April 2015 I was part of the team at Molinare who were working on the VFX shots for Dad’s Army the movie. The film is due to show within a couple of days, but if you can not wait that long you can view the trailer below. Interestingly this trailer has some shots I worked on. At 1 minute 37 seconds you will be viewing the bull gag, I composited the bull chasing Mr Mannering along the screen and then when he dives over the bush for safety.
I had the pleasure of working with the lovely people at Molinare again recently on the new TV Series “London Spy”. You can view the BBCs website for it via this link http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06pmnwn.
We had quite a handful of VFX shots to work through for the five episodes this series was running for. I worked on more than 60% of those shots that were allocated to our small and highly experienced team.
The work consisted of removals, invisible fixes, matchmoving, screen replacements and the part I enjoyed the most was a small motion graphic section demonstrating the voice recognition technology they spoke of during an episode. This part was done in After Effects using the new facial tracker tools and various scripts, the main bulk of compositing was done within Nuke(X) and using Mocha Pro 4 to assist in tracking.
Below is a clip that shows the cleaned up footage and the section with the graphics, closed captioning describes the work that was required.
During 2012 I worked with Rotem Nahlieli Creative Director at Kazoo Creative. Myself and a small team of digital compositors were working hard to complete a CG Game trailer for an upcoming game, it is still under NDA so I can not show any of the work. It is completely CG generated and rendered in house, the characters and scenery generated in Maya they had cloth and hair simulations along with some VFX work notably some fire. We were using Nuke for compositing which had been customized with an in house pipeline for loading and saving out shots along with various gizmos.
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
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
Work required
3 of about 10 animations that where to be placed into a documentary about violence in the home. The animation was drawn traditionally and later artworked by hand with pastels. The larger spaces we created in After Effects (AE) from various textures. On these examples I also drew many masks to add more shade and form to the coloured artwork. These mask would animate in size, opacity and softness to have the feeling of boiling like the pastel work. The example of the girl was entirely coloured in AE, various colours were isolated and textured and the shadow of the man drawn also in the application.
This was a job completed at McKeown Devita Productions
Work required
I was brought in for 2 full (long) days to make final tweaks and changes, to bring in those last details the director wanted. We made changes to over half of the spot during this time. Changes we made were the line work on the spaceship to be a similar colour to the fill colour to various screens that were laid out slightly differently and treated with a new look and style. New artwork was also being prepared on some shots that replaced older pieces. Some of the edits were tightened up and camera effects added to give focus and depth of field. There was also much colour grading to pull all the individual pieces together.
Work required
I was brought in after the edit was created, it required rotoscoping of the live action to either tint an object/area red. Was a straight forward job to do apart from the fact that as I had only the final edit with camera moves on still frame shots and fake camera bounce there were more key frames required than what really needed to be necessary and more time was used as the shots were now more complicated..but this was just an inconvience.
This was a job completed at McKeown Devita Productions
Work required
I was brought in quite late into production to help out with just a few of the shots. These were the front and end movement of the camera into and out of the house, and the musical notes moving around the young boy in a whirlwind shape.
The movement into the house required the original 2d artwork to be cut into “panels” and have the perspective removed so I could build a similar room but using After Effects (AE) 3d. We wanted some feeling of depth and distance from the objects so by recreating the scene in 3d we could achieve a more realistic camera feel than with the original artwork. It is subtle but helps the otherwise static shot.
The other shot I worked on is just past the middle (about 55 seconds) it has the boy being held in the air by a vortex of wind with the musical notes spiraling around it. This also used 3d in AE with the notes being hand animated but also parented to various null objects to help with regular motions, for example moving in a regular circle around the boy.
Work required
I worked on colouring some of the drawn animation. Originally it was going to look like a magic marker style fill but also with splats of colour, some shots were done by myself and liked but it was felt to late in the production to carry this style on through out the video, unfortunately the style was dropped. The shot left in that I was involved in setting up, is the final shot where we have a box in a box in a box…This used After Effects 3d camera to get the correct feeling of moving towards something very large to very small (adjusting scale only would not work in this shot because it does not work in the same way as a real camera would when moving towards an object).
Below is a clip of the 4 pieces I had coloured, these were not used unfortunately.