Living By The Newspaper Titles

After the success of our BAFTA award winning titles for Living by the Book, production company Cwmni Da commissioned us at Dinamo to make a title sequence for the follow-up show Living by the Newspaper (Byw yn ol y Papur Newydd in Welsh). This time exploring how Welsh people lived in the 1920s we wanted to keep a similar style to the first series titles, but update it to include silent movies and the more modern transport of the time. We shot presenters Bethan and Tudur against greenscreen taking part in various ’20s activities, which I then composited using After Effects. I then used photos provided by Cwmni Da, and some we took of Penarth Pier to build the newspaper editor’s desk and the paper itself. The train was modeled in Maya by Dan McCarthy and animated & rendered by Llyr Williams.

Iconicles VFX Reel

Long overdue, here’s a VFX and animation reel showing the work of many talented artists for Cbeebies show Iconicles, on which I was VFX Supervisor. The 26-episode series featured inventor and explorer Nat (Gavin Stenhouse), who has build a portal to another world called the Iconiscreen. Through the screen Nat is able to watch the adventures of the animals that live there, and invites some of the creatures to visit. All the work was done at Dinamo Productions, with my VFX team tasked with developing, animating and compositing the five CG creatures that had to speak and fully interact with our lead actor and the huge Iconicarium set. A mammoth task, we delivered 3,043 VFX shots for the series over a six month post-production period. Character and CG Iconiscreen build, rig and animation was done using Maya, with Photoshop for texturing, and all compositing was done using After Effects CS5. I put this reel together to show off the brilliant work done by the whole Dinamo CG and VFX team.

The series was produced by Alan Dewhurst, for Exec Producers Vanessa Chapman and Lucy Murphy at Create Media Ventures/Iconicles Ltd. Richard Bradley directed the live-action, and Dino Athanassiou directed the CG animation with Romano Marenghi supervising.

Living By The Book Titles

Last year I worked on this title sequence for S4C programme Living By The Book (or Byw Yn Ol Y Llyfr to give it its Welsh title). Presenters Tudur Owen and Bethan Gwanas had to experience life according to the rules laid out in a Welsh Victorian handbook. We were tasked with creating a title sequence that represented both the Middle-class Victorian era, and the book that featured throughout. The opening shot was created entirely in After Effects using photographs and elements created from scratch. I handled all of the compositing and 2D graphics in After Effects, while the CG elements (paper street, houses & train) were made by Llyr Williams and Romano Marenghi, my colleagues at Dinamo Productions.

The sequence was so successful we’ve been commissioned to produce another for the show’s follow-up due later this year.

UPDATE! We’ve been nominated for a Welsh BAFTA for this title sequence! The ceremony is on 29th May, so fingers crossed for a good result!

Grandpa in my Pocket

My second major project at Dinamo Productions was working on the second series of Grandpa in my Pocket for Adastra Creative and Cbeebies. I supervised the main studio shoot for many of the 26 episodes, then worked in the Dinamo team compositing the visual effects.

The miniature Grandpa character was either played by actor James Bolam filmed on a greenscreen stage, or as a full CG character made in 3D Studio Max and Zbrush by Romano Merenghi and Llyr Williams, the awesome 3D guys at Dinamo. All compositing was done using After Effects over an eight week period; with only three full-time compositors and two assistant compositors, we averaged one episode each per week. In total we composited 1050 shots, over 750 of which were greenscreen shots.

The series is currently being shown on Cbeebies. To see some of my work, check out my showreel.

Tellytales

From July 2008 I’ve been based at Dinamo Productions in Cardiff. My first project at Dinamo was working on Cbeebies TV show Tellytales, 25 10-minute episodes telling stories – some famous, some not so famous – from around the world, including fairy tales such as Jack and the Beanstalk, and Rapunzel. This video features just a few of my shots from the show, with greenscreen comparisons.

The series was filmed in HD entirely in front of greenscreen at BBC Wales, each story acted out by school children in costume who would later be superimposed into environments created in After Effects. The artwork we used to create the backgrounds was all painted by children at specially supervised sessions in schools across Cardiff.

I had two roles on the show – On-set Visual Effects Supervisor, and Lead Compositor working with a team of up-to 5 other compositors who comped around 3,000 shots for the series.

As well as the challenge of keying 3,000 shots, we also had to build many unique environments for the characters to inhabit with a two-week deadline for each episode!

The show aired in March and September 2009, following a grand premier at CineWorld in Cardiff.

Head Ripping VFX!

This is a shot from a 5 minute film we made for a 24-hour film challenge, featuring a cursed scarecrow ripping the head off an unfortunate victim before going on a killing spree! The actor playing the victim (my wife, Kim) wore a collar with two LEDs to help me track her motion as she fell out of frame. Due to the rush – the shot had to be composited within the 24 hours we had to shoot and edit the film – I did the roto on her falling out of frame, and then realised she needed to be scaled up to match the head position better, hence the matte looking a bit choked!

This is pretty much the shot that made it into the film, but I’ve added a bit more gore since.

This was done in After Effects at about 1am, while my cohorts were editing. Unfortunately we didn’t win the competition, probably because it runs out of steam once it moves indoors!

Day-to-Night VFX

This was a personal project, and one of my first truly complex comps. I’d heard it was a useful skill to know how to convincingly turn a shot made during the day into night-time, so I decided to try. I’d seen Andrew Kramer’s day-to-night tutorial and thought I could do something a bit better (sorry Andrew!). The resulting comp was done in After Effects, and had over 50 layers and numerous pre-comps to deal with reflections, etc. The hard work paid off as it was the standout piece on my reel that got me my current (and first proper) VFX job at Dinamo!

Spider Mouse!

I created this animation for a SimplyCG.net “Transformers” competition, and won third place. I used Maya for 3D, pfHoe for matchmoving and After Effects for compositing.

I filmed my desk with a video camera and matchmoved it to add the sinister CG creature in later. You might be interested to know that there’s no cheating – all the spider’s parts fit rather neatly inside the mouse shell, with no parts clipping any other (and therefore there’s no swapping of models part-way through). Given an advancement in robot technology, this might one day be made real!

I modelled, rigged and animated all the 3D elements in the film including the space shuttle model, the satellite seen early on in the film, and meteors using Maya, with Adobe Photoshop for textures. This was my first visual effects project so there was a huge learning curve! I then had to composite the shots, some of which involved greenscreen keys (another first for me!) using After Effects.

This reel shows a few of the shots, accompanied by the end-titles theme “Death Wish” which I co-wrote with Pete Swinson (who composed all the music for the film). If you listen closely, you can just about hear me singing backing vocals during the chorus…

This breakdown shows the elements that made up the launch of shuttle Foolhardy. I didn’t have time to build the launch tower, so instead there’s a very long ladder propped up against the side of the shuttle. But that’s okay because in the story the shuttle was somehow stolen from NASA and parked, ready to launch in a field in Solihull, and if you believe that, you’ll believe anything!