Various jobs whilst at Glassworks (London)

August 1, 2015 by Leave a Comment

From August 2015 I spent 4 months working at Glassworks on multiple jobs.  Initially I was brought in to work on a Doir commercial that I believe was aimed at tablet/website style adverts.  I was tasked with the beauty work required on the 3 commercials.  Shortly after this project finished I was moved over to a video for Samsung.  Compositing various greenscreen shots and tracking in screens.  Some of these used camera tracking data to speed up roto work and the placement of said screens.
I was then moved on to a job I had been keeping my eye on, some colleagues around me were working on the new music video for The Shoes titled Submarine.  It interested me because all the VFX work on the people in the video was being done in 2D and had to be very clean as it was mostly slow motion.  I worked on various shots for this video but the one I enjoyed the most was the slow motion punch shot at 3:15 minutes.  The face that gets hit distorts visibly requiring the artwork and paintwork to be tracked and warped very carefully to keep the form of the face.  This video was constantly asking for the highest quality of compositing and there was no room for cheating.  Once the music video was finished I had a quick stint on a PS4 commercial tweaking a shot that the client wanted changes made to.
The final job I worked on during this 4 month period was an exciting Oculus Rift 360 degree VR experience directed by Chris Cunningham.   The job required a fair amount of cleanup work and preparation of animated textures built from live action miniatures, using just small portions of each take.  These were then rendered through Nukes scanline renderer to create the illusion that the elements were locked to the live actions movements.  The piece from memory is over 4 minutes and very quickly become the job that was filling all of Glassworks server and resources.  Hopefully it will be released to the public in the near future and I can highly recommend viewing it when that happens.

Below is a video of The Shoes “Submarine”

Filed Under: Advert, AE, Camera Tracking, Imagineer Systems, Mocha, Music Video, Nuke, Postproduction, Rotoscoping, Shortform, VR, Work-Journal Tagged With: , , , ,

David Garrett – Steam London – Keying and Greenscreens

July 9, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Steam London created this music video for international renown violinist David Garrett.  He performs Coldplays Viva La Vida, playing multiple parts at once.  My part in the creation of the video was a small selection of shots.  David Garrett was filmed in front of a green screen multiple times and was to be composited on to digital backgrounds.  I was producing keys and color grades of this footage and placing him on to the template background sequence.  The backgrounds required re-timing and re-positioning of the basic assets and then it was left to me to choose extra details like dust and smoke to add to the shot as I saw fitting.
My attention to detail in the keying can be seen in the video below.  I was able to keep a lot of hair detail, and details in motion blurred areas ( the violin bow in particular) that in other shots of the video were lacking.  I had two days to complete all the shots delivered to me and in every shot I pushed the keys to the limit to gain the best composite possible.  The video below represents half the work I did, the shots tinted red were not my shots.

The next video is a copy of the enitre music video finished.

Filed Under: AE, Music Video, Postproduction, Work-Journal Tagged With: , , ,

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: , , , , ,

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

Mark Ronson Project

May 26, 2009 by

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.

Filed Under: AE, Longform, Music Video, Postproduction, Work-Journal

Fear Of Music – Better Living Through Chemistry

May 22, 2009 by


This was a job completed at McKeown Devita Productions

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.

 

Filed Under: Longform, Music Video, Postproduction, Work-Journal

Andy Burrows – Boxes

May 22, 2009 by

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.

Filed Under: AE, Longform, Music Video, Postproduction, Work-Journal

Johnny Flynn – The Box

May 20, 2009 by


This was a job completed at McKeown Devita Productions

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.

Filed Under: AE, Longform, Music Video, Postproduction, Work-Journal