The Monsterophians - Illustration

This is my design for the first "Keeping It Brief" brief. A blog set up by Gareth Sharples for Falmouth students and graduates. This month's brief was to create a music band of monsters. I sketched out many potential characters beforehand which helped inform my final designs here. I'm quite happy with the character designs - if I find time I'll add in a bit of colour. I imagine them to have a carribean sound.

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Blender - completed spaceship!

I have now completed this tutorial from Andrew Price. It was great to learn the ins and outs of Blender in terms of modelling, applying materials, lighting and compositing. I'm quite happy with this final result :-)

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Blender spaceship model

For those who are unfamiliar with Blender, it is a completely free 3D program, open source with a lot of free resources available.

I found this cool spaceship tutorial online by Blender teacher Andrew Price from Blender Guru. Over the past couple of days, I've spent a few hours modelling this spaceship. Blenders interface is nice and intuitive which makes it nice and quick to learn.

Here are a couple of pics of my work in progress:

For those who know Maya or 3ds Max, you are well catered for in Blender as you can use all the same hot keys. My next step will be to do the 2nd tutorial, texturing and compositing to create the final image.

In the mean time, here is some Blender Inspiration!

I am also intending to download a trial of Cinema 4D soon, it seems like every motion graphics job out there has it on their job description so it would be wise to learn it.

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Sketchbook work 2012/13

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Drawings + Love Soldiers update

Drawings

I got stuck into some drawing yesterday - really enjoyed getting into 'the zone' with it all..

Hands are a tricky thing as they are so versatile so I practiced sketching my own hand.

These sheets contain some drawings of my g/f Nina and some things I drew without looking at any reference including a small self portrait.

These sheets show my visual interpretation whilst listening to some podcasts at Radiolab - one on inheritance and another on speed. Both very interesting! Anyway, it's good practice for drawing quickly + aiming to get information across efficiently.

Inheritance

Speed

"Love Soldiers" update @ the RCA

Here's a pic of our studio with director Chloe in view.

"Love Soldiers" is slowly but surely coming together, and the way that we are working is fairly organic. Some shots are nearing completion whilst others are yet to be animated.

Recent tasks I've completed

- Inking over some animation of a face falling into pieces.
- Colouring a sequence in Photoshop (here the Photoshop actions have come in as a great time saver.)
- Utilising a turbulent displacement effect in After Effects to make it look like the clouds are warping/moving.
- Rotoscoping over printed live action shots of walk cycles.
- Compositing layers of animation together.
- Producing (creating a time schedule.)
- Scanning the inked animation.
- Updating the edit-in-progress.

I'm aiming to keep doing a couple of days a week here, though I try and do more if my schedule allows. It is a fun project to be working on and these are great people to be working with!

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"Sparkle Mouse" in the making...

This is a personal project that I have been chipping away at for a while. The basic idea stems from a simple and effective technique that I came up with when I was juggling glowing balls. "Sparkle mouse" is a working title - I'm open to suggestions!

The basic idea

Here I am, juggling (such is the life of a creative ey?) -

+ some After Effects trickery =

Pretty cool! What if the ball had a bit of character -

                                                             Introducing... a background!

The plan (aka pre-production) and production

Brief: To create a short visually interesting and entertaining animation, using the above technique.

Here is a rough plan of my idea. The ball interacts and navigates itself around the environment. At one point the ball transports from inside the laundry basket to above the bongo. The numbers on the plan have helped with the editing as this was not all managed in one take. It took me around 7 hours to dress the set, photograph some stop motion animation of the furniture and film myself in the dark moving the glowing ball around.

Post production

This has been the lengthy part of the process. It took me another day to edit the ball into one cohesive sequence. (I recorded about 8 seperate takes as the moving-a-ball-around process was a bit fiddley.) With the help of Maya and a handy tutorial, I animated a cool 3D sphere cracking effect for the transportation bit. This took about half a day.

Most of the work has involved cleaning up areas using masks where there are discrepancies between the environment and the ball. It has taken several days to go through this process. The moral is - use a good tripod!

