Kung-Fu High Impact soundtrack

This is a sample from a new upcoming Xbox Kinect title from Virtual Air Guitar Company called "Kung-Fu High Impact" that I wrote the music for:

Kung-Fu High Impact by Lasse Enersen

I had a lot of fun writing the music, as there were many different styles ranging from Spaghetti Western Electro to Industrial/Heavy Metal to Ravel/Shostakovich style orchestral stuff. I used UAD:s EMT140 plugin as my main orchestral reverb, and it sure sounds a bit cleaner than Altiverb, especially in the lower register.

A music video

I produced and Adele directed this music video for singer Emmi Salo:

Emmi Salo won a song writing competition called Biisikisa, and the first prize was having the song produced professionally at Fried Music (where I currently have my studio). Part of the prize was also a "making of" music video, but the guys at Fried thought that we could try produce the ourselves with our own Canon 5D cameras, with some simple visual idea, rather than a story or a "making of". Adele got this idea and storyboarded it in one day. We all liked it and I ended up producing the whole shebang.

Director/Writer/Make-up/Wardrobe: Adele Enersen

Producer/Assistant Editor/Lighting Assistant/Playback: Lasse Enersen

Cinematography: Juge Heikkilä

Camera Assistant: Heikki Slåen

Color Grading: Timo Luomanen/Post Control

Editor: Santeri Enstedt

We shot the video using one Canon 5D Mark ii camera with Technicolor Cinestyle color profile. More than third of the video was shot with a Steadicam.

The locations are all within three kilometers from our own home in Helsinki.

New music

Here is a sample from my latest score, from the upcoming Xbox Kinect game Kung-fu High Impact:

Kung-Fu High Impact - Swamp by Lasse Enersen

Evolution of Lullabel, my stop motion character

I haven't buried my stop-motion dreams, although I'm still enjoying maternity leave and my precious, precious little baby girl. Beside being most lovely little bundle of joy, she has been a great muse for us. I just wrote my first book for her, and Lasse is composing more music than ever.

Back to Lullabel...Before my morning-sickness took over I learned to make puppet with some simple expressions, I also made this "home"-set up with tiny props like knitting basket and artist supplies. 

The Lullabel -puppet is now better, but not yet perfect. I need to solve her bad hairdays and balance problems, so she would be better to animate. 

My maternity leave hobby

I'm now on my maternity leave but there can still be something creative in every day. While my baby is taking her nap I spend few minutes by capturing her daydreams:

(Music by: Lasse Enersen)

More daydream pictures in Mila's Daydreams blog.

Environment-independent transparency

In a short period of time, the internet has made almost all the information in the world available to half the world's population. We have in a way created a collective superbrain of links and information, and built infinitely multiple and personal layers of value indexes that manages and connect to all that information. This jungle of personally fitted and mined information connects people who are interested in same things. This is the part of the internet phenomena that interests me the most.

The internet is incredible in gravitating like-minded people together at different new environments, like web pages, software and even geo-locations (through mobile and GPS). However, the transparency of these environments - people to each other - is dependant to the environment itself. For instance, you can't see who are on the same web page with you, or who are using the same software. On some environments, like on YouTube, people are visible to each other via the videos they send. Or in Wikipedia there are ways of collectively decide and discuss dictionary articles. Every website and other environment has their own specific means of connecting people and making communication possible. There is no uniform way to establish every connection and every type of communication everywhere, independent of environment.

This is the problem that my company Ghobee was trying to solve. It's an abstraction to start with and a wild proposition, but we found a pragmatic and user-friendly ways to do this.

My orchestral film scoring template

It is very hard to find detailed information on what kind of studio setups film composers have. I've tried to find them from magazines, websites and DVD extras, and I've been able to cobble up some info. After watching this Mike Patti's great video about his setup, I decided to write about my somewhat similar setup. I hope it sheds some light into the technical side of composing orchestral music for films, and maybe gives ideas for other composers who are updating or building their own setups and templates.

