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
All posts by Alex
Atlantis – End of a World, Birth of a Legend
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.
Do We Really Need The Moon?
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.
Ashdown Forest gets a new look
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: 
Sequel to The Human Centipede: First Sequence
Seems Mr Tom Six has begun work on the sequel to his mad scientist centipede creation extravaganza. I knew this was coming, but was wondering quite how well the first film would be received. If you could see the stats on my blog you’d be amazed how much my traffic spikes when The Human Centipede is released in a new area of the world or every time it receives news! So plenty of interest and success which is great to see.
Total Film Feature on Full Sequence
Animation for Oasis
That’s the shop, not the band, pop-pickers.
Recently I was called upon by Pretzel Films to aid them in the creation of an animation for the ladies clothing shop Oasis. We see a girl walking along changing clothes to suit her environment, the time of day and such, focussed on the idea that there is a pair of jeans for every occasion.
My input was the background images, drawn mostly by hand, then animated into the background based on a rough edit provided for me. The girl was not filmed against a green or blue screen, allowing the director, Jake Dypka a greater freedom when it came to lighting, however this did mean Jake ended up doing a lot of rotoscoping. Fortunately he was using the new rapid rotoscoping tools in After Effects CS5, which I’ve yet to look into. It was an enjoyable piece to work on, being something that provided enough creative leeway to not be restrictive.
Update: The film was viewable on Oasis-stores.com but is no longer part of their marketing. However, it is currently sitting on youtube apparently. http://bit.ly/a2ID0h
Strike Back has airing dates
Set your recording equipment up for 9pm on May 5th as that’s when Strike Back is due to begin! Oddly although it’s 6 episodes long, they’re being shown in pairs, so air dates are as follows:
Episodes 1 & 2 Wed 5 May 21.00 Sky1 HD & Sky1
Episodes 3 & 4 Wed 12 May 21.00 Sky1 HD & Sky1
Episodes 5 & 6 Wed 19 May 21.00 Sky1 HD & Sky1
Looking forward to the 19th!!! That’s where a lot of our work went.
I’m gonna get a few people to record this for me in case one or the other reveal themselves to be lame at setting recorders. There are people out there who can’t use Sky Plus let alone set an old VCR.
More details at http://sky1.sky.com/strike-back-about-the-show-the-story
Coming Soon… Chris Ryan’s Strike Back
During the past 5 weeks or so I have been working on some VFX shots for Strike Back, soon appearing on Sky 1 and Sky 1 HD. Trailers and teasers have appeared on TV and inevitably Youtube and pals. Myself, Sascha Fromeyer and Ashley Hampton, have been beavering away on all manner of things.
I’m looking forward to watching this. All of my contributions to this are in Episode 5, so I know what happens in that and the final episode and have no idea what happens at the start!
Strike Back is based on a novel by Chris Ryan, set in the Middle-East and filmed in South Africa. It’s a hostage situation and my God… it’s cool. Watch it.
2010 VFX Reel
After what seems like an eternity of promising it’s on its way, the VFX reel has arrived. A fair amount of this is new to the site. Some of the new content relates directly to previous posts on TV shows that have been on in the past year.
The 2010 reel is also available as a quicktime. Right click here and select Save As.
Tunnelling a television!
Finally I can say this is practically where I want it to be. There are a couple of niggly bits to do with the background footage which I may tackle if and when I get the spare time to do so, but for now I’m going to say it’s done. Thanks ever so much to those who have given me feedback on this one. I’ve been working on it on and off in my spare time for over a year so it feels like time to move onto something new now and get this into my show reel.
