"The Incomplete Activist"

Alongside the work I'm doing at the RCA, I have also teamed up with the fantastic group of artists at Creative Connection. We will be creating a 3 minute animation - "The Incomplete Activist" - that reflects a thesis currently being written on the theme of incompleteness and contradictions found within community activism. It's an exciting and creative project to be a part of and I'm looking forward to seeing how we progress with it.

Here are a couple of animations that our client helped to create previously, themed around the concept of 'Church' and its current form in society:

Drawings + Love Soldiers update

Drawings

I got stuck into some drawing yesterday - really enjoyed getting into 'the zone' with it all..

Hands are a tricky thing as they are so versatile so I practiced sketching my own hand.

These sheets contain some drawings of my g/f Nina and some things I drew without looking at any reference including a small self portrait.

These sheets show my visual interpretation whilst listening to some podcasts at Radiolab - one on inheritance and another on speed. Both very interesting! Anyway, it's good practice for drawing quickly + aiming to get information across efficiently.

Inheritance

Speed

"Love Soldiers" update @ the RCA

Here's a pic of our studio with director Chloe in view.

"Love Soldiers" is slowly but surely coming together, and the way that we are working is fairly organic. Some shots are nearing completion whilst others are yet to be animated.

Recent tasks I've completed

- Inking over some animation of a face falling into pieces.
- Colouring a sequence in Photoshop (here the Photoshop actions have come in as a great time saver.)
- Utilising a turbulent displacement effect in After Effects to make it look like the clouds are warping/moving.
- Rotoscoping over printed live action shots of walk cycles.
- Compositing layers of animation together.
- Producing (creating a time schedule.)
- Scanning the inked animation.
- Updating the edit-in-progress.

I'm aiming to keep doing a couple of days a week here, though I try and do more if my schedule allows. It is a fun project to be working on and these are great people to be working with!

CBT promo complete + Luksus Ident for LS

I have now officially completed the Clear Blue Therapies promotional video! It feels like a good achievement, and I hope it does well on the Kickstarter page. It is not up there live yet, but I will be sure to post it when it is.

Here is an ident I coloured/textured and animated (The drawings were provided from Chloe.) This is the fictional film company ident that precedes the animated film "Love Soldiers" that we are working on at the RCA. Chloe was after an 80s style (I think the light rays could be a bit post-80s but it is quite a nice touch!) This took around half a day. I got quite into the timing of it - as soon as one effect stops another one starts.

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....

Royal College of Art animation project - Love Soldiers

Love Soldiers directed by Chloe Feinberg

Recently, I have been asked to offer some assistance on a project being created at the Royal College of Art on the MA Animation course. Love Soldiers is a hand drawn 2D animation, which draws inspiration from the likes of David Lynch. Chloe described it to me as "a surreal dreamlike fantasy with 80's male sex symbols set on a luxury yacht. A lot of it is reconfigured pieces from films of the 80's (usually with macho cop guys.)" Having watched the animatic a couple of times I can safely say that it is quite interesting, unusual and unconventional to say the least! Here are a few images that give some idea of the look/content of the project. The top right image is how Chloe intends the final film to look like.

So far, I have helped out with a bit of animating, producing and compositing. As there are only a handful of us working on the project, the nature of my role crosses different areas which keeps things interesting. Having said this, I believe compositing will be the main area I will be working in, as I have a good knowledge of After Effects and Chloe is keen to get the majority of the hand drawn animation done herself. Below are a couple of stills from two shots that I have animated.

The workflow goes like this -

1) Filming or sourcing reference
2) Drawing a style frame to get the sketch and shading right
3) Rotoscoped hand drawn animation, (just the lines)
4) Inking the lines
5) Batch scanning
5) Colouring in Photoshop
6) Comping in After Effects + layering on some actual film textures
7) Editing / Sound

More recently, I have been compositing. Putting together several different layers of hand drawn animation. The technical hitch was that the paper used for animating on had it's peg bar holes punched in slightly different places which meant once I had batch scanned all the work in, the animation wobbled constantly from frame to frame which is not how Chloe intended! To get around this issue, I drew 2 little crosses in the same place on every frame and voila! - a bit of position/rotation stabilising in After Effects led to a much smoother playback of the animation, as it was intended. It was quite satisfying letting the computer sort it out rather then trying to manually adjust each frame in After Effects.

