhere near the end of the movie (might even be he final scene, got to watch it again…) the main character dives so deep that he don’t have air enough to get back up and decides to stay. It’s a very emotional scene of when he calmly stays at the bottom surrounded by darkness. Slowly a dolphin emerges into what little light there is and the diver follows the dolphin into the darkness leaving all possibility of reaching the surface alive. It’s a poetic scene and I translated into that the diver becomes a dolphin himself and reaches some sort of calm state and comes to ease with himself and the world.

My friend thought that the dolphin saved the diver. I don’t think that makes any sense.

When I was asked to come up with an idea for something on the topic of “In an Absolut world” the scene came back to me. Mostly because I was a bit off in the meeting and was daydreaming about things that happened ages ago. In an Absolute world I would be a dolphin, I want to become one I said. I want to construct a lifelike dolphin diving suite and swim with other dolphins in this suite.

Somehow I got a “go” on the project. GR8!

Time to start.

Ok, now it’s time to start. Welcome to my blog! It’s the first page in a new chapter of my life. The first stumbling steps of my still wobbly legs, I’m reborn! Or not really reborn yet, the whole project is still in its womb. But I will be soon.

Where shall I start? I’m really enthusiastic about the whole deal, but I don’t want to spill all the beans at once. Let me start by introducing myself. My name is Ola Persson. I’m 28 years old and live in Stockholm, Sweden. I run a small design workshop I like creating stuff. Doesn’t really matter what, as long as I keep myself occupied. I’m a restless soul.

A couple of days ago I got a really strange brief. The company Great Works asked me on behalf of Absolut Vodka to come up with a vision about "In an Absolute World". I did and the client liked it. This blog is going to be all about that project.

The journey just begun and in my next post ill tell you all about the idea I presented! Over and out / Ola

Hi

Alright! The blog is up! Gotta go, I'm in a hurry.