Chris Lacey's Art Blog

Gluttonpood - Animated short

2013-05-23T09:26:00.000+01:00

Gluttonpood is the second film out of my 'seven deadly sins' series and is about a young boy who decides he wants to eat some ice cream. Unfortunately his poodle has other plans. This particular short is based upon gluttony. At first I only planned on doing two of the seven sins for this series but I've decided it might be fun to do the complete seven now that I've finished university.

I did all of the character animation within Adobe Flash. I decided I wanted to do 2D frame by frame animation as it's something I haven't done for a while. I'm really glad I did because I really enjoyed doing it. I mostly animated on twos for this short as I was very pressed for time to finish on deadline. So it would be nice to do something a little bit more detailed in the near future. I also did some of the animation within After Effects. The sky, airplane and the airplane's jet streams were first drawn/painted in Photoshop and then were animated during the compositing process in After Effects. Once again I composed the music for the film. I didn't have much time to do the soundtrack so I kept the music very simple. I also did all the foley and voice acting.

This animation marks the end of my university degree. So my plan now is to do a new version of my showreel and to start looking for work in the industry. I may continue to make these these shorts as they are fairly quick to produce and it might be a fun way to spend my free time.

Vanity Trip - 3D Short Animation

2013-05-22T04:52:00.000+01:00

Here is one of the two shorts I created for my final brief at university. it's about an egocentric jogger meets his untimely demise after paying too much attention to his reflection and not where he is going. I made everything in the animation apart from the character rig, which was created by Josh Burton. The rig can be downloaded for free here on his website.

Originally I wanted to created one long short for my final brief but the scope of idea didn't match up to amount of time I had to produce it. Instead I decided to make as many under a minute shorts as possible. I also wanted to make sure I focused on quality rather than quantity, as I want each one of these films to really help push the quality of my showreel up. Each animation would loosely based around one of the seven deadly sins, this particular animation being based on 'pride'.

The animation was created mainly using 'Maya' although I've combined 2D animation with 3D by using 'After Effects' in post production. I did all the other 2D animation within 'Flash'. Below is a video breakdown of what went into composting for one of the shots in the film.

Scream Scraper - Cancelled Animation Project

2013-05-22T03:00:00.000+01:00

At the beginning of my second semester for my final year of university. I had planned on creating a short animated pilot episode about two friends, a geeky monkey and his simple minded poodle friend.
The episode was going to involve the characters meeting a crazy doctor who had just created a new flavour of ice cream. The ice cream however tastes horrible and has a side effect of turning whatever consumes it into a giant monster, due to the chemical solution the doctor has used. The poodle character is established as not being a fussy eater and straight away devours the ice cream without question. Instantly he is transformed into a twenty foot monster poodle with a hunger for more food. He sees the doctor's ice cream truck and begins to pursue it around the city as the doctor tries to flee his monstrous creation. The monkey at the same time is trying to calm his friend in the hope that his friend might turn back to his normal self. The ice cream truck eventual crashes into a pond with the poodle jumping in after it. It turns out that water is the remedy to the situation, turning the poodle character back his normal self. The animation would end with a shot of a duck swimming up to another ice cream that had fallen out of the truck. the duck would then eat the ice cream, transforming it into a monster duck just before the credits roll.

The show was intended to be child friendly and was going to be produced with a variety of different animation methods, similar to shows such as 'The Adventures of Gumball' and 'Adventure Time'. Each character would be drawn in a different way or would have been animated in 3D. All the backgrounds were also going to be rendered in 3D, just like in my previous animation for Dejaview.
I started creating assets for the animation very early on but I soon realized that the scope of what I wanted to create was going to be impossible to do within the time constraints that I had. However not all the assets I created were useless. I managed to salvage a lot of the work and use it for other smaller animations that I created instead. I still might go back and finish this animation one day but currently I'm busy with different projects. I think I would have seen this project all the way through if I had the whole year to work on it but because of the 'Throwing Dirt' music video I didn't think I would've had time to make something up to my standards. Below are concept images of characters and locations that I created for the project.

Above are concepts for Dr Boulderham, the crazy doctor. I managed to get him fully rigged in flash as a puppet. I felt he had the most potential as a memorable character as he wasn't necessarily evil but just misunderstood.
Below is the concept for what would've been the monkey character. Originally I wanted the character to be a skater dog but I felt that character might have been a bit too cliche and boring. I never settled on a final design for the protagonist unfortunately. I found myself constantly dreaming up new sub characters and episodes that could surround them instead.