Half way through, I thought "hey wouldn't it be cool if I kept the effect of the bounce light caused by the ball on the environment" so that added another few days of After Effects work! In the process I have learned better ways of organising my AE comps. Firstly, using colour coding for layers makes things much easier. Secondarily, rendering out pre-comps as you are going along helps a heavy composition become much faster to work with. Here is a screenshot of my work organisation in AE.

At the moment Sparkle Mouse is nearing the end of the clean up phase, and will enter a final edit, possibly with the addition of sound and a title before final delivery. WATCH THIS SPACE :-)

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Animation, vfx and self-promotion work

Since moving to London in September, I have actively been seeking work in animation and visual effects. Alongside this I have been developing the look of my website, creating a visual identity and two new showreels - one for my general moving image/animation work and the other - more specifically for my compositing work. Here are the shots I have been working on:

Unidentified sea creature - 2D animation

A 2D animation created using Flash, textured in Photoshop and composited in After Effects. This was sparked by a quick doodle I did of a Fish/Robot hybrid that breathes fire. No fire breathing in the animation yet but perhaps this is something I will come back to in the future!

'Harry' the crab - Match moved

I initially created this crab in 2010 using Maya to model and texture it. I always wanted to place it into a real world environment striking a pose! Back in Cornwall I filmed a bit of it's potential environment and last month I finally got round to stabilising the footage then placing the crab into this environment using Match Mover and Maya. Following this, I added a touch of colour in after effects. This is best viewed in HD. To do so - click this link, turn on HD and scrub to 00:54.

Vfx breakdown - Placing a house onto Bodmin Moor

Here is an image I used in an earlier post. I have uploaded this image here again in order to precede the matte painting breakdown of this shot that I completed a week ago. Breakdowns are always a fun way to display the amount of work that has gone into a shot. This shot was created for a MA student film project entitled 'Gone.'

  

These shots have been included on my Moving Image and Compositing showreels respectively. This week I am going to continue applying to jobs and learning new things!  

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Butterflies

Here's something I've been working on - following a tutorial but customising it to fit my own textures, backdrop etc. It has been fun to create these butterflies and interesting learning about how particles work in Maya. I have been keen to do some effects stuff for a while so I'm glad I have now got round to it!

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VFX shots

Just before completing Uni I hired out the portable green screen and shot some footage. Here is a shot I composited of my housemate Olly, complete with a breakdown.



I have also been asked to help out on a MA Film project entitled 'Gone'. I have spent around a week compositing a 2 minute shot, my goal was to make it look like there was no grass or plant life and to deteriorate the rollercoaster. The purpose of this was to emphasise the apocalyptic feel of the film. I used Photoshop for matte painting, Mocha for tracking and After Effects for compositing. Below is a 6 second segment of the shot complete with a breakdown.



Here is another shot I worked on for 'Gone'. In this case my job was to place a house onto Bodmin Moor. I learned a lot from doing this in terms of using perspective, matching the lighting and matte painting.

Here is the final shot - I added some binoculars on top, linked the still plate to the camera movement which accompanied the initial shot of Bodmin and applied a bit of blur and scaling to show the binoculars coming into focus.

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Showreel 2012

My latest showreel, marking the end of my Digital Animation degree. A selection of shots from throughout the last few years which focus on compositing but also demonstrates my skills in animation and 3D. The first two shots are from our 3rd year final major project: Kernal. A CG animated film I worked on as part of a team of 17 which we have now completed and anticipate entering it into festivals.

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Final Concept and Background art pieces with WIP

To say I have been busy is an understatement! Over the last 4 weeks I have completed and handed in work (in time for deadlines) for 4 separate projects - including my CND film.

Final Pieces:

Kernel directed by Olly Skillman-Wilson.

Wife Left Home directed by Tom Gameson

Newgrounds project - London riots animation - Directed by Tom Gameson

Kernel directed by Olly Skillman-Wilson.

My role: Concept Art.

