Nexus – BBC One Sprout Boy

I had a couple of visits back at Nexus Productions during November both to work on Christmas themed commercials. This one was for the BBC titled Sprout Boy meets a galaxy of stars. I was in for a very short period of time at the end of the schedule to help with the very last push on this piece. The section I worked on was from 30 seconds in, the snowman throwing a snowball at Sprout Boy. I was adjusting the matte painting and multipass compositing of the various elements to produce the final shot within Nuke.

You can view the entire video below.

Various jobs whilst at Glassworks (London)

From August 2015 I spent 4 months working at Glassworks on multiple jobs.  Initially I was brought in to work on a Doir commercial that I believe was aimed at tablet/website style adverts.  I was tasked with the beauty work required on the 3 commercials.  Shortly after this project finished I was moved over to a video for Samsung.  Compositing various greenscreen shots and tracking in screens.  Some of these used camera tracking data to speed up roto work and the placement of said screens.
I was then moved on to a job I had been keeping my eye on, some colleagues around me were working on the new music video for The Shoes titled Submarine.  It interested me because all the VFX work on the people in the video was being done in 2D and had to be very clean as it was mostly slow motion.  I worked on various shots for this video but the one I enjoyed the most was the slow motion punch shot at 3:15 minutes.  The face that gets hit distorts visibly requiring the artwork and paintwork to be tracked and warped very carefully to keep the form of the face.  This video was constantly asking for the highest quality of compositing and there was no room for cheating.  Once the music video was finished I had a quick stint on a PS4 commercial tweaking a shot that the client wanted changes made to.
The final job I worked on during this 4 month period was an exciting Oculus Rift 360 degree VR experience directed by Chris Cunningham.   The job required a fair amount of cleanup work and preparation of animated textures built from live action miniatures, using just small portions of each take.  These were then rendered through Nukes scanline renderer to create the illusion that the elements were locked to the live actions movements.  The piece from memory is over 4 minutes and very quickly become the job that was filling all of Glassworks server and resources.  Hopefully it will be released to the public in the near future and I can highly recommend viewing it when that happens.

Below is a video of The Shoes “Submarine”

The Bank – Lumene True Mystic Volume Mascara Commercial

I was recommend to The Bank by Caroline Matthews (Marketing Director) whom I have worked with multiple times during her time at Airside and Rupert Ray she is now at Koto and it is always a pleasure working with her.  Initially I met with the team and was shown the project.  I loved the concept they were proposing of a continual loop.  We were to start with a sky full of northern lights and the product above the treetops the camera would move down through the trees to reveal the talent applying the mascara, further transitions would happen until we found ourselves again above the horizon viewing the northern lights and the product.  This was an ambitious job for The Bank as it was to be done internally to give them full creative control but they needed someone with the experience to guide the job and work closely with the inhouse talent to produce the final commercial, this was my role.  It was very much a hands on role, I was planning and supervising how we were going to solve each problem and working up shots early on to show timings and how the piece would look before the heavy duty VFX work was to proceed.
Running up to the shoot and during, the initial storyboard concept got diluted a little as you’ll see in the final video.  We did still get to work in half of the video as seamless transitions but the need for locked off beauty shots was strong that it had to change, we were able to end on a similar frame to how we started.

The first 5 seconds of the commercial had a camera solved so we could start to build the environment in After Effects.  The tail end of this 5 seconds was heavily styled to look more magical and lit.  I created a fake zDepth pass to add depth of field to the shot.  The same pass was used to make the cone of light moving through the trees react in a more realistic manner.  We pull further away from the forest out through the pupil of an eye.  The eyelashes don’t yet have the mascara applied as the brush passes through the eyelashes we reveal the now strong vibrant bold black lashes.  This shot required a lot of warping and stabilising to match the two takes together.  There was a lot of detailed beauty work done to the final close up of the eye; removing mascara clumps and smudges that are really now only picked up by the high resolution cameras used in productions.  After the mascara application shot it was mostly beauty work.  Frustratingly it rained a little during the shoot and the water droplets left odd smudges and white spots on the talent, along with those fixes we worked to make eyebrows look tidier and softened off shadows and creases.  We were taking care to keep the original skin texture and made sure the beauty work was subtle and local to the fixes required.  In comparison to the original it made a positive change.
In total including myself we had up to 4 of us working on various parts of the VFX for the commercial predominantly we started off with myself and Luke Doyle.  Luke Doyle, The Banks in house designer (now freelance) had been working on the look for the northern lights and built the product in 3D and animated it.  He took care of the CG compositing for that section.  Luke Carpenter and David Robinson were later brought to complete the team.  Luke Carpenter worked on the final packshot, and put in some R&D for the northern lights (which sadly went the live action route at the very last moment) and Dave Robinson was stellar in assisting me with the beauty work.  I have known both for a long time so knew to expect good things.

 

 

Nexus Productions – Smith & Foulkes – Orange Commercials

I had the pleasure to be the sole Nuke compositor on one of these fun commercials for Orange (Romania).  These two characters are always getting up to some kind of mischief or mini adventure.  The animation is entertaining and really catches your eye.  This was rendered multipass to allow a lot of flexibility within the composite and also required a little clean up on the CG.  I am looking forward to hopefully working on more of these in the future as I very much enjoy seeing the work of the animators bringing these two characters alive!