The main requirements for the setup are that I am able to write orchestral music to a moving picture, export an audio track for directors approal, and be able to export a midi file that makes sense for the orchestrator. For me, I want to have a very diverse and large palette of instruments and articulations at hand all the time. If I want a suspended cymbal roll played with drum sticks + flute flatterzunge + sul ponticello tremolo in strings, I can write/play/edit the music directly to the already created midi tracks and hear the result. This means that I need hundreds of midi tracks in my template open when I start a new cue. My sequencer is Digital Performer 7.01, and the current working template has 250 midi tracks (click thumbnail for full size image):

My studio setup consists of one host computer and three slave computers:

Host: Mac Pro, 2 x 2.8 Ghz Quad-Core Intel Xeon, 12 GB RAM

Three identical slave computers: Dell Studio XPS 435, Intel i7 2.67 Ghz, 12GB RAM

Audio interface: Motu 828mkII

Midi Interface: Motu Midi Timepiece

Midi controllers: Kaway ES4 Keyboard and M-Audio Trigger Finger

Bulk of my orchestral sounds are from Vienna Symphonic Library and they all reside in the 3 slave computers. I have the extended cube, which is a very large library with incredible amount of different articulations for each orchestral instrument and the very best sound quality. The samples are dry so I apply reverb and ambience to them, depending on the sound I'm after. Usually I use the Altiverb with Todd AO impulse response.

The sounds are loaded into Vienna Ensemble Pro instances in the slaves. These instances are connected to my host via ethernet. One instance in my setup can have up to 32 Vienna Instruments, but even more can be loaded. Almost every VI (like Piccolo Dynamics) has multiple articulations, like 2 second crescendo, 4 second crescendo, 4 second crescendo-decrescendo, sforzando, etc. I choose the articulation with my M-Audio Trigger Finger pads, that are programmed to apply keyswitches to the VI:s. It also controls dynamics with expression and velocity crossfade faders.

In DP, the only instrument plugins that are loaded are Omnisphere and Trilian. All the other plugins (including VE Pro plugins) are loaded into a standalone Plogue Bidule, and connected to the DP via rewire. This has been a revolutionary little piece of software for me. Since all the sounds are automatically loaded in the slaves when I open them, and the plugins are loaded outside DP, it makes it very easy for me to open and close different projects and cues. I don't have to waste time waiting for all the sounds to load every time I open another DP file. DP only handles midi, audio routing and applies Altiverb to the sounds. In the Bidule template, I have seven VE Pro:s, two Kontakts, one PLAY (StormDrum2), one Omnisphere (for basic sounds I want to use regularly), Garritan Steinway Piano and Stylus RMX. Bidule is very easy to use modular software, especially if you have experience with Max/MSP. Here is my Bidule Template:

A recap of the work method: I record and edit midi in DP. The midi is sent to Bidule's midi ins. VE Pro plugins can receive max 16 midi channels, so all the Vienna Instruments past that get the midi through MidiOverLan. In Bidule that midi is sent to VE Pro Plugins, which go through ethernet to Vienna Ensemble servers in slaves. The audio is then sent back through ethernet to Bidule, and directed through ReWire to Digital Performer. Here it goes through some auxes and buses (Altiverb), and ends up to a stereo audio track. If I'm sending the stuff to 5.1, I apply a 100% wet Altiverb track for LSRS channels. Works like a charm and is very reliable. Bidule doesn't crash even with PLAY, which is notorious for crashing.

If you have questions about this setup/template, leave them in the comments.

www.lasseenersen.com

Latest orchestral film music demo of mine:

Helsinki, The World Design Capital

Our hometown, Helsinki has won the title of World Design Capital for 2012!

more info: WDCHelsinki2012

Scene from Pan's Labyrinth (2006) rescored

I wrote this as a compositional exercise and promo material (open in YouTube for larger picture):

Green Cloud

Here is an idea that my friend and co-founder in Ghobee came up with: Green Cloud.

It's a mix between Seti@Home and cloud computing services like Amazon's EC2 and Google's App Engine. The idea would be to program a software that people could download and use as screensavers/etc, that would give their unused computer time and processing power to companies' computing needs. Green Cloud could charge the companies the same amount or less than Amazon and Google and all the money would go to charity, maybe of the user's choice. This software could be a quite decentralized P2P application, so the running costs would be very minimal. This would be a great and simple way to participate in charity.

