I’m currently available for 3D generalist work in the UK, ideally either remote, or as a hybrid to London arrangement. I do a lot of layout and environments, asset creation, lighting and leading small teams.
My full CV is on this website along with an up to date showreel.
Please contact me via aj@ajcgi.co.uk
A Gentleman In Moscow is the last show I worked on during my latest stint at Rumble VFX. The reel above contains breakdowns of many of the shots I worked on.
I was initially tasked with creating a reusable Moscow skyline asset. This was inspired by photographs of the 1920s and 1930s. Many of the buildings used were from off the shelf kits. These had textures, but weren’t yet set up for Redshift 3D, nor indeed Houdini ready. The process became much easier after a few models. For example I had a script set up to convert shaders to Redshift ones with the correct names and textures attached. All needed balancing to look approximately the same when brought in to one primary scene.
Photography of the time shows the typical Russian formal gardens in front of the Bolshoi and Metropol. I began the layout with these gardens, working out from there. Much of them are point instanced models of bushes, flowers and grasses with hero shrubs and trees placed by hand. This was in part because in some shots they got in the way and in others they needed adding to so as to give height to the scene.
Paved areas were defined with curves. Stoned edging and cambered road surfaces were added in procedurally along and away from the curves respectively. There was even a tram system for creating recessed metal rails in the road and slightly different cobbles on the ground. A separate one defined the power lines. In one shot I went to the extent of animating the over head lines and the pantograph on the tram, something that is maybe only visible on very large TVs!
A technical challenge with having so many models and lights in shot, was that of memory limits, especially VRAM. To remain quick at rendering Redshift must use less than the available GPU memory. Plants were read off disk at render and most of the buildings were converted to rs proxy files. They load in quickly and could still have their shaders altered globally for one specific pass, the snow.
The snow pass was in addition to the usual beauty with a snow material overriding all the usual ones. It was blended with the beauty using Normal, AO, noise and other custom AOVs in Nuke. This method allowed us to be flexible about the location of snow. As with other projects where I’m setting up a primary setup for a team I had a Nuke script that could show compositors roughly the end result I was aiming at.
Snow on the ground was actually one large grid with its own gentle undulations, pushed up near to buildings, street furniture and so on. It was then roughened in these locations and poly reduced, keeping the detail in these bumpy areas. To add further detail when seen at ground level, the snow grid was worked in to with displacement maps, particularly footprints.
Other tasks on A Gentleman In Moscow included animating a picture frame, shot by the count to alarm the hotel manager. In the plate, the practical gun went off then half a second later the picture swung down! For impact, timing and believability we decided to replace the whole thing post-firing. I made a simple model of the frame, complete with photo, mount board, glass and frame, then I set up a shattering system.
Stills on set gave me a great reference for which bits of glass remained in the frame and where the bullet hole should be. I drew out wobbly lines radiating from the hole and set up an RBD sim in Houdini. I had trouble getting the finesse I wanted from the SOP level shattering system so only used that to break the mesh in the first place, passing that and the constraints to a custom DOPnet. In there I gave the sim a speed limit, some drag and transferred velocity from the picture frame over the first frame or two for pieces within a certain range. This was to assist with the appearance of glass being pushed by the frame as well as the bullet. Anything that shot backwards for any reason was rapidly decreased in size so as to vanish.
A Gentleman In Moscow is now streaming on Paramount+. To see more of my work, check out the other projects!
PDF Breakdown of 2024 Showreel
A new 3D VFX Showreel has been long overdue.
The last few years have seen a lot of changes to my reel, though a couple of projects are missing, either through incongruity or tight Netflix IP restrictions, so I’ve snuck in some pre-pandemic stuff. I’m working on a private reel including shots from The Crown, so if you’d like to see that, get in touch via aj@ajcgi.co.uk.
Like many in the UK VFX scene I still work either remotely or hybrid. My commute in to London is a 4 hour round trip so please take that in to account if you get in touch after seeing this reel.
Primarily I use Houdini. There are some who would claim that’s not the weapon of choice for generalist work, but I would contest that. Lots of my work is documentary and drama content where I’ve been hired to do environments and set extensions. This means I do asset builds, scene layout, lighting, and just about everything including tracking and sometimes the compositing too. Houdini works fine for practically everything I throw at it and is flexible enough for me to set up entire scenes as a base for others and have them understand what they’re looking at.
Naturally there’s other work absent from this 3D VFX Showreel, so take a look at the projects page for more.
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
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.
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.
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.
CGI – Computer Generated Imagery, as a term has always been an enigma. Personally I see it as being 3D graphics, but Wikipedia confusingly refers to it as including some 2D also.
VFX – Visual Effects, to many is synonymous with green screen. I’ve long suspected this belief comes from Behind The Scenes documentaries, vacuous DVD fillers that are so popular I do wonder if many people prefer so-called BTS content to actual movies and TV shows.