Brief: A concept art piece establishing the Greenhouse in it's city setting. Composition to look down between 2 buildings. There must be a layer of mist caused by the pollution.

At first I was unsure how to go about this - how does one draw a futuristic city with realistic perspectives? To get the ball rolling I went on intuition and made a little futuristic city in my bedroom out of stuff from around the house.

Maya came in very handy for this project.

I printed this screenshot off and worked from it getting the colours, adding in new ideas and more detail inspired by the photos I took of the city I made in my bedroom.

The next 4 images were achieved in one all night session as the deadline was approaching..

These billboard sketches are an important part of the setting. The protagonists character is enhanced and developed through his conflict with the doctrines of the society in which he lives. On a visual level these messages should stand out. Olly states in his script: "...the darkness of the smog and urbanity lit only by its media"

Olly gave me some pics where he caught water droplets on the lens of his camera and took photos of lights at night. I then brought this into Photoshop and applied the linear burn layer style to merge this in.

This last pic is with Olly's additions. He has added a looking-through-window effect which has really enhanced that 'you're there' feeling about it. The flares are a nice touch too. Nice work Olly :-)

My friend Marcel gave me some good feedback suggesting that further improvements could be made by lighting up the front of the skyscrapers at the bottom of the screen. This would help define them a bit more against the background without taking away from the murky misty effect.

Wife Left Home directed by Tom Gameson

My role: Concept Art

Brief: Design a nice morning environment around 'Dim' (the main character.) It is a typical English town.

Some of Tom's inspiration. Artwork from Pixar artists using marker pens and ink.

I used the same media here:

Using Photoshop I enhanced the colours:

Shell and Paddy directed by Thomas Spettle

My role: Background artist

In this shot we see a chase. Paddy chases Shell but then trips up over this branch-like creature. I reckon it should be quite a funny scene!

I checked with Thomas about not getting this done in time for the pitch - he was cool with it. Unfortuantly I couldn't complete it in time with all the other projects going on. Hopefully I will get it done soon. From now on I will add in 1 contingency day every week into my schedule to allow me to achieve all projects in time.

Newgrounds project - London riots animation - Directed by Tom Gameson

My role: Background artist

Tom did a bit of animation for my CND film. In exchange, I have produced 2 backgrounds for his project that he was working on throughout the Summer at Newgrounds.

For these, I have worked a lot by hand before going into Photoshop. Ralph Steadman has been a big inspiration for Tom so I tried to incorporate elements of his style into my work.

City background

Prior to this I did 4 half hour A5 tests of different styles. Tom picked out the one he liked the best - a bit of collaging with Ralph Steadman style lines. He wanted the buildings to surround and overwhelm the character.  For the final piece I worked in A3 using the same method as I did for the test. I then worked these up in Photoshop.

This is where Photoshop came in.

Park background

In this shot we will see the camera pan down on the right, then track to the left (hopefully these are the correct film camera terms I'm using!) Tom specified that the background is a bit run down, tucked away on a hill somewhere in London.

Tom's layout design:

My 20 minute Photoshop sketch just to get the depth values and a bit more definition.

I produced these elements by hand using Ink and pastels. I used pastels purely to get the colour and Ink for everything else. Here are all the different elements brought into Photoshop.

My first real go at Photoshop painting (of the rubbish) - using photographs for direct reference. Halfway through I thought 'Hang on - I can get Adobe Illustrator to do what I'm doing' so I did that for a test. It was a bit quicker doing it using Illustrator (the colour 6 filter) but I was pleased that when I did it myself in Photoshop the result was 10 times better.

The resolution of the full Image is 6344 x 2813 to allow for all the camera movements.

In this close up shot you can see the level of detail with a crisp packet stuck in the tree and plastic bags trodden into the dirt.

That's 4 weeks worth of work crammed into a couple of hours of blogging!

On a side note, I will be going to Bristol this Saturday as I have been invited to the showcase and prize-giving event of the CND film competition at Watershed cinema. I'm quite excited about seeing my work up in front of an audience!

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