If someone has time and passion to code this, please take it and let us know so we can start using it as well :)

She is Lullabel

Summer of stop motion

I haven't been blogging lately in 'Nonsense!', simply because I've been busy with other projects and blogs. If I find something new creative and interesting, I'll act like an addict. I'm totally in to it, and nothing else matters. Luckily my hubby is same kind, so we understand each other well.

Most of the time my addiction is advertising, but after a quite hard year, I needed something comfortable to balance that.
So I got obsessed about well-being, low-carb cooking and natural beauty care, here's my food blog. (Only finnish, I'm sorry)

That's why I was probably too relaxed when my 4 week summer vacation started. After enjoying 3 days freedom and holidays with friends, I was ready to create something. "Let's make a our own movie!". We both love movies. I'm into screenwriting, stop motion and character & set designing. Lasse is a brilliant movie composer, but also into shooting, lightning, screenwriting and editing. We both are interested about directing, and in this little short film, I think we are the perfect package together. Some couple's test their relationship by building a house, we are going to make a film. Insane, but that's us.

Right now I'm learning how to make best puppets for the animation. There's a great handbook in www.stopmotionanimation.com we have also The Aardman Book and watched some extras from Tim Burton films. I really love Burton style, but I hope that I could find my own style. In this point, I guess my source of inspiration is showing through.


The story is based on my old comics, and I've written the first version of the script. The hard part with the story is the narrator, so I'll write one version before and other after we have shoot the film.


....to be continued.

UNICEF Finland, typography print

"Be a mom for a moment."

www.unicef.fi

Stock market prices = Economy?

It seems to me that when people talk about how good or bad the economy is, they really mean Dow Jones. Stock values. This is like taking blood pressure to measure eye sight.

Haven't people really discovered already that markets can be extremely erratic and volatile? What do they think the stock market bubbles are? Did the 14,165 record Dow in October 2007 really represent the healthiest economy USA ever had?

So why are everyone looking at stock values when they are trying to fix the economy? My guess is that because that is where the recession effects first hit for those in charge; people with enough money to invest in the stock market. This includes politicians. Now they are trying to make stock values go higher again. Why? Shouldn't the markets try to rebalance itself after the bubble? Why should the stock prices be at the same level than during the bubble market conditions?

So what is the right meter to follow? Well, I think that a healthy economy is a sustainable one. One with good immune system. One where markets are forced to follow fundamentals. This would mean balanced government budgets, balanced import/export, high savings rates, low government debt and low inflation.

This would also mean no more crazy stock market booms. But do we really need them? Now that we've seen where they lead?

Change?

Dot-Com Bubble

Bush & Greenspan methods fighting against recession:

- Increased deficit spending

- Loosening of monetary policy, significantly lowering feds funds rates

Housing Bubble

Obama & Bernanke methods fighting against recession:
- Increased deficit spending

- Loosening of monetary policy, significantly lowering feds funds rates

Albert Einstein's famous definition of insanity is as follows: Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Jaiku is now open source

Jyri Engeström wrote a blog post about open sourcing Jaiku. This is interesting news, since Twitter is right now the hottest thing going in the web, and Jaiku is the second best microblogging platform available.

Jaiku resides now in Google Cloud. Anyone can now set up and run their own JaikuEngine instance on Google App Engine. Hopefully the developer community takes it as their own and starts to develop Jaiku like crazy. There's certainly a lot of stuff they could do to make it even better and more diverse. And I wouldn't be surprised if some startups find a new way to use microblogging as part of their offering. My own Ghobee could be one of them.

Good stuff.

UNICEF campaign - Guerilla kick off

Let´s wake up those motherly instincts.

Imagine you see blue abandoned baby strollers. You see them on the way to your work, and then you hear some crying coming out of them. Would you take a look that everything is ok?