Above is the concept for the protagonist's best friend, the poodle. This character was going to animated with a very similar aesthetics to the bear character from the previous Dejaview music video. I knew I wanted at least one character to be done using frame by frame animation and I didn't know exactly how many characters I was going to feature in the pilot. So I decided a main character should be animated in a style I was familiar with.

Here is an early 3D model of the ice cream truck the doctor would have been driving during the episode. I did the rough build in of the model in 'Sketchup' and was then later going to texture and fine tune the model within Maya. The horrific colour scheme on the truck was intended to make uv mapping a little bit easier down the line. I never got that far so unfortunately the truck remains ugly.
Below are some screenshots of the city I was building for the animation. The idea was create the main layout for the city straight away and then be able to use it for later episodes, adding new locations as the show went along. I had already done a lot work modelling and texturing the city. Although I don't think I'll use the model for anything now, (as it was far too big to accommodate simple scene navigation or rendering) I did use a lot of the textures I'd created for other projects however which has saved me a lot of stress and time.

Heart Attack - Music production

2013-05-22T01:38:00.002+01:00

I recently finished working on a track for an animation created by Cassandra Adsett (a fellow animation student on my course). The animation is supposed to raise awareness about the potential dangers of heart failure. The animation shows a beating heart becoming clogged up with fat, until finally a blood clot blocks up the arteries causing a heart attack. Cassie wanted the track to be upbeat and quite busy to represent how many different things were going on with the visuals. I choose to produce the track using entirely electronic elements within Reason 6. This way I could keep the sound and rhythm perfectly functional whilst adding glitches to the sound to suggest that the body was failing. I gave Cassie a couple of different versions of the track, the first version had less of a beat to it and focused more on the string and synthesized elements. Were as the second version had a strong kick drum backing the entire track. Cassie ended up going with the second version of the track. Which was probably a good idea as the kick drum gives the impression of a beating heart.

The full animation can be viewed here on Cassie's YouTube Channel

Also the full track can be listened to and downloaded for free here on my Soundcloud page

Vanity Trip - Animation & Render Progress

2013-04-08T17:08:00.001+01:00

Over the last week I've been working with the Morpheus rig. My aim has been to create a full 3D short using the rig as the main centerpiece. Above is my current progress from a visual standpoint. The last bit of animation that I did with the rig was quite static, so for this short I wanted something a lot more expressive. I'm pretty happy with the early playblasts seen in the video below. There's still a lot of work to do before I finish this particular animation. My main focus at the moment is building props for the scene. All the character animation is pretty much finished and I have a clear plan for everything that needs doing so I'm hoping to finish by the end of next week. If all goes well with this animation I'm hoping to create several more shorts similar to this one all based round the seven deadly sins, this first animation being 'lust'.

Roboface - Portfolio Website

2013-04-08T17:08:00.000+01:00

This last month I launched my new animation portfolio website. I built the page myself, keeping it as simple as I possibly could. The site is compatible with most mobile devices although it doesn't have any css code, so the site doesn't scale unfortunately. The site's only real purpose is to present my showreel whilst giving out my contact details. I likely won't make any changes to website now apart from updating my showreel with new work. I've tried to keep my showreel as short as possible, whilst giving it fairly varied content. It's ok for now but I'm likely to do a new showreel within the next couple of months.

My website can be viewed under the domain www.roboface.co.uk

Throwing Dirt - Reception

2013-04-08T17:07:00.002+01:00

I've been blown away with the reception I've had for the animation I created for DéjàView. The video has been posted and shared all over the web. Fans of DéjàView have been reviewing and sharing and generally just have been having a positive reaction to the video. I'm so happy that people have been able to enjoy the content I've put out and it's all the more incentive to keep doing what I'm doing. Congrats to Ben Potts for the success of his new EP.

Here are just some of the places the video has been featured over the last month or so:

Flashlight - VK feature

Creative Futures Week & Ffresh Festival

2013-04-08T16:37:00.000+01:00

Over the last few months my University has held some interesting talks from industry professionals as part of Creative futures week and the Ffresh film festival. I also attended talks by one of my lecturers Dan Berry about having good business practices as an artist. As part of degree I'm supposed to write up about the talks that I attended. Starting with the Ffresh film festival. I will talk about the talks that I found most relevant to me.

