AJCGI

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:

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

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.

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.

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.

This is a breakdown of a short sequence made for an ITV drama called The Fattest Man in Britain. The taxi has a rig following it that holds the camera in a fixed position above the taxi, looking down on it. Unfortunately this kind of rig needs stabilising and in this case 2 cables were run to the front of the taxi. A slight issue there is that the 2 cables were now visible in 4 separate shots.

I tracked each shot in Syntheyes bringing the 3D data into Softimage. Simple 3D geometry was put in place with camera projected textures, individually airbrushed so that the wire was removed in each. When rendered and comped with mattes, the cables were no longer an issue.

Sun Quiz Live is an interactive online show much like the quiz shows on tv but better thanks to a slick point and click interface and live text chat. You can even make some money off of it. No, I don’t get royalties.

I was drafted in at relatively late stages of this project to create a virtual studio for use behind the presenters. The kit powering the live chroma keying, switching between cameras and sets, is Newtek’s Tricaster system. Consequently, this meant using Lightwave, another Newtek product, to create the 3D sets. Well, technically. The plug-in for producing the end files only works with Lightwave. After a few experiments it became clear that it was quicker to use my knowledge of Mental Ray in Softimage vs learning the Lightwave renderer which appeared inadequate for our needs. A quick work around was to build the entire set in Softimage and move it into Lightwave complete with baked in textures and lighting.

I was pleased with the results, but I still think that set would be ruined by a bit of rain.

Apologies for those who dislike fuzzy looking jpegs. The image above is a screengrab of the video.

www.sunquizlive.co.uk

Following on from the previous post, this week’s episodes of Waking The Dead on BBC1 focussed on the story of Gemma, a girl raped twice then thrown off a bridge, and somehow surviving with a few broken bones and a shattered pelvis.

I worked on one shot for this, the falling stunt Gemma. A digital stunt double works out cheaper, and safer than a real one.

Being how she is seen at a distance I was able to get away with modifying a pre-existing female model straight out of Poser. I reduced the detail level to something managable, altered the overall shape to match the adjacent shots and set about animating using a slightly modified default rig in Softimage. Once that was cleared as being fine, the hair and clothes were added, the whole lot rendered out and passed on to Sascha for compositing.

[no longer on iplayer]

BBC iScience, which had already won the award for most interesting project I’d worked on, won the 2009 Royal Television Society Award for a television program for use in schools. I didn’t know this was up for an award so it’s a pleasant surprise! Here’s what RTS had to say:

“…a well-produced entry which stimulates, challenges and moves students to engage in both hard and soft science in a way that would definitely add value to the classroom experience.”

Presumably this Prof. Tanya Byron saying this as she hosted the night.

Congratulations to all involved at Illumina Digital!

For a look at clips of the show, click here. I did all the cel-shaded animations, DNA mutations and anything involving little molecules flying about, colliding, causing pollution and so on.

I remember many of the science programs at school being old OU recordings on wonky VHS tape, played via ageing Ferguson Videostars. iScience trumps these on many levels, so the award is a well deserved accolade. I actually did all 3 sciences at school in GCSE and still learnt things producing work for this show.

The RTS have a list of all winners on their official site.

Last night was the Television BAFTAs, this being the time of year when shares in sequins go through the roof. The Best Drama Series Award went to Wallander, produced by and starring Kenneth Branagh.

So how does this relate to me in the slightest? I did a couple of VFX sequences in that I’ll have you know! All being well, one of them will be in the show reel I am currently piecing together. There was a lot of fog at one point, some of which is 3D fog created in XSI’s ICE engine then composited in After Effects, the aim being to cover up gaps in the smoke machine’s efforts.

Check out the rest of last night’s winners and losers at http://www.bafta.org/awards/television/tv-noms-2009,709,BA.html