4.9.10

Never work with children or animatronics

They say never work with children or animals, and in this latest experiment of mine, I think that applies to animatronics too. I've always been interested in animatronics, and thought it'd be fun to rig up an old puppet I made with a rudimentary Lego Mindstorms skeleton.

Bearing in mind that most animatronics are remote controlled by skilled artists, and that Mindstorms allows for full automation of movement based on a few simple inputs, I decided to make something that can just sit in a corner until unsuspecting people come near and then start responding to them as best it can. This is how Steve the Seamonster behaved:



Probably with a bit of tweaking he'll become an obedient little puppet, but I kind of feel sorry for having to alter his personality in order to "fix" him. He's so cute when he's badly behaved.

22.8.10

The Runner: now on 20% more facebook

I did a bunch of wire removals and a cool slowmo bullet shot for this wee indy short, which has a promo page on facebook right here. There's a teaser trailer up there as well as some stills and a full version the wonderful poster pictured below. Playing in a festival near you sometime soon! If you live in NZ!

 

18.8.10

Red Mars, Green Screen

I'm comping a few shots for a beautiful little sci-fi film set on Mars, and made right here in little old NZ! The loctation shooting is just amazing, and my task is to match that amazingness in the greenscreen closeups. No sweat.


Check out the production blog for more news and more amazing location shots like this one.

17.8.10

It's not rocket surgery

Much as I'm a fan of using practical models for realism, or "faking it in post" like in the Tiny Inventions video, pretty often is more efficient to break out the 3D CG models. Also, as a fan of commercial space travel, it's fun to practice my (rather limited) 3D skills on a model of the rocket that's likely to carry the worlds first commercial orbital manned space capsule. SpaceX's Falcon 9. This is the first time I've used UV mapping to texture an object, so you could say that's another world first for the rocket. You could, but let's not mention it.

 

Rocket exhaust done in After Effects with Trapcode Particular.

13.8.10

Amazing stop motion style animation by Tiny Inventions

Red Giant sell a huge variety of some of the most useful and innovative plugins for After Effects on the market. If they don't sell it, chances are they will do soon. Using a few of these plugins, and a whole lot of creative talent, Tiny Inventions have taken "faking it in post" to a whole new level.

Watch the making of video on Red Giant TV
By taking the time to prepare and photograph live models and puppets, the animations still have that lo-fi texture of a Michel Gondry video, but with hours of painstaking stop motion replaced by marginally less (but still many) hours of painstaking computer animation, and (here's the clincher) sigificantly greater control over every last detail of the final "look" of the film.

10.8.10

Avatar on a $20 budget

For the last three years, prior to the V48 hours film-making competition, V has been running a "mildly furious" 48 second competition. The aim of the game is to recreate a 48 second scene from a movie while simultaneously working in some clever product placement. Given the limited time and resources at our disposal, we decided to have a crack at the $300 million blockbuster Avatar.

Armed with $20 worth of props, some amazing volunteers and a fix it in post attitude, we shot the film in Albert Park over lunch. I composited the shots over a long weekend. Digital makeup was achieved in After Effects by keying skintones to replace with blue, with a fair bit of rotoscoping where the skintone matched the background. Then the eyes were tracked, colour corrected and bulged to give an Avatar-like look that was formulaic enough to apply to every shot in a short period of time.



The overhead shot also ended up being shot as two different plates, then roto'ed and comped together to avoid putting anyone dangerously high up trees. The V can was modelled, textured, lit with an HDR chrome ball image taken during the shoot and animated in Maya by Oana Croitoru. Then, back in AE, I comped it with lightwrap and some cheesy (hey, this is meant to be Avatar) glowing particles. Here's the result:

5.8.10

Captain EO is back!

As a stereo nutter (not to mention fan of old school practical effects) I was delighted to hear that Captain EO has returned to Disney theme parks all over the world.

For those who don't know, the seventeen minute stereo sci-fi epic produced by George Lucas, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, and starring Michael Jackson, went down in history as the most expensive film per minute ever made. Until something more expensive got made.

To celebrate, I took a quick anaglyph shot of Hooter, one of Captain EO's alien buddies. Yes, the merchandising was 3-D too!