Ffresh Film Festival

Aron Evans - Dinamo

Aron Evans, founder of Dinamo pictures in Cardiff gave us a presentation of his studios showreel. He gave us an insight of the studios beginnings and the basics of getting a job in UK as an animator. He then opened up the floor for Q&A.
Dinamo is known for it's production of multiple children's Television programmes, the most notable of which being the stop motion 'Rastamouse'. Aron gave some helpful advice regarding production. he said things like to give at least two weeks for storyboarding and that his animators could produce anything from two fifthteen seconds of animation a day, anything more and the quality of animation could suffer. He also said it's important to always think like a director with all of your work. The industry is always looking for more directors and he likes for his employees to have their own ideas for shows that they would like to produce. He also went through basics such as when giving someone a pitch keep it to one side A4. Keep your showreel short and be selective about what goes in it. Advice wise it was all stuff that I have heard before however it's always useful to hear how a particular studio likes to receive applications. Aron stressed that 'cel action' is a very important bit of software in children's animation at the moment. I first learned of 'cel action' when visiting Astley Baker Davies and have been meaning to get hold of a copy since, as it seems to be a useful bit of animation software to learn.
I definitely wouldn't mind working somewhere like Dinamo. I don't think I would exclusively go for children's TV. Honestly though I'm happy to work anywhere as long as I'm helping to produce good content.

Suraj Harrington - The Mill

Suraj Harrington is a lead 3D artist at the London studio 'The Mill'. The mill is a international VFX company based in the UK and the USA. Suraj showed us the companies showreel and then ran us through the production of an advert that him and his team had just finished working on for KIA.
I particularly enjoyed this talk as Suraj went into great technical detail on how the effects in the advert were achieved. For example all the text animation behind car was originally animated within after effects and then was exported into their 3D software as an alpha map. This alpha map was then used to as data to tell the keyboard model in the background how to animate. This helped me think about my own 3D production as normally i'm used to exporting 3D materials into a 2D scene but I'd never thought I'd be able to animate something in 2D and have translate into a 3D image.
I'd never thought I'd really be that interested in VFX as I didn't understand completely how I would be able to fit into a production staff but as I've been developing my understanding of programs such as Maya, I'm more open to the idea of working at somewhere like The Mill. No matter where I work I would still be an animator.
I always worry that with 3D I'll be required to do more than I currently understand but with the walk through that Suraj gave us though, I felt more comfortable. Every step that Suraj explained I understood and I felt that were many elements of the production that I could've helped with.
The advert itself is very inventive and be viewed here on vimeo.

Creative Futures Week

Tim Makin - Wink Nudge

Tim Makin, founder of 'Wink Nudge' (a mobile device software development company) gave us a talk about the basics of designing for web content on mobile platforms. Whether it be a tablet device, mobile phone, ios, android or windows. He stressed the importance of simple navigation for users. Less information can be displayed on a screen than on a pc. This opens up interesting design challenges for the developer. How does the developer/designer cram all of the same kind of information as a user would be able access from their computer on their phone. This made me think about my own web presence as more and more people access the internet through their phones. I had to make sure that my site worked on any platform. So when it came to developing my showreel site I made sure every step of the way that my site worked on both ios and android. Now if I send an email containing my showreel to someones phone I can be confident that they will be able to view it wherever they are.
In terms of software development, I'm not particularly interested in taking it as a career path. I've taught myself bits of basic coding here and there but it's more of means to an end than anything else. I'm definitely interested in working more on creating simple games. It would really great to be able one day make a mobile game off my own back but I'd never do it as a full time job unless of course I was only animating.

Yasia Williams Leedham - Octopus Publishing

Yasia Williams, art director at 'Octopus Publishing' gave us a run through of the standard process of how they would design and then produce the cover sleeves of their clients books. It was great to see how much craft went into making book covers. Although the talk wasn't very relevant to my particular skill set, I really enjoyed listening to design process. That being said I wouldn't be opposed to doing illustration for books. It's not where I'd focus my efforts but if I ended up taking that route I think I'd be happy.