Watch this video

Inside the strollers is a sign that says (loosely translated):

"Thank you for caring, we hope there is more people like you.
Be a mom for a moment, UNICEF.
www.unicef.fi/aiti"

Campaign: Ole hetken äiti - Be a mom for a moment
Client: UNICEF Finland
Agency: Taivas

Cloud panel

A great panel about Cloud Computing, all the major cloud companies represented:

I am certain at this point that cloud computing is the next great enabler of future internet innovation.

Mobile short film: Mankind is no island

One of my collegues show this short film today. Very inspiring.

This touching, shot on a mobile phone -movie has won both the 'People's Choice' and 'Best Film' category at the NY Tropfest short film festival 2008.



I think we should sometimes do something non-commercial film "art" with Lasse.

Ad placement gone wrong, Finnair

News is all about Buffalo plane crash, and Finnair ad says: "Happy surprise for valentines day!"

Oh dear. (Thanks Johannes.)

All work and no play, but a NEW campaign for Arla is out there!

Arla Power Cow is Arla's brand for dairy products for children. Unlike their competitors, Power Cow does not use traditional media like TV. Nice Challenge, me likes!

(In my opinion, there's enough annoying bright and noisy "Hey kids, you wan´t this yammy-stuff"-commercial in TV anyway.)


Last year campaign was about a dance contest. This year the name of the game is Music Video. We wanted to give even more space for kids creativity. We have a new song and new product: cheese.



We have also Power Cow room in Habbo. It's nice to read comments in there. Some kids remember last year dance contest, and others are already expecting this new competition. Some likes products, some don't. It's nice to be honest in advertising. "Here is this product, but you make up your mind what you really think about it. "



Here you can see the campaign site:
http://www.powercow.fi/

Is it really 'worst since Great Depression'?

(from Examiner)

Bill Hicks on Letterman, finally

I have to post this video for cultural value, and as a good deed from David Letterman. 

The legendary comedian Bill Hicks recorded this bit in 1993 for Late Night with David Letterman, and it was the first bit ever to cut completely out of the program because of the nature of the material, which CBS at the time thought to be offending and not suitable for the viewing public. This devastated Hicks and his fans. He never got the recognition he deserved in his life time. Bill Hicks died in 1995.

Internet really made Bill Hicks a posthumous star and a hero to many. I remember getting some mp3:s from my friends and laughing my ass off to his routines, which were quite anarchic and philosophic at the same time. A true alternative for comedy. He validated many peoples sense of reason and view of the world.

Anyway, Letterman decided to put this video on air finally, so here it is:

"The world is like a ride at an amusement park. And when you choose to go on it, you think it's real because that's how powerful our minds are. And the ride goes up and down and round and round. It has thrills and chills and it's very brightly coloured and it's very loud and it's fun, for a while. Some people have been on the ride for a long time, and they begin to question: Is this real, or is this just a ride? And other people have remembered, and they come back to us, they say, 'Hey – don't worry, don't be afraid ever, because this is just a ride ...' And we ... kill those people. Ha ha, 'Shut him up. We have a lot invested in this ride. Shut him up. Look at my furrows of worry. Look at my big bank account and my family. This just has to be real.' It's just a ride. But we always kill those good guys who try and tell us that, you ever notice that? And let the demons run amok. But it doesn't matter, because – it's just a ride. And we can change it anytime we want. It's only a choice. No effort, no work, no job, no savings and money. A choice, right now, between fear and love. The eyes of fear want you to put bigger locks on your doors, buy guns, close yourself off. The eyes of love instead see all of us as one. Here's what we can do to change the world, right now, to a better ride. Take all that money we spend on weapons and defenses each year and instead spend it feeding and clothing and educating the poor of the world, which it would pay for many times over, not one human being excluded, and we could explore space, together, both inner and outer, forever, in peace." -- Bill Hicks

Story of Stardoll.com - a co-founder's story, Part Four

I was at that point an avid user of finnish website called Mikseri.net, which allows people to share their own music and discuss softwares and hardwares. As I liked how it felt to use, I contacted its founder and manager Arto Aaltonen on IRC (not the gallery) and briefly presented our little thing called Liisa's Paperdolls. As a very entrepreneur-spirited guy, he got excited and was like "yeah let's do it". Together we created a new site, which included basic social networking features and made into a bit more professional looking, logos and all. Arto was really fast at coding the site. I realized only later on, being more around with other coders, how fast he actually was. I'm really happy to have started my internet career with him, because that way I understand what kind of work attitude and end result is possible. At times they can be really lazy and managers are wondering why projects are stalling, while their coders are surfing the net and not doing anything.