The VFX industry is so vast in scope that keying green screen (or any colour really) is one of dozens of things you could be asked to do within a week as a compositor. In itself, compositing is one of dozens of jobs in the business. However, very little compositing work is what many regard as CGI.
There! Right… there! You see it? That’s the grey area. If a viewer of a cinematic spectacle sees a hint of VFX they may well jump to thinking of it as CGI. Not all VFX contains CGI. Am I splitting hairs because I do 3D CGI and see CGI as 3D only? Yes. Yes I am.
When people say that show X has no CGI in, they might be right, or at least think they are. Lots of shows I work on have literally hundreds of VFX shots but only a dozen or so contain 3D graphic elements. The amount of VFX work in TV is astonishing. If you don’t notice it, it’s succeeded in being excellent.
To me, traditional 20th Century Hollywood was about in-camera practical effects and hand-painted backdrops. These days those are often, but not always, referred to as SFX – Special Effects. That historically has been used for so many things that now even VFX is lumped in with SFX in the media, to the extent awards are given out in the category of Special Visual Effects. Add in AI imagery and now nobody outside, or indeed inside, the VFX business has a clue what to do with all the acronyms.
The recent Barbenheimer furore made me think. Both Barbie and Oppenheimer contain a lot of VFX work – tonnes of it – but the directors’ favour of traditional methods was set upon by the media as a good thing, getting us all away from that pesky CGI. The CGI was never the issue. It was scriptwriting, acting, the terrible art direction, but most of all, a complete and utter misunderstanding of the whole VFX business and those who work within it.
To me, films and TV would improve a lot if the focus returned to making gripping stories with well-developed characters. Get that right, then speak to a VFX studio about what might work best as practical or VFX work. Read around the subject, talk to us VFX folk directly about what we’re doing, (and credit us if you would be so kind) but leave those misleading BTS docs alone. They aren’t made by those who made the effects.
To see the things I’ve worked on over the years and judge my qualifications for judginess, see Recent Work.
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.
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.
On my longest stint working for one client, 14 months at Lola Post, I was lucky enough to be working on The Planets, first airing on BBC 2 on Tuesday May 28th, a decade after the previous BBC show of the same title aired.
A lot has happened in the last ten years – scientific advances and space exploration has led to us having unprecedented imagery and data from our solar system which has altered the theories as to how Earth and its sisters came into being, why we have life and other planets currently don’t, inspiring future voyages into the unknown. Down here on our little blue marble, technology has marched on apace, supporting space exploration and indeed driving it, but it has another positive outcome too – a huge improvement in visual effects.
This series has hundreds of VFX shots in it, many of them involving visualising locations we can’t possibly send a film crew to and times so far in the past it’s hard to imagine. With so many shots, and so many different terrains and planetary destinations to represent, I was brought in early to do look development and some research into how things may appear. Once the series was underway this was supported by the Open University who informed of correct details and current theories regarding how a landscape looks, the colour of the sky, the variety of tones on the ground and so on.
Helping all this was the fact that NASA and ESA put a lot of their data out in to the public domain, so written information, photographs, global textures and even elevation data, are available to you and I for free. There’s a lot to wade through but it was well worth the trouble.
Much of my terrain work and planetary imagery was pieced together in Terragen, though some of the wider planet shots including contemporary Earth, Jupiter and Neptune, are made in Houdini, that also being the 3D software of choice for laying out camera moves, adding asteroids, dust clouds and so on. The probes, asteroids, meteors and landers were mostly tackled by a team of talented artists and operators, some being hired for their lighting skills, modelling, others for more challenging Houdini simulation and destruction work.
Many were working for several months, a few of us well over a year, with production itself taking 2 years in total! That’s a lot of people putting in a lot of effort, and if my recent viewing of an episode is anything to go by, it’s all been worthwile!
For more info, check out the BBC Earth site at https://www.bbcearth.com/theplanets
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!
A while back I had my first stint of working at Glassworks London.
After assisting on a PS4 ad, tweaking a few shots to help another 3D guy with his workload, I moved onto this advert for Swisscom.
Layout is a stage that many of us do as part of shot creation. It’s similar to photographic composition in that elements in a scene must fit together on screen to draw the viewers’ attention to the right things, give scale to a shot, or perhaps a sense of drama or relaxation. In this case the skiier has to look fast so the piste has to be described on the mountainside in a way that suggests quick downhill progress in each shot.
We placed lots of fences in such a way that when someone else came along with a working system for simulating the wobble of said fences they were already there and the layout wouldn’t have to be worked on. This is almost always wrong as the layout tends to be adjusted according to client’s needs. For example if they feel the background isn’t working, perhaps the matte painting will need changing and the piste now runs into a mountainside. Looking at the final cut for the first time recently made me notice this had indeed happened and the fences had been adjusted accordingly.
All in all the piste appears consistent in width and our skiier makes it down to the finish line in double quick time!
To me this is quite a clever little advert, something that Glassworks seem to specialise in.
