I have collected the motion graphics work I have done the last 3 years into my first showreel. I'm aiming my career towards this field, and hoping to be doing a lot more of it in the next years. It's an exciting field where you get to play with illustration, animation, 3d and design on almost every project.

The introduction was made entirely in Maya with V-Ray as the rendersystem. The details in the floor came out phenomenally. The material is actually a carpaint shader with a displacement map extruding the details. The rigid dynamics came out pretty nice too. I had intended to have a more detail simulation, but I had to let it go in order to get it done.

My Bomber Kid character got another appearance too... I think it's time I modelled some more 3d character with a full rig, this guy is everywhere now!

We released Jack and Joe for the iPad and iPhone, and now we get to reap the fruits of the media blitz that it created! Well, alright, it wasn't really a blitz. More like a pfffofohhhhhftzzzz...z..zz..whaaateverrr... I guess we had high hopes, but that's a good thing in the end. The Norwegian version is selling like hot cupcakes in a fire sale where everyone's super hungry so far, we have had almost 1300 sales in only 10 days. That's pretty good for a book with no promotion, no marketing department and no fancy publisher behind it. Our budget was about 400 dollars. Time spent: ahmm...let's not talk about it. It's been a fun ride so far, and the coolest thing of all, is that we've MADE THIS. We actually have a fully working, pretty good (in our humble opinions) app! One that's on the App Store, sold by Apple! And about 1400 people have downloaded it and had fun with it! That's incredible! A giant pat on the back to ourselves.

My brother has done a fantastic job coding this app. He had to learn Objective-C from scratch in just 6 months, and then put all of this together. He's got two kids too, so getting this done and on schedule with this sort of quality has been an amazing achievement. I couldn't be happier with what he's done for our book!

So, what's this about a media blitz? Let me tell you...
So far, we have gotten two AWESOME things:

An A- rating and review from the big-league iLounge.com. We really couldn't have gotten a better review than what iLounge wrote about us. These are the nicest things they said about us:

“Our top pick in the bunch is Jack and Joe.(…) a two-brother writing, illustration, and programming team that has more combined talent than most of the larger children’s book developers in the App Store.(…) Jack and Joe is a really cute little book that has plenty of art, audio, and fun for the price; it’s certainly worthy of our high recommendation, your attention, and further editions.”

And a super fantastic interview/review with the amazing illustration resource FuelYourIllustration! .This was a really fun and entertaining interview for me, so I hope what I wrote was interesting to their readers too! Check out what Nikki said about "Jack and Joe":

I loved the illustrations! Bright, colorful, good movement! Very cute and great style for kids. The illustrations were really engaging and I felt the artwork went along perfectly with the story.
The interactions build into the book are fantastic. The hide and seek page was one of my favorite parts! There are also pages you can shake and some where you can pet Jack! In talking to Bard, I learned that in a future version of the story there will be even more interactive pages.
Jack and Joe very much felt like characters that could be on Disney or Nickelodeon – the voices were good too and there was a good pace to the book and the reading.

Many thanks to the wonderful Miss Nikki Jeske and the gracious Mr. Jeremy Horowitz!

After over 6 months of seriously hard and silly work, we've finally released our interactive children's book for the Apple iPad and iPhone!

Wow, it's been so much work you wouldn't believe it! Even if we chained you to a chair for nearly a year and spelt it out for you, you STILL would not believe us.
My brother Odin has spent every hour available on learning Objective-C and the ways of the Xcode. I have drawn endless amounts of huskies and blonde haired kids. And bees. Lots of bees. Dancing bees too. The cute kind. And we've hit every roadblock imaginable from pesky sound bugs, to the most evil bug of them all. The Memory Bug that crashes your app. But we squashed them all, and we got it through Apple's rigorous review system.

It's a great sense of accomplishment to have made both a children's book (which has always been a dream of mine) and to have something real on these fancy new digital toys. We really hope everyone out there likes it!

Jack and Joe is out now, and you can get for $2.99 at the App Store.

Check out the fancy promo site here!

On December 29th, we released the iPad version of "Jack and Joe", our interactive children's book, and now we're working on an update that will let kids color in a page themselves. It's something we had to cut for the first version, but we definitively had it planned for the end result.

So here's a preview of the new feature in action. It's a rough setup, we'll have proper colors in the final version of course!

The Tiki Cat is my new vinyl toy that will be released in 2011. More info coming very soon!

Donut Man is a character I created mostly to try my hand at rigging a character in Maya. He's fully rigged for animation now, so I tend to use him for every test project I do. I was initially just testing the Fisheye camera function, but realized that this would make a pretty awesome animation. I've done a couple of camera moves and I might just make this into a 30 second disco dancing short. We'll see where it goes when I get some time. He sure looks great in a disco setting though!

KARVT just released my artist series Macbook Skin. Laser etched onto authentic fine quality wood, ready to attach to your Mac for $50.KARVT is the product of my friend Kurt Barbee and his business partner/designer Sean Herman. Truly quality products, made with great finesse.

Buy one here:
http://karvt.com/store/bard-standal-ninja-pandas/

I am not entirely sure how my Pirate Pandas became "Ninja Pandas", but that's cool

It seems like my Skulliphant BUD toy has been released to the world's designer toy stores. Like the excellent Rotofugi:
Skulliphant BUD at Rotofugi

I even found them on ebay:
Ebay auction for Skulliphant BUDs

Awesome ^--^

Fukoko is a creature that brings good luck from Japanese mythology. So here we are, a quick 3B pencil drawing of the little guy. I then boot up Maya!

After a little work, the cube I started out with, is starting to take shape.

There we go, modelling nearly done.

And here we are with the UV-mapping and texturing done. Next up, animation!

Finished and animated, ready for my new portfolio site

A box of 50 Skulliphant Bud of the Month from JAMUNGO! just arrived!

This is my first production toy that will be sold around the world. Edition of 800 normal colors and 200 clear. Really happy with these, they look so great!