Fifth lesson: Hire people who work hard as well. Do not recruit rockstar coders, or anyone with huge ego.

Company was founded by the three of us, Liisa, Arto and me, money was getting in, site kept growing like crazy. To get where we were going with product dev, we needed a Flash coder. We talked with few, but they all decided they wanted to stay at their cozy jobs, rather than doing some fantasy startup company about paperdolls. We started to think about having venture capital money in the company, in order to develop the things we wanted. Enter Danny Rimer.

Danny is a general partner at Index Ventures, one of the best VC companies in the world. We had decided to start looking for venture capital money just one week before out of the blue he contacted me and said he liked the website and wanted to talk about it. I didn't know anything about how everything works regarding venture capital company involvement. At this point I contacted Taneli Tikka, who at that time was the CEO of our hosting company, and who I knew had a lot of VC experience. We met and had an interesting talk. He had many good advice about our company, service and he helped understand more about venture capital. And kudos for also understanding how valuable the site was for girls online. I also met Aapo Kyrölä, the other co-founder of Habbo Hotel. I presented the site to him, and we mainly talked about negotiating with VC:s. We were a lot smaller than Habbo at that time, but were still competitors in 50% of their target market. I highly respect his attitude towards us, in spite of us being competitors. Finland is a small country and we should help each other out like that more often.

to be continued..

Internet industry vs. electric industry

I have always had extra big admiration for Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos. In this video he explains how the dot-com boom and bust is often compared to the Gold Rush, but that its more like the early days of the electric industry. 

An inspiring video.

Bad sign

Here is interesting graph. This is probably good to keep in mind in the future. It's exactly like Jim Rogers said: when 29-year old people in the financial sector are driving Maseratis, something is terribly wrong.

Online shop for Finnish goods!

If you are finnish person living in somewhere else, or otherwise brainwashed to enjoy our nordic goods, you´ll eventually miss finnish products like crazy.

Especially real rye bread, salmiakki (salty licorice), sauna products scented with birch and tar, and of course latest issues of finnish journals.

But now there is a solution! Hurraa! Suomikauppa.fi is the world largest online shop for Finnish goods!

Goodbye Bush : Veet

Clever!!! Via: Brand Strategy - blog

Monetary politics

Central banks are independent institutions without any tangible government (people) control. The are not accountable by any authority. Therefore monetary policy is undemocratic. We can vote any other sort of politician, except the monetary politicians - the most important ones. No other institution in the world has so much power and so little obligations and accountibility. The complete untouchable.

If you are going to centrally control the economy, rather than giving the control to free market (democratic economy), then at least give the people the right to vote on it, and educate them on how their economic system works.

"If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs."

—Thomas Jefferson, 1802
the third President of the United States (1801- 1809).

Anatomy of a Bubble

1. Investing (in any asset class) goes mainstream and ordinary people think that they can get rich effortlessly

2. This can go on as long as everybody has the same disillusion, and supply of the particular asset is smaller than demand

3. Bubble bursts when supply gets bigger than demand and forces prices to decline, causing the demand go even lower, and eventually turning into a loop

Central banks are in the position to create bubbles, because their credit to banks and governments can be cheaper than if commercial banks lent money to each other. It is a centrally controlled mechanism for agreeing prices for credit. 

Artificially cheap credit --> less risk for banks to lend money to companies and individuals --> companies and individuals invest more --> go back to nr. 1

Half of LAMP is from Finland

Finnish people have sometimes problems taking credit from what they have done. So I'm going to brag a little bit.

How many realize that half of the open source software bundle LAMP is finnish: operating system Linux and database management system MySQL. Remaining being Apache and PHP. LAMP is used everywhere in the world, and is behind most stuff on internet.

