Archives for January 2012

Heinz Pasta Pouch

This was a job completed at Tandem Films

Work required
I worked on a few shots for this advert, but my main shot starts at about 12 seconds.  In this shot the carrot dives onto the grater leaving specks of carrot on the table for the small brush to sweep up.  The shots were filmed with an Arri camera, and for the stop motion Dragon was used.  I had four shots that made up this sequence, a background plate, one with the tomatoes moving in the bowl, the brush sweeping, and the grater and carrot.  Each item had a metal rig to allow it to be animated these were quite large and had a tendency to cast shadows across the set also making it difficult to isolate the objects shadows.  Rather than the traditional method of removing the rig to show through the clean background I opted to cut out the objects.  This was decided after a quick test, I realized that all the soft shadows from the rigging would also need removing and the two pieces of video were not matching seamlessly.  Once each  item had been isolated, I worked on creating the shadows that were in the original shots.  These were mostly roto’d in using soft masks and an adjustment layer but some original shadows were kept.

Visual Concept For Wordsearch.co.uk

This was a job completed at Wordsearch (fullscreen video for full image quality)

Work required
The animation was created entirely in after effects.  I did make use of some 3rd party plugin’s that I own to help with some of the effects, and speed up my workflow.
I was given a concept image from a different shot to work from and a brief of what was to happen.  The live action of the gentleman walking into shot with a green screen behind him was also supplied.  All the artwork was created in photoshop or inside of after effects.  This was a quick turn around of about three days including tweaking and client feedback.

Elton John & Leon Russel – If It Wasn’t For Bad

This was a job completed at One Hand Clapping

Work required
Originally the footage was shot with the intention of being rotoscoped for drawn animation ( AHA – Take On Me style) but due to time constraints a different direction was taken.  The edit was created, and I was tasked with rotoscoping the footage that was not shot to be cut out.  I trained an employee who uses FCP to assist in the rotoscoping.  We used Mocha for all the shots.  This was my choice for my assistant as it is very easy to teach him how to use the program and then allowed me to spend more time on keeping his technique to a high standard, he had never rotoscoped till this day.  For someone who is very comfortable with the program it really speeds up your roto work and did allow me to get through the shots very quickly.  There was a few retakes later and some shots were shot on green screen but due to compression and lack of light a good key wasnt always available.
At the start of the project I worked on a scene with the moon in the sky, this was our template for how the rest was to look and be created.  Myself and Paul Chesire worked on the compositing and Chris Holmes created the cgi backgrounds.

Currys / PC World Advert


This was a job completed at Tandem Films

Work required
I did some rotoscoping on this job, the 3d glasses, and the shots after 21 seconds (LCD TV, and remote control).  The on screen interface was also created by myself and animated to look like it was being controlled.  The depth of field effect in this shot was added in post.  There was a fix on the live action where the TV is mounted on the wall.  Originally the wall it was mounted onto wobbled slightly so I stabilized the TV and mount to make it look like it was mounted onto a solid brick wall.
Tandem did 8 adverts in total, each requiring rotoscoping, I helped out on the last two.  The other advert I worked on had a laptop, which required me to create a PC desktop that looked generic and animated.

Comet – Sponsers Christmas Entertainment “Laptop”


This was a job completed at Airside

Work required
I worked on this Advert with Charles Beglan who was involved in creating the 3d sets.  We knew we would need a 3d track of the live action, therefore during the filming we were on set to supervise the vfx preparation.  This involved taking measurements and layouts of important parts of the set, recording camera and lens data, and making sure we had trackers in view and enough parallax to assist the 3d tracking.
I prepared the footage, and did the matchmove using syntheyes 2011.  For these I supplied Charles a 3d camera, and stand in objects of the sofa and foot stool in a Maya scene.  With regards to rotoscoping I had two assistants that I was able to delegate work to.  I used the matchmove to assist with the rotoscoping by importing the data into After Effects and placing solids in 3d space near the areas I needed to cut out.  Most of the rotoscoping was broken down and roughly keyed before being handed out to the assistants.
I worked the treatment of the man sat down to match the clients vision.  This was all comped together to produce the final piece.  The post production company Nice Biscuits were involved in making the different versions and created the Laptop content.