 

Nexus Productions – Johnny Appleseed

Some of this commercial was shot with a motion controlled rig, however it was not very stable nor the move as smooth as we had wished.  My job was to stabilise and smooth the live action and lock the end position in place for the transition into the following shots.  I created various setups that the CG team would use as a reference for matching the animation to.  The bottle also required various cleanup and grading to match the clients taste.

You can view the completed video below.

 

Ubik – Luna – Perfect Moment

I worked with the great duo of Ubik on this advert for Middle Eastern evaporated milk brand.  My role was a compositor ( full credits here http://www.ubik.tv/Luna-Perfect-Moment-1 ) .  The shots were all rendered from Houdini as different passes and as layers of different depths.  Shots were composited in After Effects in linear work space at 32 Bits allowing us to keep all the fine details in tone.  I worked mostly on the last milky shot with the family, but we had some time to develop looks for the final composite and how the tea backgrounds were going to look.  The live action had some cleanup work done to it using Nuke.

Nexus Productions – Fuze Tea

Fuze Tea “This Meets That” was directed by Smith & Foulkes.  The section I was responsible for compositing is from 25 to 35 seconds in the video clip above.  This is the undersea section switching to the space environment with the spaceman hopping across planets.  The majority of the animation was done in Adobe Flash (not done by myself) and exported via a script into many swf files, each representing a single layer from Flash’s timeline.  This gave us plenty of control for coloring each element and adjusting how the blends work on overlapping pieces.  This section was laid out in After Effects 3D enviroment which helped to give plenty of depth to the shot.

Uli Meyer Studio – Domestos “Touch Me”

This commercial was made at Uli Meyer Studios, my role was senior compositor. 3D generalist and lighting TD Mark Bailey took the animated shots and brought them alive in Maya.
I used After Effects and Nuke for compositing. After Effects was used to stabilize some of the footage with its warp stabilizer, and handled the pack shot animations easily. Nuke was used through out for all the CG compositing. The live action shots required some cleanup and rig removing along with tracking points needing to be painted out, I first used SynthEyes to do a camera track this was very useful for some of the tracker removals as I would convert 3d points into 2d ones and attach my paint strokes to it. This workflow allowed the plate to be cleaned very quickly. I also used the tracking data to create a new floor and some geometry of the toilet inside so I could project some dirt and muck onto the live action plate. Geometry was created in Maya, and all projections done inside of Nuke for convenience and flexibility. Most of the CG was graded with mattes or subtraction of passes on the beauty and re-addition of the same pass that we wanted to adjust, this workflow was preferable for Mark as he had the time to tune his materials and lighting of shots to produce a very good looking render. Our renders were all done in house using Smedge, during the first couple of days I spent the time setting up each machine to be consistent with the software we were using and to pull all our plugins from a network source rather than locally. I also created a customized Nuke interface for submitting jobs to Smedge and for our gizmos along with bench-marking and prioritising machines for particular jobs . During the job I render wrangled and made sure we had the resources to get the job out in a timely manner. The fun part obviously was working with Marks renders. I setup a system of taking his Mattes and filtering them into my own channels in Nuke, I knew a certain amount of them would be standard and could be reused through out other Nuke scripts. This worked well in that most of my scripts were grade nodes using a channel for the matte. It kept the script tidy and compact, I would also leave notes in the nodes to make it clearer still what was going on. We added quite a lot of atmosphere to the shots with glows, trying to boost a wet look on the germs, and in camera effects like motion blur and depth of field. Mark worked very hard to make the Motion vector pass work exactly as it should and I have no doubt if it was the newer version of Maya that we were using it would have been easier but due to the germ rigs and associated scripts/ materials we were forced to use Maya 2009.

Mark Baileys website.

Nokia Asha 306

I had the pleasure of working at Design Studio during June 2012, at the time based not far from Silicon Roundabout (Old Street). They have been creating many commercials for Nokia based on photo real renders of soon to be released mobile phones. The 3D renders are produced in Maya using V-Ray and my part was compositing the passes into the final look. All the on screen animations are produced in After Effects and supplied as a rendered pass. All the compositing was done in The Foundrys NukeX 6.3. The client had a specific look they wanted for the reflections on the glass and how the blacks of the phones were to look and feel. They were very happy with the outcome which evolved over a few meetings and viewings of work in progress.
All the shots were finally edited together with the music in FCP. This was one of two versions, the second phone looking almost identical apart from the addition of a second SIM card slot and the alternative graphics showing this feature.

Intel Ultrabook

I recently had the opportunity to work with MiniVegas (based in Amsterdam) on an Intel interactive video, this video is due to be promoted in 50 countries and 26 languages.  I had not seen these online videos before, the idea is that the user is presented with choices and can determine what happens next in the video. In this video, you’ll get to see the Ultrabook user take on knights, cowboys and martial artists.  I worked within a small team using Nuke removing rigging and compositing various shots.  I worked mostly on the Camelot shots and western clips.

The link below is the English version of the interactive video

http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/sponsors-of-tomorrow/ultrabook.html

I also screen recorded just one path you can take on during the interactive video which can be viewed below


The company Interlude were responsible for the technology behind the interactive video.