Päivän neljäs kalapuikko

Sorry folk´s, I just have blog this one in finnish. This blogging about finnish fish stick-riot in school. If you really need to know, you may try google translation. :D

Tapahtui eilen:
Keskellä kaikkien masentavien uutisten ja yt-neuvottelujen, yksi uutinen kaikessa surkuhupaisuudessaan piristi päivää.

Ei siksi, että olisi jotenkin hauskaa että kuriton koulupoika käyttäytyy huonosti, ja koulu joutuu turvautumaan poliiseihin, vaan siksi, että yhden yksilön itsekkyys saa älyttömät mittasuhteet, kun mediassa kaikki näyttää kiteytyvän yhteen pieneen kalapuikkoon. Oikaisuyritykset rapeista kalapaloista vain lisäsivät vettä myllyyn.

Eipä sillä, lapasista lähti myös vitsinä perustettu neljäs kalapuikko-ryhmä, jonka tehtävänä oli pohtia parin kaverin kesken mikä on se viimeinen kalapuikko joka katkaisee kamelin selän. Allekirjoittanutkin paneroutui kalapuikkojen syvimpään olemukseen sellaisella antaumuksella, että aviomies vaihtoi huonetta kun myöhäis-illan pimeinä tunteina esa pakarisen klassikko muuttui muotoon "Lentävä kalapuikko".

Vielä tänäänkin kalapala-baliikki on rapeaa asiayhteydestään irroitettuna. Kalapuikko-metaforat saavat hymyilemään. Ehkä jonain päivänä kielletyn hedelmän sijaan meillä on se neljäs kalapuikko. Eilen onnistuin jo käyttämään neljättä kalapuikkoa lauseessa. Tänään olen onnellinen kuin neljännen kalapuikon saanut koulupoika.

Ehkä me kaikki kaipaamme juuri nyt elämäämme sitä mahdotonta neljättä kalapuikkoa, ja sille asialle on parempi nauraa yhdessä, kuin itkeä yksin omaa kalapuikottomuuttaan.

I swear..

...If I suddenly lose my job in this economy-schmeconomy situation, I will apply into this one:

"Britney Spears 2.0 Media Manager"

(Well, no, I didn't went to Harvard, but I've seen Love Story few times, does it count?)

If I don´t have to do this, I know the right person to be the one: It´s Chris Crocker

Causes and effects of fuel hedging

China Eastern Airlines, one of the country's largest carriers, said it faces a "significant loss" for 2008 after fuel price hedges turned bad to the tune of 6.2 billion yuan ($906 million) (from Associated Press).

I think that this is very interesting phenomena, and suspect that this was going on rampant in 2008. Wikipedia explains what fuel hedging is: 

"A fuel hedge contract commits an airline to paying a pre-determined price for future jet fuel purchases. Airlines enter into such contracts as a bet that future jet fuel prices will be higher than current prices or to reduce the turbulence of confronting future expenses of unknown size. If the price of jet fuel falls and the airline hedged for a higher price, the airline will be forced to pay an above-market rate for jet fuel."

So airlines have bought a lot of fuel (--> oil) in 2008 when the prices were skyrocketing, basically paying a much higher price than they would have if they just bought at whatever market prices were after the spike. This makes me believe that the price collapse in oil from 145$ to 42$ (price today, January 12th, 2009) is partly due to this. When massive amounts of hedging contracts were made, the effect was that future demand decreased the same amount. "We have already bought all our jet fuel for the next 1,5 years, we don't need anymore".

Now the overall demand, and I mean how much oil is really consumed, hasn't declined much. What has declined is output, because of the fear that during worldwide economic crisis, everyone has to drive a lot less. And I happen to disagree with this. I will not believe that people have really started to use and buy less fuel, globally. That is just a gut feeling.

So what are the effects of fuel hedging in 2008, other than decline in prices? I suspect that prices will go back up. I think that commodities bull run isn't over yet. I'm with Jim Rogers on this one. When stocks and bonds lose their value, the most valuable thing are real things. People will always be in need of food and energy and raw materials. And investment in productive capacity just isn't happening. I mean, who wants to become a farmer, hands up? Or who is investing in a coal mine or lead mine? At times like these?

Long: commodities. Short: 30-year bonds.