In Bangkok

Well bangkok has seem me do something I thought Id never do.... sit in starbuck poncing around on a laptop. Unfortunatly for the short term this is my only acces to the internet. Im trying my best to make it seem like im working on my big screen play.. but I dont think the lady outside the window selling fried squid really cares that much.

Big day tomorrow... first day at imagimax. Quite nervous as Im not ensure what they will expect us to do or be ableto do. Exciting.

My first day and a half in BKK has been fun. its going to be agood month

Rhydian T2000

Here is a Video I made for a Friends facebook group "Rhydian is from the Future".
Rhydian is a contestant on a certain minor primetime ITV talent show, and my friends Michael and Matthew contend that he is in fact some kind of entertainment cyborg sent from the future - due in part to his emotionless face and square head.
Putting all my After effects training to good use I produced this video - i made it in my lunch break but I think the roughness add to its charm.
Sadly perhaps this video has gotten more plays than all my other videos put together, even the one of Dan & Jen singing drunken 'Im a believer' Karaokee in the Bute Dock Hotel of an afternoon.

Showreel - December 2007

Here is an updated showreel for 2007, including much of the work I have produced at CYFLE over the past few months.

The music track on this in the excellent "You! Me! Dancing!" by Los Campesinos.

Robot Chase

Heres the finished version of the chase sequence featured in the animatic posted below. Im not entirely sure how happy I am with it. The process of making it was quite labored as we were using ToonBoom for this project and it essentially made the process quite drawn out. ToonBoom does some things that After effects does and some things that flash does. But does non of those things as well as those packages. I had to comp the whole thing in aftereffects after animating in toon boo as for some reason the render in TB kept skipping frames when there was a lot happening on screen.
For the look of the piece I was trying to get away from the immediate cartoony feel of the supplied character - so opted to give the backgrounds a German expressionist feel. All pointy with exaggerated shadows - Like the film Dr Cilgari (nice) But i think somewhere I got a little lost in that. Also the finish I applied to the character is a bit forced. However I'm pretty happy in the Direction of the piece, and I managed to get a few chase scene staples in there. There are a couple of rough edges - and I havent yet been able to complete the introduction which has the main character feeding nuts and bolts to small robotic birds - just to frame the sequence in some semblance of understandable narrative.

Toon Boom Animatic

The brief for the Toon Boom project Im working on is is essentially to construct a chase sequence, with the Dinamo logo robot being chased by another machine. Naturally the Evil machine I have designed is a 20 foot steam powered raven which shoots scissors from its beak. Here is the first rough animatic.

Its rough.

Its a landmarkfor me in that its the first piece of work I've ever done using a wacom tablet + pen. Using this and flash to put together the animatic was really fast. The downside is that using the digital pen is pretty weird, and I imagine quite like drawing with a cucumber, blindfolded.
Me blindfolded not the cucumber.


The animatic is a slight extension of the original. Roughly twice the length. I changed the ending to make it more dramatic and to achieve more satisfying runtime

Tooney Boom

Toon Boom, is the new software of choice at CYFLE right now. A few of the guys here really like it as its alot like traditional animation to use. I'm not so keen for much the same reason. Anyway below is the result of a character rigging/animation test. The story is about some Italian fella who builds a rocket using junk. Of course as he is Italian he needs to have a mustache, though the pink bangles on his arms are an attempt to break away from more stereotypes. You don't know how hard it was to resist putting him in red dungarees.

Right so the Aftereffects part of this course is well and truly over. My opening sequence came out pretty well. The Brief (below) really called for a sequence of house images with some kind of snazzy transition. There was no way of getting away from it , especially with the supplied music the whole thing rather wrote its self. For the snazzy transitions I decided to use the good old popup book animation style. Some could say this is quite an overused look for animations at the moment - but It really fitted the brief well on this one. Its all about history see, and history comes in book - right? It communicates the idea of discovery also , and finally the soundtrack had these fluttering sections that couldn't evoke the idea of pages turning better.
So just for the heck of it i also used that current animation staple of layered waves made out of card, as though they are from some kind of puppet theatre. I swear if anyone ever invents another way of creating a good looking seascape with 2.5D animation they will win the Nobel prize...of animation.

At first I thought I would have to do allot of the 3d construction in MAYA - but after a few tests I was surprised to find it was all possible in AE. The pages are not as floppy and papery as they could be as AE doesn't allow you to do curves really, but Popup books are made of card - so get over it!