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.

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!

 

American Greetings – Thank You List

Being a fan of the artist Keira Rathbone for her typewritter art work (http://www.keirarathbone.com/) I was excited to work on this project because the style reminded me of her work, sadly she was not invovled in the project. This piece was created for the online site http://www.thanklist.com/create it is an interactive piece whereby you choose whom you’d like to thank and your message to them along with a photo and it will create your very own personal video that you can then have sent to your choosen person.
I was involved in the compositing for this piece within a small team, we used a mixture of Nuke and After Effects. A version of the film can be seen below but the site is also still live so I highly recommend you give it a try if you have a friend you’d like to thank!

 

Film Team
CG Lead: Dara Cazamea
Storyboards: Cyrille Nomberg
Animation: William Lorton
Animation: Sabrina Lecordier
Animation: Ines Pagniez
3D: Pierre Clenet
3D: Remi Cauquil
VFX: Stuart Armiger
VFX: Pierre Clenet
VFX: Zoubein Rana
Compositing: Bence Varga
Compositing: Aitor Arroyo
Compositing: Chris Forrester
Compositing: Gianluca Vecchio

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.

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.

Compositing on a game trailer at Kazoo Creative

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.

http://www.kazoo-creative.com/