Honey Cheerio’s – Never Give Up

This was a job completed at Uli Meyer

Work required

I was working on the post production of this advert along side David Walker.  We were compositing multi pass renders and integrating the character into the live action backgrounds, most of my completed shots are after 8 seconds.
Extra 2d displacements were added to show the feeling of displaced air.  The product pieces were 3d and had a lot of attention to get them just how the client wanted.  We worked along side the client for two days making final color tweaks and adjusting details.

 

Channel ID selection/ Color ID Passes in After Effects

I have been working more and more with compositing full on 3D adverts, and was quite happy extracting matte runs from so called ID passes with the usual methods that most people have seen online before, for example Channels – Shift Channels effect to move the green channel into the alpha.  When you have been given also Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow in the color channel things can get a little more tricky.  Some might be tempted to use the keying tools found in AE to extract the colors, other might extract the channels once, and then precomp to extract again to reach one of these other passes.  What I have proposed is using the Channel Mixer effect and some simple expressions to allow a slider that lets you flip between the 6 Channels.  This workflow also allows Masks to be drawn so you can further adjust the mattes that have been extracted.  I spent the time to set this up as an animation preset as it is much faster than building each time the effects needed to extract the channel you want, plus if you decide later to change the channel you want to use you have to adjust your work.  With the slider this is a breeze.  I found also if you stack various layers above each other you ought to set the transfer modes to Alpha Add this will tighten the alpha channel where there are joins.  This is normally due to anti aliasing on the edges

You can download the animation preset from here and also watch a demonstration of how you might deal with color ID passes, starting with ones that just contain red, green, and blue moving onto all 6 colors (the extras being Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow) I finish with the animation preset being used.

I hope this preset is useful to speeding up your work, and becomes something you use frequently I know myself I do.

Download the ColorID pass slider animation preset – click here
Follow this link to see the video tutorial and how to use the preset

 

Kelloggs – Mr Kelloggs, Vitamins And Iron

This was a job completed at Beglan Brothers

Work required
I completed some of the post production on this advert.  We were shooting 4K stop motion stills and grading with the raw camera files.  Some flicker had to be removed from the shots, and also the occasional “clean up” that is required in stop motion ie rigging removed or taking away accidental blemishes.  There was also a lot of rotoscoping required, and keying to introduce the shots outside of the windows.  The shots were lit to feel like a sunny morning in post.  There is also some invisible work in the live action shots.  The kitchen did not have tiles to the very bottom so these were placed in after, as well as the daughter behind the packs being removed and the re positioning of the chalk board to be more title safe.
I also worked on one of the press stills, this involved similar compositing to the advert but more precision and more clean up of the model and his enviroment, as everything was staying at a higher pixel dimension.

Beglan Brothers website, www.beglanbros.com

Boyles Sports – Sponsorship

This was a job completed for Mark Holland

Work required
Mark already had an idea visually as to how this was going to work, and with some stock footage edited the shots together.  I was to take his edit and mood image and produce the final piece, with Mark making final Director decisions.
The footage I was given was not shot for keying, so some rotoscoping was required and some clever keying in sections of the shots.  The original ball was removed and the red one placed in with betting odds.  Extra overlapping details were masked in to help integrate the ball better with the footballer.  This was a quick turnaround initially 2 days, there were some extra comments and changes made and all up we were done with masters in under a working week.

BBC Comedy – News At Bedtime (short clip)

This was a job completed for Kate Sullivan

Work required
Kate Sullivan designed, directed and animated a sketch to accompany Nick Newman and Ian Hislop’s Radio Four series “The News at Bedtime”. You can watch the full version here http://tinyurl.com/newsatbedtime.  The sketches are produced by Simon Nicholls. They star Jack Dee, Peter Capaldi and Vicki Pepperdine.
Martin Davey painted the backgrounds and I did the compositing and some 3d work using Maya.
The 3d that was involved was mostly projection mapping.  I would project Martins drawn artwork onto 3d geometry.  This was used to good effect in the opening scene into the news room.

Kates website, www.katesullivan.co.uk
Martins website, www.martindaveyillustration.co.uk

Wolfblass – Sponsors Rugby

This was a job completed for Mark Holland

Work required
I worked on the treatment for the rugby section to match what was supplied from the previous advert.  We also required a new pack shot.  This was put together in After Effects 3d and consisted of photographs that were treated to blend seamlessly.  Lens blurs and gentle light interactions help keep the shot alive.

Chocapic – Free Falling

This was a job completed at Beanimation

Work required
3D Backgrounds where by Arkvfx.  I was involved in the compositing of the characters and color grading.  We supplied a cutdown and various other countries versions of the advert.

The Guardian – Great British Walks

This was a job completed at Tandem Films

Work required
There was a small team of us brought in to rotoscope various shoes.  The shoes were animated stop motion style against a blue screen but it was felt that the screen was not going to give a good enough key for our use.  The shoes were rotoscoped from there background and some rigging inside the shoes removed.  Shadows were also masked out to be used in the final composite.  there was some initial colour grading and spill removal on this footage, which was passed onto Chris Gavin who completed the final composite.

Sky One – Domino’s Pizza Sponsors the Simpsons

Here is a compilation of the Domino’s Pizza adverts. I was involved in various parts of this production. The live action was shot with a motion controlled camera and gives a real crisp feel to the backgrounds. The backgrounds were tracked in 3d as we had trouble getting the motion control data into our 3d application. I built and animated the 3d box and made sure it tracked nicely to integrate into the scenes. During linetest stage with the animation we were preparing all the matte runs and roughly tracking the characters into the scenes. I shared the compositing with another compositor for the final touches after linetest stage. These were played during the popular series The Simpsons on Sky One.

CCTP – Optimum Triple Play

This was a job completed at BEanimation

Work required
This was completed at 1080p HD (this version is the SD version).  Because of the lengths of the advert and the size of the frames it did require a little more planning of time.  We had the animator from the guiness hand adverts create some clips for us for the stop motion hand.  The “drawn” animation was done by 2 flash artist’s.  Myself and another compositer keyed, and rotoscoped the stop motion hands.  Whilst the flash animation was being worked on I was able to start to position and occasionally retime various hand clips to match the animation from the flash artists.  Later on once the animation had been approved the final details were added.  These included adding texture and roughness to the line and also drop shadows on the hands.  There were initially two 60 seconds and two 30 seconds adverts, which later followed with a version slightly adapted, this included another 60 and 30 second.