CBT promo film complete!

It includes time lapses, a composited news room, a sound track and some nice motion graphics. The image below the embedded video provides some idea of the content.

Kickstarter CBT promo video update & making of

I have almost finished this project now! It has been a bit of an epic and has drawn on my skills as a motion graphics designer, compositor, camera man, editor, 3D artist, time lapse recorder and musician! If anyone has any ideas of one word that I could use to fit these different roles, I would appreciate it! Audio-visual artist could be a good umbrella term.

Just a quick reminder - this work is for a promotional video made to represent Clear Blue Therapies on Kickstarter. Clear Blue Therapies is a therapy business founded by Saskia Griffiths-Moore. The video utilises motion graphics and draws on a news broadcaster theme to promote interest and help delineate Saskia's four phase plan.

Here are a few screenshots showing different parts of scene 2 on which I have created some nice bits of animation / motion graphics. The actual film itself will be out on Kickstarter soon - I will keep you posted. I just have a few final bits and pieces to sort out following some final feedback from Saskia.

I enjoyed getting the pencil out and drawing this piece to represent a conference.



Following this, I worked over it in Illustrator, then animated it in After Effects. Playing with the opacity of the fills adds a nice element of visual interest to the image. Also, conceptually, I reckon it enhances "the meeting of minds" element.



I also found it quite rewarding and satisfying working in 3D for parts of this project. The spinning logo and the books turning. Simple but effective!

And - this is a bit of an odd one - I'm quite proud of the train style LED text I put together. The font itself is called LCD Dot, and was created by Omer Kose --- http://www.omerkose.net/ I downloaded this off Dafont.

The bit that I'm proud of is the nice repetitive dot pattern I created in Illustrator for the LED light background! This lines up with the dots of the font. Then of course the colour and glow effect. It mimics the train style LEDs quite well. As things have turned out, I have been asked to change this style as it could be confusing, and takes away from the cohesion of the other fonts in the video. Think I may have taken Saskia a little too literally when she said 'text like you see on train displays'. Nevermind though!

Watch this space! The promo video will be out shortly....

Title sequence - workflow and screenshots.

This took around 3 days. I shot the timelapses and footage; created the sound (utilising a 120 bpm house loop by "afleetingspeck" off Freesound) then worked between Premiere and After Effects (using the Adobe Dynamic Link) to edit it together and add effects. The timing and visual/audio synchronicity seems to be key in maintaining a steady pace and flow to the sequence. As you can see below, the shots change precisely on cue with the drum beats.

The additive dissolve makes for quite a nice transition between shots. To further visually convey the pulse of the soundtrack I added a blue moving line effect in sync with the drum beats. It's simple but effective! I will upload the movie here when the video is up on Kickstarter.

Kickstarter campaign progress

Just a quick post this week. I have been quite busy spending time seeing my sister this week so I will be aiming to get this project complete for next Friday. This week, I have worked on adding text to imitate the look of the british rail LED screen type - this is timed perfectly with the words as they are spoken. I found this type off Dafont. It is called LCD Dot, made by Omer Kose.

 I also spent half a day going into town and recording some timelapse footage for the news title sequence. This looks great. The next step is creating a soundtrack to go with them - there's some great stuff on Soundcloud but I could run into copyright issues by using it, so instead I have found a good house loop off Freesound and will work on the track myself.

Train LED style text

Timelapse stills

Showreel 2012

My latest showreel, marking the end of my Digital Animation degree. A selection of shots from throughout the last few years which focus on compositing but also demonstrates my skills in animation and 3D. The first two shots are from our 3rd year final major project: Kernal. A CG animated film I worked on as part of a team of 17 which we have now completed and anticipate entering it into festivals.

Level 3 Pitch Presentation and Showreel

Here is my pitch presentation (that was presented at our Animation Pitch forum) designed to showcase my skills and method of working in Concept Art, Environments and Storyboarding.

The subsequent showreel also demonstrates my skills in Compositing and Animation.

These are areas I would like to focus on throughout my third year and hopefully build up an Industry standard portfolio/showreel. It may be that I end up focusing down onto one of these areas or that I continue to be more of a generalist. Time will tell! Ultimately, I would like to work in the Industry on feature films, short films, music promos etc..

Presentation

The only bit that isn't really explained - as it's a presentation the explaining was done verbally - is after my first concept piece. The subsequent slides show how I produced that piece, starting on a city I put together in my room made from things found around the house (for initial reference and inspiration.) It builds up from there switching between Maya models and working over it with pencils and pastels.

Final Pitch

Animation and Compositing Showreel



This was produced a bit last minute and combines work from my Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament Film, my previous Showreel and my last main project from Uni 'Colours and Cogs' that I produced at the end of level 2.

My Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament Film - now available to watch :-)

My film entry for this competition is now officially open to the public to watch and review! Please feel welcome to watch and review it :-) It appears that 'When I grow up' is just one of four in the 'Chance of a lifetime' gallery that has been shortlisted by the judges. Ouuuu exciting!