The experimental nature of this project makes it a joy to work on. It's great to be back in a small team again collaborating on a short film, and quite a novelty to be at the RCA. 

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

Kickstarter update and some inspiration

Here are some icons and a main image created for the CBT Kickstarter campaign I'm working on. I'm aiming to get the film complete by next Friday, so it will be a busy couple of weeks!

And now for some animation inspiration...

I came across this neat little ad for the french post office a while back on motionographer. I really like how well it has been thought out and executed. Nice sound track too (from Amadou & Mariam.)



Here is a great little animation I watched yesterday made by Perrie Murphy. There is a simple element of truth within Colin that I'm sure many people can empathise with! It's pretty funny - definetly worth a watch!



So that's it for now. Catch you next Thursday!

"Sparkle Mouse" in the making...

This is a personal project that I have been chipping away at for a while. The basic idea stems from a simple and effective technique that I came up with when I was juggling glowing balls. "Sparkle mouse" is a working title - I'm open to suggestions!

The basic idea

Here I am, juggling (such is the life of a creative ey?) -

+ some After Effects trickery =

Pretty cool! What if the ball had a bit of character -

                                                             Introducing... a background!

The plan (aka pre-production) and production

Brief: To create a short visually interesting and entertaining animation, using the above technique.

Here is a rough plan of my idea. The ball interacts and navigates itself around the environment. At one point the ball transports from inside the laundry basket to above the bongo. The numbers on the plan have helped with the editing as this was not all managed in one take. It took me around 7 hours to dress the set, photograph some stop motion animation of the furniture and film myself in the dark moving the glowing ball around.

Post production

This has been the lengthy part of the process. It took me another day to edit the ball into one cohesive sequence. (I recorded about 8 seperate takes as the moving-a-ball-around process was a bit fiddley.) With the help of Maya and a handy tutorial, I animated a cool 3D sphere cracking effect for the transportation bit. This took about half a day.

Most of the work has involved cleaning up areas using masks where there are discrepancies between the environment and the ball. It has taken several days to go through this process. The moral is - use a good tripod!

Half way through, I thought "hey wouldn't it be cool if I kept the effect of the bounce light caused by the ball on the environment" so that added another few days of After Effects work! In the process I have learned better ways of organising my AE comps. Firstly, using colour coding for layers makes things much easier. Secondarily, rendering out pre-comps as you are going along helps a heavy composition become much faster to work with. Here is a screenshot of my work organisation in AE.

At the moment Sparkle Mouse is nearing the end of the clean up phase, and will enter a final edit, possibly with the addition of sound and a title before final delivery. WATCH THIS SPACE :-)

Promo film for Kickstarter

Hi everyone, so it has been quite a while since I last blogged. Sorry folks! From now on I intend to do regular blog posts to keep people in the know of what I'm up to. Since compositing a couple of shots on the independent feature film "The Otherworld" I have realised that I would be much better suited to work on short form productions which offer a higher degree of creative input and a greater variety of work. One of the things I have been working on recently is a promo film for my friend and aspiring alternative therapy business entrepreneur - Saskia.

Promotional film for a Kickstarter project

Saskia has a plan to set up an alternative therapy business and needs the video to act as an essential part of her kickstarter page. I had designed some business cards for her previously, which have proved successful. I believe she is aiming to raise around $10,000 so the video promo is definitely a worthy challenge! The basic idea for her promo is to create a news themed "special report" featuring Saskia as both reporter and massage therapist. Some clear and simple motion graphics, that sit with the live action recording will help delineate her ideas. So far we have done the shooting and now I'm working on the post production. I used my Sony NEX5 to record the footage in HD, and coupled this with sound recorded into a clip on mic.

Business card

Video Promo - still

The shooting took place in my flat, with Saskia filmed against a cream coloured wall. It took me a couple of days to create a clearly defined matte of Saskia which has enabled me to cut her out and place her into a news broadcasting themed environment. I have learned from Ron Brinkmann's book "The art and science of digital compositing" that the most efficient way to rotoscope is to use several mattes - not just one. So here, I have pulled mattes for her body and hair seperately, then combined the two. I have also used a light wrapping technique which creates a subtle effect of the background colours lighting up her outline. The images below show the work in progress:

For my own future reference, and for those of you who are curious - here are the effects I applied to pull a matte of her hair at a part of the video where it swings to the side. These effects are applied to a pre-comped garbage matte so the dynamic range is concentrated to the section of hair being cut out. The still shows the garbage mask and the subsequent matte along with the effects. I pushed everything into the green channel as this provides the best contrast between hair and no hair.

