Today we started off our day by signing the Swedish and Norwegian flags which we brought with us on this trip to take fun group pictures with. When signing the flags we found out that one of the pens was bleeding a lot which resulted in very creative writings on the flag 🙂
After this our day commissioners, Rachel and Ilse W, took us through the city towards our last company visit in Stockholm; Goodbye Kansas. They call themselves a world-class visual content & technology partner and use technologies like augmented reality, virtual reality, VFX production, game cinematics, performance capture & scanning, digital humans, and real-time animation. They use all these different technologies to work on TV, movies, streaming, games, and e-commerce. We got a very warm welcome when we arrived at their headquarters here in Stockholm. The visit started off with a tour through their building, where the group got very amazed at the equipment, workspaces, and lounge spaces in the Goodbye Kansas building. After the tour, we got a presentation about which types of work they provide, how the company arose and we got a sneak peek into what they have made in the past. During the Q&A our group was eager to ask a lot of questions since everyone was interested in what their company does and how their work environment is. Two interesting questions that got asked during the question round were for example:
Q: Do you think the animations will get any more realistic in the coming years, or might they actually steer away from realism a bit more?
A: I think indeed the second might be true. You already see this trend coming with some games that came out last year. Although the realism can get better and better this can also cause something called the uncanny valley. This means that if things look too realistic people might get scared away from them.
Q; Where does the name Goodbye Kansas come from?
A; It comes from the movie Wizard of Oz, where it starts off in black and white when they are in Kansas and when they leave Kansas the world becomes way more colorful. We took this as a reference since we as a company aim to make the world more colorful for people.
The next stop on our calendar was taking some group pictures with the flags. After some discussion, we decided to climb up a platform that was overlooking a beautiful river in Stockholm and asked a kind stranger to take these pictures for us.
The afternoon was scheduled as free time which meant relaxing time and time to wash some clothes for most participants. Some of us even went to the natural history museum to take a look at the dinosaurs exhibition and all the other exhibitions which can be found there. There were even a few brave soldiers who conquered the Swedish rain to get to the museum.
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In the evening some people will go and explore Stockholm by (night)light. See you tomorrow!