When I get a bit of free time spare I will upload more information here about the 'making of' this film. It took about 4 months to make it (on and off) so it feels like a very nice achievement to have it handed in, in time for the deadline (with at least 24 hours to spare - result!)

Geneva - Audio-Visual and Mapping Festival 2011

I have recently returned from the Audio Visual and Projection Mapping festival held at Geneva, Switzerland with my mate Simon (3rd year animation student at Falmouth.) This was a great experience and really helped me to put a face to this niche industry. Not only was it a good chance to have a merry one but it was also very insightful, interesting and useful to meet other professionals in the field of Audio Visual production.

The festival itself was held over 10 days, we got a ticket just for the last weekend (Friday and Saturday.) It was at 5 different locations - A cinema and adjoining night club (Cinema Spoutnik and Zoo/Usine), a warehouse (Le Fonderie - near where they kept all the buses,)an art gallery (BAC) and a couple of other places I didn't get time to go to. I went a bit OTT here and made a lovely little diagram mapping the locations of the festival:

Le Fonderie


Here, they accommodated the MadMapper workshop. Unfortuantly, Simon and I were a bit late to join in for this (plus neither of us had the required Macbooks needed to join in.) MadMapper is a new software that allows you to project onto any given surface - its pretty cool stuff. We entered what looked like an abandoned warehouse to find a bunch of guys and a few girls on laptops testing it out. The architecture inside was ideal as there were lots of different surfaces, walls and pipes to project onto and sure enough there were many projectors in action. We wondered around a bit - mingling with the people who were trying it out before heading off to the cinema Spoutnik to catch the VJ competion. We came back again later to see it in action. Here are a few pictures I took:

VJ competition

A key event for me was the VJ contest held at Cinema Spoutnik over 2 days with around 20 participants. It was great to witness this art form being performed and exploited to its full potential by other like minded practioners. Below are some videos showing examples of work produced by the 2 finalists.

VJ Kobored:



VJ Suave - this video is from the first round of the Mapping festival:




VJ Kobored was the winner and won a belt and quite a lot of other stuff! (see below)

It was great to sit back and watch this with so many like minded people that treated VJing as a recognised Art Form. VJ suave has a very cool hand drawn and artistic animation style with some great characters. VJ Kobored had a range of 3d, live action and 2d styles. VJ Electroiman incorporated some performance art in his work using people who were made up and in costume. VJ Fader used an iPad as his main input - literally tweeking the visuals by the touch of his fingers (practically like playing an instrument.) It was an audio visual feast experienced in the comfort of a cosy cinema!

Another highlight for me was the BAC. The gallery was fully kitted out with interactive and visual projection sculptures. On top of this we attended a conference there.


The Conference

One of the speakers talked to us about a program he had worked on called VVVV. This software serves as a node based compositing platform between coding and rendered animation. Its not something I'm particularly interested in but those of you who are into coding would find it very interesting.

United Visual Artists talked to us about their work and the creation of their latest software 'd3' which ties in texture mapping/modelling/and projection mapping into one program. There was a lot of interest in this. It will be around a year or so before we see any sign of its release. UVA are known for supporting bands like Massive Attack with visual installations. They also talked about their projection work on a Bentley sports car and some permanent visual sculptures they had done.

Another one of the speakers was Shantell Martin. Shantell works as an Artist, VJ and Illustrator. She likes to draw directly onto people in real time using a Wacom tablet and Sketchbook Pro. The theme of her work is to directly interact with people, performing her work at exhibitions and clubs. I found her to be quite a free spirit and very inspiring.


The Art Exhibition

There was some fantastic work exhibited that made you go 'ouuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu!' Here are some of the pieces:

Enigmatica III by Kit Webster 


Further experimentation into new forms of synesthetic sculpture.

Continued from ENIGMATICA vimeo.com/9842123

www.kitwebster.com.au

Of course to see it in real life is something else as it utilises the dimension of physical depth. It is quite a sensory overload!

Cityscape 2095 by Legoman, Mandril & Thomas Vaquie

This city was awesome. It was a composited array of bits and pieces of various cities projected onto from behind. You could see it was timelapsed as it went through day and night. As you can see - someone had worked over it using art materials giving it more edge..

This tracking installation attached a little creature silohuette that floated around your silohuette as you walked across - it made me giggle :-) Apologies for not knowing who created it..

There were other installations but the three above were my favourite..


Zoo/Usine Audio Visual clubbing

This was a nice extra of the whole event for me. I have to say that the music was not totally up my street - (mainly electronic and techno) but it was fun having a bit of a boogie. The visuals were generally fairly basic - patterns, a mouth jumping around, written statements and I have to say that they didn't do much for me. I found the VJ competiton a lot more interesting in terms of visual content. Still it was pretty fun and of course there were drinks : D Highlights include seeing 'Da Krew' - the french equivalent of The Beastie Boys!