Next, I will be working on integrating some motion graphics with the next scene which shows Saskia as a massage therapist explaining her idea. Here is a still of that shot:

Why animation?

I saw this great TED talk recently and it inspired me to ask myself "why?"



Here is why I love working with animation and the moving image:

- Any idea is possible!
- It can offer a simple, fun and effective way of expressing a message.
- In the audio visual area, I get a deep satisfaction of matching visuals to music/sounds.
- Live action can be integrated with animation. It is great to make something that has been previously imagined be perceived as real. If you're not going for photo realism, it is still great to combine the two and create a cool style or express an interesting idea.
- The joy of breathing life into a character or object. Creating a believable world and defying the laws of the real world.
- Animation tends to be a team sport and I enjoy working with others.
- I love working with visual narrative - conventional or abstract.
- It's highly stimulating and utilises both my technical and creative skills.
- It has a range of different applications - television, films, theatre, AV performance, music festival screens, clubs, the internet etc. It is widely accessible.
- It carries the ability to entertain, inform, influence and amaze people, ways in which that are unique to the medium.

"The Otherworld" - compositing work experience

I am currently busy doing some work experience for independent feature film "The Otherworld." It's good to get some experience and fun to be part of the project. My role so far has been to key out a green screen shot and create "magic mist" that surrounds the character. The shot I'm on now involves a bit of rotoscoping and match moving to line up a moving camera shot of a character in front of a matte painting backdrop. It's nice to refresh my skills previously learned as well as develop my knowledge. Unfortuantly, I cannot put up any stills/movies of my work until the film gets released.

Animation, vfx and self-promotion work

Since moving to London in September, I have actively been seeking work in animation and visual effects. Alongside this I have been developing the look of my website, creating a visual identity and two new showreels - one for my general moving image/animation work and the other - more specifically for my compositing work. Here are the shots I have been working on:

Unidentified sea creature - 2D animation

A 2D animation created using Flash, textured in Photoshop and composited in After Effects. This was sparked by a quick doodle I did of a Fish/Robot hybrid that breathes fire. No fire breathing in the animation yet but perhaps this is something I will come back to in the future!

'Harry' the crab - Match moved

I initially created this crab in 2010 using Maya to model and texture it. I always wanted to place it into a real world environment striking a pose! Back in Cornwall I filmed a bit of it's potential environment and last month I finally got round to stabilising the footage then placing the crab into this environment using Match Mover and Maya. Following this, I added a touch of colour in after effects. This is best viewed in HD. To do so - click this link, turn on HD and scrub to 00:54.

Vfx breakdown - Placing a house onto Bodmin Moor

Here is an image I used in an earlier post. I have uploaded this image here again in order to precede the matte painting breakdown of this shot that I completed a week ago. Breakdowns are always a fun way to display the amount of work that has gone into a shot. This shot was created for a MA student film project entitled 'Gone.'

  

These shots have been included on my Moving Image and Compositing showreels respectively. This week I am going to continue applying to jobs and learning new things!  

Moving back to Blogger.

Following the end of Uni, I tried integrating this blog into my Wordpress website and found as a result it was slower and some of my older uploaded videos were no longer available. So I have returned to Blogger :-)
The sudden influx of posts this September were actually created on my Wordpress blog throughout the summer and now I have pasted them back here.

Butterflies

Here's something I've been working on - following a tutorial but customising it to fit my own textures, backdrop etc. It has been fun to create these butterflies and interesting learning about how particles work in Maya. I have been keen to do some effects stuff for a while so I'm glad I have now got round to it!

VFX shots

Just before completing Uni I hired out the portable green screen and shot some footage. Here is a shot I composited of my housemate Olly, complete with a breakdown.



I have also been asked to help out on a MA Film project entitled 'Gone'. I have spent around a week compositing a 2 minute shot, my goal was to make it look like there was no grass or plant life and to deteriorate the rollercoaster. The purpose of this was to emphasise the apocalyptic feel of the film. I used Photoshop for matte painting, Mocha for tracking and After Effects for compositing. Below is a 6 second segment of the shot complete with a breakdown.



