On the Recent Work page, and indeed right here, is a video of a few of the shots I worked on for Orbit: Earth’s Extraordinary journey.

The first and last shots featured are both from the same ‘journey’ setup that was used for many other shots too. The setup featured many different elements on their own passes, each passed into its own part of a Nuke composition. As the project progressed, both the 3d scene and the Nuke script needed subtle reworking.

The second shot is a pair of emFluid particle systems, whereas the third is a simple enough ICE simulation in Softimage. The particles in those two shots were rendered with beta versions of Exorcortex’s Fury rendering system which loads the particles onto the graphics card, rendering them in OpenGL. Without Fury the second shot would have been particularly time-consuming to render. It contains millions of particles and took many many hours to cache out.

I worked on a handful of complicated shots for this including one where the hot air above india rises, sucking in cold air off the sea. That was a very dense particle system with a few caching issues, but we got there eventually.

The hardest thing with this show is there are a lot of shots which explain slightly different things but which share a similar 3D scene. Creating an appropriate camera move around what are essentially spheres in space should be a simple deal. One shot I was tasked with shows the Sun rising over the Earth. We pull back to see the Earth as a whole passing through space then follow it round its orbit. That was one camera move. Sometimes it’s the apparently simplest things that are actually the hardest. Moving the camera in such a way as to get the Sun to rise at a constant speed, then following the Earth at a reasonably constant distance, but continually orbit the Sun as well, took a lot of fiddling. We had a camera rig which worked really well for close to the Earth shots but not for wide shots. In the end it was hand-animated without a rig.

The second tricky thing with space is scale. We regularly had to move the Sun much nearer the Earth than it really is so it can be seen clearly as opposed to being a tiny insignificant dot with less drama than a wet tea towel.

See the link below for more details.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00xztbr

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

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.

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.

http://bbc.in/lwdbRu

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.