Flash Man To The Victor The Spoils

March 15, 2013 by Leave a Comment

You can read a little about the album here

This project was a little outside of Airsides comfort zone in that it was a full live action music video, wanting this piece to be great they brought on board a lot of talent who were very adapt in this area. Directing the piece was Tim Bricknell, and DOP was Carlos De Carvalho who has a long list of feature film work under his belt. I was brought in to head the compositing and 3d work, this involved a mixture of camera tracking, set building in 3d, and a fair amount of keying/rotoscoping. We had a small team of 4 working on the many shots, this video had a fairly quick turnaround and after seeing all the care and attention that had gone into the filming we did not want to compromise on the post production. I had trained an assistant to do some rotoscoping and guided her through her shots. Alasdair Brotherston was a pro and really helped us out in the last week to get the final long shots out.
During the start of the project it was just myself. I was going through each shot preparing the tracks and match moves so that they were ready for background artwork and keying. Once Everything had been setup I started to work on all the keying to a finished standard and adding extra touches to some of the shots, these included a snow storm and some squirting blood. The opening and closing shots were started by Simon Goodchild using Maya, I supplied the match moves and rough geometry in place for him to build the set around. After he finished we had to adjusted the closing shot to pull out from the crowd shot into the gallery as if it were the picture frame. This involved me setting up the camera move in Maya and then exporting it back into after Effects for me to build the crowd scene, this had some extra problems as the shot with the kiss was filmed with a pull out so it first had to be stabilized and then implement it as a 3d plane. The original picture frames were remodeled and a mixture of bump maps and displacement mapping was used to add the detail. I used high res photographs of the frames as the base for my textures, this really helped to add detail and form to the main picture frame that we move through.

Airside also commissioned a making of video for Flashman which can be viewed on Vimeo

Filed Under: 3d, AE, Camera Tracking, Imagineer Systems, Mocha, Music Video, Postproduction, Rotoscoping, Uncategorized, Work-Journal Tagged With: , , , , ,

Uli Meyer Studio – Domestos “Touch Me”

March 14, 2013 by Leave a Comment

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.

Filed Under: 3d, Advert, AE, Camera Tracking, Multipass CG Compositing, Postproduction, Work-Journal Tagged With: , , , ,

Heinz Pasta Pouch

January 19, 2012 by

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.

Filed Under: Advert, AE, Imagineer Systems, Mocha, Postproduction, Rotoscoping, Stop Motion, Work-Journal

Visual Concept For Wordsearch.co.uk

January 18, 2012 by

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.

Filed Under: AE, Motion Graphics, Shortform, Work-Journal

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

January 18, 2012 by

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.

Filed Under: AE, Imagineer Systems, Mocha, Music Video, Postproduction, Rotoscoping, Work-Journal

Currys / PC World Advert

January 17, 2012 by


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.

Filed Under: Advert, AE, Postproduction, Rotoscoping, Work-Journal

Comet – Sponsers Christmas Entertainment “Laptop”

January 17, 2012 by


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.

Filed Under: 3d, Advert, AE, Postproduction, Work-Journal

Westfields Christmas 2011 TV Advert – Breakdown

December 2, 2011 by Leave a Comment

The video is a presentation of how two shots were cleaned up and some of the processes I used to speed up my work.


Each toy was brought to life by three puppeteers that required removing in post production. This did involve selectively keeping parts of the background in place or patching in areas that were always covered by the puppeteers as the set was being moved about slightly during each take. Most objects were tracked very roughly to give me the basic motion, this motion was then attached to my mask. this workflow meant I only had to concentrate on how the objects changed shape whilst in motion and not be concerned with the movement.
The shot of the teddy bear that runs towards camera was stabilized first. I tracked the teddy’s movement using Mocha by drawing a shape around his larger areas that had the bulk of the main movement (his head & body). This was imported into after effects and was used to stabilize the plate. I then created my roto’s on a layer above, as the teddy was stabilized I did not need to concern myself with scaling and movement of the mask as much as if it was the original shot. The masked layer then had the inverse stabilization applied (via some scripts) and used as a mask to cut the original footage out. If there had been stronger motion blur on the footage I might not of done it this way, because the footage is stabilized the masks are not moving as much as they really would have so the built in after effects motion blur will not be as strong. I did however apply a gentle reelsmart motion blur to the final matte to help compensate for this.

Filed Under: Advert, AE, Breakdowns, Imagineer Systems, Mocha, Postproduction, Rotoscoping, Work-Journal Tagged With: , , ,

Raid – The Way Bugs See It

March 22, 2011 by


This was a job completed at Uli Meyer

Work required
I worked on the first seven shots compositing the characters into the background plate.  A shallow depth of field was created on the 2d drawings by painting our own depth mattes, this involved some amount of rotoscoping and specific paint and trace instructions, the same was done with the background so we could shift the focus through out the shot.
The product shots had the spray on barrier produced in 3d using Maya, we worked closely with the 3d artist to produce matte runs and passes required to create the look the client was after.
The explosions were added after by Dave Walker who also completed the last shots and over saw the project.

Filed Under: Advert, AE, Postproduction, Shortform, Work-Journal

Mocha Pro – Arm removal

March 22, 2011 by

This was a job completed at Be Animation

Work required
This is just one example of the removals that were required in this advert.  I used the imagineer products to speed up rotoscoping and the process of removing any rigging.  We were not exactly sure how much of the drawn Nesquik bunny would cover the rigs so I was removing as much as possible in each shot to give more flexibilty later.  Any matte runs required per shot were rotoscoped and rendered as individual passes. 

Filed Under: Advert, AE, Breakdowns, Imagineer Systems, Mocha, Shortform
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