Here is another shot I worked on for 'Gone'. In this case my job was to place a house onto Bodmin Moor. I learned a lot from doing this in terms of using perspective, matching the lighting and matte painting.

Here is the final shot - I added some binoculars on top, linked the still plate to the camera movement which accompanied the initial shot of Bodmin and applied a bit of blur and scaling to show the binoculars coming into focus.

Finished university

It has been a productive few years and I have learned a lot of things. It's been great getting to know everyone on the course and I'm sure our paths will cross again. I feel privileged to have spent 4 years living in Falmouth, Cornwall. It is such a fantastic place. I'm currently living with my girlfriend Nina in Stroud, Gloucestershire and our next move will be to London where we aim to get work.

I helped arrange this exhibition at The Poly, Falmouth to represent our Digital Animation course. They screened our films at The Poly as well - Shell and Paddy, 1890, The Pasty Child and Kernel. This was all part of UCF's Film course's Pixelate event. It was great seeing our work properly on the big screen and it got a very positive response from the audience.

Our exhibition with an interactive stop motion set up:

Part of the Pasty Child set:

Goodbye Falmouth! We shall meet again..

Annecy International Animated Film Festival 2012

I found this to be a very inspiring and eventful week packed full of animation goodness! It was nice to see some of my friends from the course and it also presented a good opportunity to network. Over the week I saw a lot of short films, commissioned films and feature films. Aside from this I also enjoyed Serge Bromberg's morning interviews with the short film directors, a VFX conference, a feature film conference, talks from directors, a talk from an animation supervisor from Dreamworks, the awards ceremony and a rounders game! The festival seemed to strike a balance between the mainstream and the weird and wonderful stuff being produced on the fringes. It was inspiring to discover a large, open-minded and respectful audience for all things animation.

Here are a few of my favourite films that I saw:

Features:

Wrinkles directed by Ignacio Ferreras.

"An astonishing cocktail of friendship, resistance, and life that goes on in the unexpected setting of an old folk's care home" - Annecy guide.

The characters were really well developed and the story was moving, well structured and interesting. It was visually quite stunning.

Approved for adoption directed by Jung Henin and Laurent Boileau.

"200,000 adoptees have been scattered around the world since the end of the Korean war. Jung is one of them." - Annecy guide.

This was a very personal account of the directors life growing up as an adopted child. It was 3D but rendered in a refreshing 2D style. The film juggled this style with live action documentary footage of Jung speaking, old footage of the family as well as some expressive 2D animation to emphasise some key moments. The mediums that were utilised encapsulated Jung's story on different levels and offered a rich and vivid account of what he had been through both internally and externally. The film won 2 awards at the festival.

Le Tableau directed by Jean-Francois Laguionie.

"Three characters living in an unfinished painting venture out into the real world in search of their creator, to convince him to finish his work." - Annecy guide.

This was also created in 3D but rendered in a very painterly style  - visually, it was quite unlike anything I've ever seen. It was a good concept with some funny and surreal moments. Whilst at the festival I went to see Jean-Francois Laguionie talk about making this film. He noted several interesting points:

-He had 2 years financed to make the film plus 6 months for pre-production.
-The animatic is a great communication tool. It is helpful for the producer to help outline a budget.
-Drawing helps establish the connections between objects, people, landscapes etc. more then writing a script. He felt that he was writing with his drawing.
-Recording actual actors/actresses prior to making the characters is an advantage.

Commissioned films

We cut corners "Pirates life" by P.Adamski and K.Kijek

This is a very cool hand drawn animation - it goes to town on the simple visual theme of water and reflections.



Five years older "I should have known better" by Dirk Koy

This shows an interesting technique that has been carried off effectively, showing landscapes in a constant state of flux.



Ants directed by Gerrit Bekers

This is definetly 30 seconds of your time well spent!



Short Films

I saw a lot of great short films at the festival - it would take me a long time to post every one that I liked so I will just put up a few. Most of these are trailers.

The people who never stop directed by Florian Piento

This was visually stunning and contained a nice message.



Tram by Michaela Pavlatova

This had the audience in stitches! A wild journey through the driver's fantasies..



Second Hand directed by Isaac King - Full film!

This has to be one of my favourites. Brilliant and funny characters, interesting visuals and a strong message. Definetly worth a watch.



Modern no.2 directed by Mirai Mizue

An excellent synchronisation of visuals and music. The animation looks great.



