Tag Archives: Ashford

Video

The Crown Season 5 at Rumble VFX – Period Set Extensions on Beautiful Plates

Before the late Elizabeth II passed and her son was coronated, I was a CG lead at Rumble VFX on Season 5 of The Crown for Netflix.

See the full breakdown of what Rumble did in the video below and on the Rumble site here The Crown, Season 5 – Rumble VFX:

For me, there was a lot of set extension work to do including a recreation of the famous 90s neon signs at Piccadilly Circus. Naturally, being The Crown, there were also ground level, rooftop and aerial shots of Windsor Castle. I created a dilapidated look for Villa Windsor (Mohamed Al Fayed’s gift to The Queen) and was even called upon to replace an errant non-royal yacht. (How dare the late Steve Jobs leave it in shot!)

Work on the show took lots of hours of research and meticulous attention to detail, creating 3D in Houdini, projections in Photoshop, painting up in Substance Painter, rendering in Redshift.

A challenge for me is that I really enjoy the show and wanted to work on it for years, so ended up treating each shot as if it was my last. At one point I was dreaming of various tones of wall in the shots of Windsor Castle. What helped immensely and stopped me painting myself in to a corner was the exceptional production team whose feedback and documentation of the shoots was on point.

The yacht was a peculiar beast. Yachts are often very smooth, white, shiny, looking like fresh CGI frankly. With this being an HDR project I had to make sure we had details that were matching the plate, even out of the range of the SDR monitors most of us work with daily. When doing my rough comps I knocked the exposure of everything down to check it matched, then brought it up again.

One aspect of this project that really helped is the mountain of photos out there on the web. I’m really grateful for those of you who visited Piccadilly in the 90s with a camera or indeed the millions who’ve documented Windsor and the show’s Windsor, Burghley House over the years!

Set work is just one string to my bow – see other projects here.

Video

Gold Rushing

For the last nine months I’ve been working for Fluid Pictures on graphics for Raw TV’s Gold Rush, a documentary series for Discovery Channel.

There seem to be two responses to the above. One is to ask what the show entails, the other is to ask why on Earth it needs visual effects. I tend to think of the Gold Rush work to be 3D graphics rather than VFX as it clearly isn’t aiming for a photoreal aesthetic. Unfortunately it’s this that keeps the show off my reel as the two styles clash. Luckily for me, Fluid have their own reel of graphics we’ve made!

I worked on many of these shots, bar the ones at 00:11, 00:17, 00:20, 00:26, 00:31, 00:42, 00:50, 00:53, 00:59, 1:03

I’ve personally been involved with season 10-12 and even a few shots on season 9. Each season is around 24 episodes long, with earlier episodes being broadcast as the later ones are edited. This time constraint, with a delivery every week, means graphics can’t be too fancy or they would continually fall very short of the client’s ideal.

That all being said, we used Houdini as the 3D software of choice, usually used as a straight VFX tool. The node-based methodology, excellent terrain tools and a fairly logical workflow worked in our favour. It was the first time where locations could easily be referenced directly from GIS data. We made tools for drawing out rivers, the cuts in the ground, tree distributions and so on, such that we could concentrate on the shot content. Much of the time the graphics explain how things work or the challenge of moving material from one location to another, but also mechanical things break, especially those with moving parts, so many of the graphics are there to show the problem and how it’s solved.

Oddly there are still technical challenges on this show, with Houdini FX actually being necessary for smoke. Also, although we had simpler Houdini Core solutions for dirt, water and conveyors, we needed to show these things going wrong dynamically or illustrate a point close up.

The show has improved my Redshift 3D skills and made me learn about HDAs, rigging excavators, POP fluids, and machining engine parts using VDBs. That being said, three series is enough for me now. I’m moving on to pastures new with actual VFX work on actual plates.

Gold Rush, at times in its life the most watched show in America on a Friday night, is available on the Discovery network of channels and Discovery+ in the UK.

Advice, Announcements, Video

2020 3D VFX REEL

Video

PDF Shot Breakdown of 2020 3D VFX Reel

After a few more years of pootling about working in London and 2 years of Houdini work, it’s about time I updated my VFX reel! The previous one missed many projects out, so it’s fitting that this one is practically a 2019 one, especially considering the months spent during lockdown working on a personal project or two.

This particular reel contains some of the more effective and impactful shots I worked on for The Planets and the second series of Britannia, both at Lola Post Production in London’s West End. The Planets mainly involved decorative spheres in space, with a strong style that leans heavily on NASA’s archives with inky blacks and no stars. See my preview post from a while back for details!

Towards the end of The Planets I moved on to Britannia Season 2 as the CG shots were ramping up considerably. See my previous blog post for more details on that!

As an aside here, as someone who has switched 3D software to Houdini, if you’re considering learning Houdini, don’t be daunted! Start with the simpler stuff. At Lola, I was given a Houdini Core license which gets used in studios to do the day to day 3D tasks, working on shots, bringing in assets others have made, plus creating shaders, doing layout work etc. If you can handle that, the FX stuff becomes a lot easier to get your head around because you are already thinking Houdini. Looking back, especially now I have my own Houdini license at home, if I had dived into the FX end of things first it would have put me off the software. I can now easily work around problems with wrangles, writing my own nodes in VEX, I understand the logic with which the transforms are put together, the reason why global transforms are hardly ever differentiated from local and so on. If I had to learn that AND how to make a custom destruction sequence I’d be a full time bowl carver by now.

Enjoy the reel! And the drum and bass. Apologies, I needed something with pace and no lace. Feel free to use that last sentence in a conversation today.

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2017 Showreel

After many years of work I’ve finally built up enough new shots to replace much of my old reel. It served me well, bringing in many projects, and indeed some of the better shots still remain, but now with spangly new work alongside!

My contribution to each shot is shown briefly in the bottom left of the screen, with a much more detailed explanation written shot by shot in the PDF breakdown.

In the past few years I’ve been fortunate enough to work on some very interesting projects that have been subject to watertight NDAs. Now that they’ve been broadcast and the dust has settled, it’s a real bonus for me to finally be able to share some of these with you.

The MARS series and Teletubbies were two such projects. MARS was seven months of my time and if I recall correctly, Teletubbies was significantly longer. This left two large projects missing from my reel and consequently any updates to it felt kinda pointless as I’d only be adding one or two shots and labelling it a new reel. The thing with working in TV or film is not all shots that I work on are actually showreel-worthy. Many are similar to each other or shots I’ve made previously, or they may be created using other people’s systems, to the point that putting them in a reel of my own work feels disingenuous.

This reel has been a long time coming, so I hope you enjoy it!