Kickstarter campaign progress

Just a quick post this week. I have been quite busy spending time seeing my sister this week so I will be aiming to get this project complete for next Friday. This week, I have worked on adding text to imitate the look of the british rail LED screen type - this is timed perfectly with the words as they are spoken. I found this type off Dafont. It is called LCD Dot, made by Omer Kose.

 I also spent half a day going into town and recording some timelapse footage for the news title sequence. This looks great. The next step is creating a soundtrack to go with them - there's some great stuff on Soundcloud but I could run into copyright issues by using it, so instead I have found a good house loop off Freesound and will work on the track myself.

Train LED style text

Timelapse stills

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Kickstarter update and some inspiration

Here are some icons and a main image created for the CBT Kickstarter campaign I'm working on. I'm aiming to get the film complete by next Friday, so it will be a busy couple of weeks!

And now for some animation inspiration...

I came across this neat little ad for the french post office a while back on motionographer. I really like how well it has been thought out and executed. Nice sound track too (from Amadou & Mariam.)



Here is a great little animation I watched yesterday made by Perrie Murphy. There is a simple element of truth within Colin that I'm sure many people can empathise with! It's pretty funny - definetly worth a watch!



So that's it for now. Catch you next Thursday!

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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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Promo film for Kickstarter

Hi everyone, so it has been quite a while since I last blogged. Sorry folks! From now on I intend to do regular blog posts to keep people in the know of what I'm up to. Since compositing a couple of shots on the independent feature film "The Otherworld" I have realised that I would be much better suited to work on short form productions which offer a higher degree of creative input and a greater variety of work. One of the things I have been working on recently is a promo film for my friend and aspiring alternative therapy business entrepreneur - Saskia.

Promotional film for a Kickstarter project

Saskia has a plan to set up an alternative therapy business and needs the video to act as an essential part of her kickstarter page. I had designed some business cards for her previously, which have proved successful. I believe she is aiming to raise around $10,000 so the video promo is definitely a worthy challenge! The basic idea for her promo is to create a news themed "special report" featuring Saskia as both reporter and massage therapist. Some clear and simple motion graphics, that sit with the live action recording will help delineate her ideas. So far we have done the shooting and now I'm working on the post production. I used my Sony NEX5 to record the footage in HD, and coupled this with sound recorded into a clip on mic.

Business card

Video Promo - still

The shooting took place in my flat, with Saskia filmed against a cream coloured wall. It took me a couple of days to create a clearly defined matte of Saskia which has enabled me to cut her out and place her into a news broadcasting themed environment. I have learned from Ron Brinkmann's book "The art and science of digital compositing" that the most efficient way to rotoscope is to use several mattes - not just one. So here, I have pulled mattes for her body and hair seperately, then combined the two. I have also used a light wrapping technique which creates a subtle effect of the background colours lighting up her outline. The images below show the work in progress:

For my own future reference, and for those of you who are curious - here are the effects I applied to pull a matte of her hair at a part of the video where it swings to the side. These effects are applied to a pre-comped garbage matte so the dynamic range is concentrated to the section of hair being cut out. The still shows the garbage mask and the subsequent matte along with the effects. I pushed everything into the green channel as this provides the best contrast between hair and no hair.

Next, I will be working on integrating some motion graphics with the next scene which shows Saskia as a massage therapist explaining her idea. Here is a still of that shot:

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Why animation?

I saw this great TED talk recently and it inspired me to ask myself "why?"



Here is why I love working with animation and the moving image:

- Any idea is possible!
- It can offer a simple, fun and effective way of expressing a message.
- In the audio visual area, I get a deep satisfaction of matching visuals to music/sounds.
- Live action can be integrated with animation. It is great to make something that has been previously imagined be perceived as real. If you're not going for photo realism, it is still great to combine the two and create a cool style or express an interesting idea.
- The joy of breathing life into a character or object. Creating a believable world and defying the laws of the real world.
- Animation tends to be a team sport and I enjoy working with others.
- I love working with visual narrative - conventional or abstract.
- It's highly stimulating and utilises both my technical and creative skills.
- It has a range of different applications - television, films, theatre, AV performance, music festival screens, clubs, the internet etc. It is widely accessible.
- It carries the ability to entertain, inform, influence and amaze people, ways in which that are unique to the medium.

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"The Otherworld" - compositing work experience

I am currently busy doing some work experience for independent feature film "The Otherworld." It's good to get some experience and fun to be part of the project. My role so far has been to key out a green screen shot and create "magic mist" that surrounds the character. The shot I'm on now involves a bit of rotoscoping and match moving to line up a moving camera shot of a character in front of a matte painting backdrop. It's nice to refresh my skills previously learned as well as develop my knowledge. Unfortuantly, I cannot put up any stills/movies of my work until the film gets released.

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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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