How to eat your apple directed by Erick Oh

A Dali-esque surrealist take on eating an apple. Pretty surreal and fun.




VFX conference and other things

I found the VFX conference very interesting. People from MPC, Framestore, BUF and Double Negative talked us through breakdowns of Wrath of the Titans, The Tale of the Three Brothers (animation for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows), Marsupai and John Carter of Mars. I always like learning what goes on behind the scenes so it was a highlight of the trip. I particularly enjoyed seeing the making of The Tale of the Three Brothers as it is quite a distinctive and stylish animation which brings together a variety of techniques. Dale Newton, Animator supervisor noted how Houdini was used for the procedural forming of the bridge. I really liked this effect (and the other effects.) Later in the week I spoke to a Houdini representative who showed me the software - I'm inclined to try it out when I get a bit of spare time.

The directors conference was quite interesting as well. What I found amazing was how these productions were spread across several countries. It really takes some strong organisation to make these things materialise and stay cohesive.

I also enjoyed Serge Bromberg's morning interviews with the short film directors. It was nice to hear about their inspirations and ideas behind the films.

I had a couple of interviews in the week with Snarx FX, Paris and Mokko studios, Montreal. This was a valuable experience.

It was good to meet several other fellow animators/vfx artists throughout the week. The rounders game on Saturday was highly enjoyable and I scored two rounders!

Annecy itself is a beautiful place and I'm glad that some of my mates from the course could make it. I hope to return in the future.

Photos:

Inside Bonlieu (the main venue)

Serge Bromberg interviews Jun-Ki Kim - director of 'Her Story'

Tom and Fran sitting outside of Bonlieu next to the big outdoor screen. Mountains and the vast Annecy lake are in the background.

The outdoor screen. Serge introduces the last screening of the festival.

The Annecy ident.... 'LAPIN!!' (sorry - only people who were at the festival would get this ;-))

To summarise - it was a great week packed full with films, conferences, meetings and people and all set in a beautiful location. After every competition film was screened the director would be invited to come up and take a bow. This was one of the (many) strengths of the festival - paying much deserved tribute to the creators. I would definetly like to return in the future.

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.

Innovations - How to composite a polluted city shot

Here, I have put together a detailed guide which documents the process of compositing a typical polluted cityscape shot for our 3D animated film Kernel.
Innovations - How to composite a polluted city shot

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To browse through other innovations documents by people on the Kernel team and on our course check out the links below. I will continually update this page as more people upload their documents.

A linear lighting workflow based around mental ray's final gather by Olly Skillman-Wilson

Dissertation and Kernel progress

Dissertation

Here is my dissertation. In it I relate art to modern forms of commercial animation and digital media. My argument is that audio visual areas of commercial digital media and animation could allow for the most 'artistic freedom'.

Art, Animation and the Audio Visual: An exploration of art and its relationship with commercial media forms

I enjoyed writing this. I found it interesting learning about and applying the fundamental attributes of art to contemporary and commercial animation/digital media.

Some of the music videos I referred to in my dissertation are the following:

Everytime (2009) by Oi Va Voi. Directed by Kijek and Adamski.

So So So (2011) by Rone. Directed by Studio Funf.

Frozen (1998) by Madonna. Directed by Chris Cunningam.

Joga (1997) by Bjork. Directed by Michel Gondry.

Yes I Know (2011) by Memory Tapes. Directed by Eric Epstein.

There is also this great web page which documents in detail the making of Jonsi's live show visuals: 59 productions.

Kernel progress

Things are getting pretty busy at the moment as we have less then 3 weeks left to complete our final major project. Kernel - our CG animated film which is looking fantastic. My role on this currently consists of overseeing the compositing and editing. Below are a few finished stills - Its an exciting time!

                                   

32 bit colour implications
Heres a little 32-bit colour related compositing mystery I recently stumbled on whilst analysing the final awesome touches Olly added to the first city shot shown above. This may look pretty boring but it was quite intriguing from my point of view!

Other stuff

I'm currently working on a website, aiming to promote myself and my skill set (a mixture of concept art, storyboarding, compositing and animation.) Here is a screenshot of the current layout.

Furthermore, I'm hoping to create a business card, C.V. and up-to-date showreel all in time for the Annecy animation festival which I'm greatly looking forward to! Woop :-D