AJCGI

Every now and then a show comes along where I get told something a little unbelievable such as, “We have a high budget, almost limitless.” In this instance it was, “This show is presented by Samuel L Jackson!”

“Errr… come again?”

Well it turned out to be true. The show itself is a series of scientifically-backed explanations of how America the world may end. VFX-wise this mostly involves large explosions, landslides, tidal waves and the like. It’s all slickly presented by Samuel L Jackson who seems to be in a bunker, the dampness of which puts me right off hiding there from the impact of the apocalypse.

My input was to work on the tidal wavey goodness. This was using the aaOcean suite of Softimage plugins plus a few in-house ICE nodes at Lola. That and many many passes.

http://bit.ly/pw0FCG

Just to confuse me, the second of the Richard Hammond documentaries has a different name, Journey to the Bottom of the Ocean!

It’s on Tuesday 26th July 9pm BBC One.

http://www.radiotimes.com/ListingsServlet?event=10&channelId=92&programmeId=201706224&jspLocation=/jsp/prog_details_fullpage.jsp

The first part, Journey to the Centre of the Planet, received praise all round on the whole which is great. Best thing I saw on Twitter was “Wouldn’t it be great if Richard Hammond reached the centre of the planet only to discover it was made of lego?”

A fair question I’m sure you’ll agree.

Being the avid TV-watcher that I am, I’ve entirely missed the trailers for this! Journey To The Centre Of The Planet will be start here in the UK tomorrow night (19th July 2011) at 9pm on BBC One and BBC One HD, and will conclude the following week. http://www.radiotimes.com/ListingsServlet?event=10&channelId=92&programmeId=201635458&jspLocation=/jsp/prog_details_fullpage.jsp

Repeat is being shown Thursday night. Click the link above to see details.

I’ll put together some details on what I actually did on this in the not-too-distant future.

Not so long ago I finished working at Lola on this project, soon to be broadcast on prime time BBC here in the UK. Can’t say a lot about it yet other than it’s CGI heavy and interesting stuff. The name is possibly in progress. Not sure, it’s changed a few times! Here’s a press release and no I didn’t get to meet him.

http://bbc.in/lwdbRu

First things first, I didn’t work on this sequel. Don’t email me requesting to see it or any other such shenannigans! In their opinion, the BBFC consider the sequel to The Human Centipede to be too horrific for UK audiences.
There’s sexual mutilation and all sorts so it’s not a huge surprise. Plenty of you come here solely for news on this film (and the original which I did work on), so here it is!

http://t.co/eyfUbPh

My opinion on the controversy is that occasionally films like this are made and without them we wouldn’t be able to define boundaries, whether they are in the correct place for all viewers or not. Boundaries are there to protect the younger generations. Many friends and colleagues of mine who have seen the original film have either got half way through and decided it’s too disturbing, finished it and decided it’s the grossest film ever, or merely watched the trailer and stopped there. My goddaughter watched the trailer at the age of 12 and couldn’t sleep for a week. Thanks YouTube!

I saw the highlights of an edit with the director before working on the vfx and have to say I would probably choose not to watch it, but then horrors aren’t my favourite type of film. I do enjoy working on horrific content as it’s fairly challenging. I nearly worked on this sequel and recall being told by a colleague, “It’s extremely graphic. Far more so than the first film… erm… *cough*… how are you with penises?” I presume those shots would be challenging for any man to work on.

Eventually, it’s inevitable the ban will be lifted. Prior to that torrent sites will carry the film from its foreign releases. The original film carries quite a cult following and is far more famous now than it ever was on release. Banning this film will actually make it more desirable to many as it instantly becomes the forbidden fruit. I’ll be steering clear of that apple tree myself, but in the meantime, feel free to go scrumping.

Update: What a shocker, the ban is overturned and the film awarded an 18 certificate.
Guardian coverage on the matter.

This month I’m one of the few freelancers featured in 3d World Magazine’s showreel feature! Hello if you found a link in the magazine. I wasn’t expecting quite so much print space! Was an interesting read. It’s amazing how many conflicting opinions there are regarding what should and shouldn’t be in a reel. I don’t consider mine perfect by any means but I’m a lot happier with it now it’s entirely vfx focussed rather than bits of vfx, character animation etc.
Feel free to say hi. I try to respond to all emails.

After a few delays Atlantis was shown on BBC One last Sunday. Was great to see all our work at Lola coming together on screen. It’s currently on BBC iplayer somewhere at http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer

From September til December-ish I was working on Atlantis. Lola (www.lola-post.com) was creating visual effects for almost the entire thing, 550 shots, so there was plenty for each of us to do. In my case, I was working on falling volcanic rocks and boats, then seas. There’s a lot of sea involved in this show, much of which is actually real, but the rest is created using Aaman Akram’s aaOcean suite of shaders and deformers in Softimage.

All the shots were broken down into different passes, with that being especially essential for the sea shots. Water behaves oddly at sea. It’s hard to tell the scale of a large wave versus a small one without something giving you a visual cue. By creating various mattes and animating the large waves at different speeds to the smaller waves sat on top, we were able to keep the scale in check, adding elements like foam and colour variation depending on the shot composition.

Prior to this, I was involved in the pre-vis stage of the boat shots. Many of them involve particularly dramatic moments and it was necessary to nail exactly how they were going to work before getting bogged down in rendering water at HD. Pre-vis is short for pre-visualisation, whereby each shot is roughed out using rudimentary elements or low detail assets to get a feel for timing, scale, composition and so on. By having this stage, it’s possible to work something into the edited sequence as quickly as possible to see if it actually works. It saves a lot of time and takes some guesswork out.

Atlantis – End of a World, Birth of a Legend will be broadcast in mid March.

For now, here’s a preview on Youtube. There’s a making of and a couple of sequences in there too.

If like me you did A Level physics, you’ll know the answer to this, but this documentary is worth watching.

For a good few months now I’ve been freelancing for Lola, working on a few things. Although broadcast first, this is the second show I’ve worked on there, with a few underwater shots like this pictured, a fly through the solar system to Jupiter, and a sweep across Saturn.

The water shots are mostly a 2d job run by a Nuke compositer, but in order to create a decent depth to things I tracked each shot, placing 3d geometry into a Softimage scene, then outputting depth passes. Fast Volume Effects output shader was used for the rays of light cast through the surface.

The solar system was a fairly easy task. There’s plenty of data freely accessible from NASA regarding where each planet is in relation to the others, their relative sizes and suchlike, but Jupiter was still cheated nearer for timing purposes. It’s also a little larger than reality for similar effect.

For a few more days, it will be up on iPlayer.

BBC iPlayer – Do We Really Need The Moon?

Whenever there’s a break in work and I’m aching to do my own thing I work on a few ideas. One of these that’s taken a step in the direction of starting is to take a piece of footage I shot last year and alter loads of it. It’s a 9 second or so sweep across the Ashdown Forest, not too far from here. What I’m going for is a near-future post-war landscape with much destruction. One of the things to suffer will be a tractor, shown below. I’m a bit off finishing the model let alone the texturing, but it’s nice to let you lovely people see what I am actually doing when not working!

Click for a closer view.

[Edit] Modelling Done now! Will dink it a little then texture: