Road Trip #1

Yes there was the first road trip for us a weekend before Easter. I was lazy and didn't write anything about it for quite a time. And now time has come to put some words here about it.
For our first road trip we choose Mount Taranaki. The second highest mountain on New Zealands north island.
It's a very mighty mountain in the middle of flat landscape all around. The mountain is a dead volcano. It is proud and overlooks the great landscape around it.
The area around the mountain is National park and is really nice covered in very colorful forest.
Our at begun at around 900m above the sea level. And took us all the to the peak at 2518m.
Only two of us managed to summit. It took us 8h and some more minutes to get from our car to top and back again. We'll have to get into better shape for future summits.
But this was only first day of our trip. We concluded the trip in New Plymouth where we fell asleep as soon as we got our beds.
On the next day we looked arroud the New Plymouth, payed a visit to art gallery and one of the parks. After the New Plymouth we went on te Highway 45 that goes on the west coast around mount Taranaki. On our way back we also visited the Dawson Falls. They were really nice.
Late in the evening we concluded our first road trip back in Wanganui.

You can see some pictures in my gallery here.

A car

Yes. We did it. We (my 2 flatmate's and me) bought ourselves a car.
It's an 92 Ford Laser. It has small engine so the gas consumption shouldn't be high. And that is great.
It cost us 1.700 NZ dollars, so it wasn't expensive. Now we'll be able to get around to some nice places we wanted to go.
Maybe we'll do the first trip this weekend.
Anyway here is the picture of it at night. I'll put one in a daylight up soon too.

The beach - 2nd time around

We went to the beach again last Sunday. The weather was not that good but we still tried out the water. We went to the other beach this time around to see the cliffs.
They were quite nice, but the beach was not so nice. There were quite a lot trashes there.
We went back to the beach where we were last time and ran into the ocean. It was cold and the waves were high, the current was strong also. We weren't in for a long time.
On our way back we stopped at botanical park, where there were many plants thet can be found in New Zealand and elsewhere in the world.
You can see the pictures of our trip here.

Study in New Zealand

I have chosen three classes here:

• Computer Illustration (3 credit points)
  Is a class where I will try to learn to draw. For the first part of the class we have to do 3 illustrations with any medium. I have chosen the Photoshop and Wacom tablet as my medium for this first assignment. I have also chosen the theme I'll be working on.
  I will try to create a wizard in different circumstances (spell casting, summoning, channeling).
• Animation (3 credit points)
  In this class we are learning the basic of animation. We did the stop motion here. For our assignment we have to do a short animation. It can be as short as 6 seconds, but it has to follow the basic principles of the animation.
• Maya (9 credit points)
  In this class we are learning how to 3D model. We are working on Maya.
  My project here will be to create the 3D model of Blood elf female mage from World of Wordcraft.

All the classes are very good, but they take a lot off time to get the things done. I enjoy them.

Playing with toys

Yes it's true. That is what we are doing in our school. We are playing wit toys.
At animation class we had to bring toy character for our stop motion animation practice. I had no toys with me, so I had to buy some new ones. And I bought Lego's Bionicles. Two small robots that I could use for my stop motion practice.
So what is stop motion?
Some of you might remember the well known stop motion movie "Nightmare before Christmas". This is type of movie where you have to create frame by frame with help of miniature scene and characters. You have to get each and every shot for the complete animation.
I did three short movies. The first one is not for the public, because it's too bad, but here are other two movies put together.
You can find the video on youtube (here)
We only had 3 hours to learn the principles of stop motion and create some test videos. I'm quite pleased with my output. If we would have more time we could create so much more :)
It's fun doing it at first, but after a while you get really bored.