Category Archives: Awards

Season 6 of The Crown – Breaking down the VFX.

I’ve been fortunate enough to keep working with Rumble VFX for a while now, recently completing a couple dozen shots on Season 6 of The Crown, the final instalment of Netflix’s favourite. Our work, alongside Framestore’s, has been nominated for a BAFTA Craft Award!

See the full breakdown of what Rumble did in the video below and on the Rumble site here The Crown, Season 6 – Rumble VFX

Heraldic Banners

I began this stint on The Crown making many heraldic banners for St. George’s Chapel, Windsor, filmed on location in York Minster. The real chapel has many heraldic items which you can read about here. Of all the heraldry in the real chapel, the banners are visually the most impactful.

From a technical perspective, each banner is connected to a point on a line. Each point has variables to define the angle the banner droops at, plus some colour variance. A vellum cloth solution is applied to all flags at once in Houdini, with the fringing being extruded from the edge of the resulting mesh.

As I knew the order of flags, and indeed gaps between, were subject to change I renamed all the textures and shaders such that they’d pull in flag_1 textures for the first flag, flag_2 for the 2nd etc. This afforded the flexibility to merely rename the textures to change the layout.

Diana

The investigation into Diana’s death took a very long time, wrapping up practically a decade afterwards. As part of a montage surrounding the crash investigation, we see a computer simulation of the car passengers during their moment of impact. To give the impression of a ragdoll-like movement inherent in these things I used a ragdoll solver within Houdini on characters with very basic wireframe appearance, sat within a model of the Mercedes.

Many different simulation systems in 3D share a common trait – one tweak to a shot can change the whole thing, with characters falling the wrong way, leaping out their chair through the sunroof or slapping each other in the face. There were a couple of occasions where the motion appeared too violent, even given the wireframe appearance. With each revision we lost more and more visual detail, dropping frames to give it more of a caching computer simulation look and less of an emotional re-enactment.

Half a Dimension Lost

An odd concept I first read about a decade ago is 2.5D, that is to say a 3D look made in 2D. As I was tracking a few shots for a sequence of princes Harry and William having fun in Botswana I decided to drop in a temporary background in Nuke as a test. It made sense to use the digital matte painting provided and after a few tweaks and advice from others I realised that projecting that on to geometry in Nuke wasn’t so tricky. All my Botswana shots were Nuke scanline composites, not 3D renders. To me it pays to know a few little tricks involving multiple software. I’m hired to produce the end result not a convoluted Houdini scene nobody except wizards can understand.

My work has seen me do many things in many ways – see other projects here.

The Alienist – Emmy Win

It’s not often I find the time to write something for my blogs these days. Even this news is 2 months old at time of writing. Back in September, the first episode of The Alienist, a show I spent many months doing modelling and texturing work on at Peerless, won the 2018 Emmy for Outstanding Special Visual Effects in a Supporting Role!

Needless to say it has gone on the CV. My colleague and good friend Rasik hopped over to LA (bravely I might add) and picked up this little lady for us. Here I am holding what has to be the most obvious hiding-in-plain-sight potential murder weapon I’ve ever held. Those lightning wings are spiky. There’s a sentence I never thought I’d write. Anyway! Onwards and upwards!

Me with a shiny award. No I don't get to keep it. Stay outta my home! :P
Me with a shiny award. No I don’t get to keep it. Stay outta my home! 😛

The Alienist is now available on Netflix in the UK.

iScience wins RTS Award!

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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.