Other stuff

Phew! This is quite an epic blog post! I think it has to be to reflect the epic-ness of the trip! I forgot to mention on our first day we accidently walked into France! oops! Its ok though we made it back.

Geneva is a pretty nice city, with smooth transport (trams) that run on time, a large and impressive lake and on the horizon surrounding the city are mountains. It has quite a cosmopolitan population with lots of rich banker types. Generally its a very affluent place epitomised by its 140 metre high water jet at Lake Geneva. Having said that our hostel was round the corner from the red light district so we also saw the sin city gritty edge to it.

We more or less lived out of Lid'Ls in terms of food and luckily for us City Hostel in Geneva had a little kitchen we could use. We also got free transport for the duration of our stay chucked in with our accommodation fees so a win-win situation there. We met some good people in the hostel and at the festival. One last random thing - we saw a Saturday night roller disco by the side of Lake Geneva! How cool is that?!

Some final photographs of our trip:

The journey there was a golden opportunity to shoot some cloudscapes.

Hello Geneva !

These faces seemed quietly confident...

The party was in full swing at Usine

Even the toilet was a visual sensation!

Walking back from the club..

Its a clock made out of flowers! Amazing!

This made us giggle..

Is that a regular curb or...

A little miniature curb planet!

Nothing says success like a 140 metre water jet.

Simon and myself on our last day. I had just eaten an amazing sandwich.

Yep. My camera does panoramas!

Some business cards from the various VJs and jewelry merchants we came across.

Our 4 day trip comes to an end. This airport scene looks relaxed but a few moments later we were literally running to catch our flight. (I had misread the times on our checking in sheets and assumed the plane leaving time was actually the gate closing time - luckily my name was announced on the intercom and we made it!)

So far this trip has got to be the highlight of my year. It was fantastic and I'd recommend it to anyone with an inkling to the more alternative/performance/audio visual/motion graphics/fine arty/experimental/projection mapping side of Animation.

Negotiated Brief - Music Video - Finished!!

I am pleased to announce that I've completed my Negotiated project good and proper now..
If you want to skip the 'making of' and see the final video - I've embedded it at the bottom of this post.

I was quite inspired by the Richard Morrison talk earlier this term and took a couple of things from it. With reference to this project I applied what he said about letting the idea come out naturally - and not forcing it out. This was partly due to juggling several other projects but also a result of my way of working.

I acted on moments of inspiration and combined the results of these creative impulses with a methodical approach. In other words - doing some storyboarding and visually responding to the music (see earlier post) as well as thinking 'hmmm - I'd quite like to put in a sunrise timelapse' or 'I feel like going out and doing some creative night photography'.

Some results of these experiments are below:

Also during the term I went to an Audio Visual and Projection mapping Festival at Geneva with Simon which was great fun and inspiring. I will do a separate blog post on this. The point of me mentioning it is that I was able to get some great shots of being above the clouds.

So around a week or two ago my head was full of ideas - I had lots of footage filmed in mind of the project, I had some initial artwork to go on, and some timelapses and photographs. I just needed to somehow condense everything into the 50 second audio piece. Essentially I needed to go 'back to the drawing board' and do some final preparation work. I still needed a proper storyboard (the first one was done before getting a lot more ideas/footage etc.) , a dopesheet -which turned out to be very useful and a place to put all my ideas:

I got to work following the storyboard and produced some artwork designed to be composited into the piece (whilst listening to the music I was doing it for) Eventually I had all the raw material I needed and worked the different elements into After Effects.

One fun idea was to dress up in a suit and incorporate pixellation of me holding a heartbeat (using a video but having it printed off so literally holding up a frame at a time.) I was planning to do the same with a sunrise - but due to time constraints I decided 'hey I'll just composite it onto a blank sheet of paper that I'm holding ' This was a massive time saver and looks a lot smoother. There is a nice hand-done quality to the Heartbeat however. If you have any opinions on this feel free to comment! Getting muddy whilst wearing the smart clothes was Ninas idea (who is also featured in the film.) This was great fun. Also see if you can spot the additional prop in the shot. Here are some elements I put into the final video:

I cut out these cogs by hand using a scalple and some card. Then I scanned them in and animated them in Flash. These fed into the people timelapse shot below - for this I used After Effects.

These were initially hand drawn using pastels on black paper. Then I put them into photoshop and
used a pallett brush and liquify effect. I designed them carefully on photoshop to be able to be looped.

So you get the idea - inspired creativity is what it is! I Love it!



Presenting an Audio Visual piece I produced for my 'Negotiated Brief' project at the Digital Animation BA course in Falmouth.



I really enjoyed doing this, it gave me a chance to be quite experimental and incorporate a range of techniques. Hopefully I will continue to do this kind of audio visual work. Its great to have an idea and then make it happen.

The highlights have to be dressing up in a suit and getting muddy - great fun!



Thanks to Nina Cumberbirch for allowing me to feature her in the video. Thanks to Lazulene for the music.

What does it all mean?.. well I leave that to your interpretation.
Now I must go out and celebrate ! Wooooooooooo!