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: , , , , ,

The Sweeney 2012

May 1, 2012 by Leave a Comment

I worked for a month with visual effects supervisor Seb Barker on the upcoming film “The Sweeney”.  I completed 50 VFX shots, and assisted another 10 using Nuke, details of the shots will have to wait until the movie has been released for now enjoy the trailer hosted on youtube

For cast details and other information regarding the film please check out the IMDB link

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0857190/

Filed Under: Imagineer Systems, Longform, 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

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

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: , , ,

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