It was interesting to hear how in recent years the company have had to adapt to producing for mobile content as well. Due to the success of things like kindle the hard copy industry has taken a considerable hit as less people are buying books from retail. Now Octopus Publishing also design a range of different interactive experiences to go along with their hard copy products. It's a nice reminder that illustration skills will always able translate to popular forms of entertainment. Making sure you have the knowledge to be able publish content to your target audience is always essential.

Chris Woodworth - Traveller's Tales

Chris Woodworth is animator at the game development studio 'Traveller's Tales'. Traveller's Tales are best known for their work on the recent LEGO games which take famous ip's such as Star Wars or Lord of the Rings and then completely redo them in the form of LEGO. It's a novel idea which has seen huge success.
I had already met Chris once before at the global Gamejam so it was nice to be able to catch up with him. I had a lengthy chat with him after his presentation. We disgust all sorts of things ranging from how I should present my work to how Chris saw the future of his career.
I'm very impressed by the range of Chris's work. Both his 2D and 3D work are very good. Talking with Chris gave me the confidence to revisit my own 3D animation. He suggested that I should try using free animation rigs such as Morpheus or Max. I started using Morpheus and I'm so glad I took Chris's advice as I felt I've learnt a lot from it, I'm really enjoying animating in 3D again. So much so that I think will definitely start to look for work in 3D animation as well as 2D.

Dan Berry - Creative Futures Lectures

I've been attending Dan Berry's creative futures lecturers every week before the Easter holidays. Dan has been going over lots of very important business & financial practices. making sure that we understand how to manage professional briefs and commissions. The do's and don'ts of freelancing. He has given a very important insight of how to charge clients appropriately whilst still making a reasonable profit.

I've been very grateful of this information as previously I have undercharged for a lot of my commissions Now I feel I will be able to act a little bit more professional towards all elements of my work.

Dan also went over how to present yourself as an artist in the online space. He said to keep presentation simple and easy to navigate and to make sure all information presented is completely relevant. He suggested for those without a portfolio website that they should use a template plugin for building a website such as wordpress. I decided to go against Dan's suggested approach merely because I've had a little bit of experience developing websites before and I felt it was less complicated for me to build my own site than to learn someone else's template. I'm now happy enough with my portfolio and online presence that I have begun to look for work when I finish my degree later this year.

Laser Etched Skateboards continued

2013-04-07T14:03:00.000+01:00

Here's another one of my laser etched skateboards. Unfortunately I haven't done much with the boards since I first started them. Originally I was just doing the designs for the skateboards, then my friend would print and sell the boards. He has since moved on, so it's up to me to pick where he left off. I still really like the idea of continuing so I've been working on a couple more designs. I'm selling the boards for £80 so please contact me if you're interested. I'm also willing to do custom artwork for the boards if you want to commission me.

Email: chrislacey81@gmail.com

Vitafly - Music production

2013-04-06T13:24:00.000+01:00

Over the last eight months or so I've been putting a lot of focus into my music composition and have finally been confident enough with it to release it. My music currently goes under the name of Vitafly but I may create multiple personas if my music starts to branch out into different genres. I'm currently working on an ep that I will distribute freely across the web under a pay what you want model. It be great to make a little bit money on the side from this project but at the moment I'm just treating it just a passion that I enjoy. I've had a lot of positive feedback from the music I've put out so far and I'm hoping this trend continues. I only have a small following at the moment and I've been limiting the amount of time I give myself for composition, primarily because I don't have long left of my animation degree, which requires the majority of my attention. I'm really looking forward to putting some more time into this project as it been something wanted to do for an incredibly long time now.

I've released my first single here on my bandcamp

I also have a soundcloud page here

href="http://vitafly.bandcamp.com/track/blinded-by-cold">Blinded by Cold by Vitafly

Global Gamejam 2013 - Spirit Rush

2013-04-06T12:24:00.000+01:00

Early this year I took part in the 'Global Gamejam'. Across the globe teams of people have to design and produce some sort of game within fourty eight hours around a theme that is picked at the start of the event. This year the theme was a beating heart.
Originally my group wanted to make a Flash side scrolling game were the player would stop creatures with bad hearts by beating the evil out of them. This would cause the creature to be a friendly NPC with a good heart. Once all the characters had been saved you be able to proceed to the next level.
Unfortunately I was the only person on our team with any coding knowledge within actionscript. This meant a lot of our original ideas had to be scrapped due to me not being able to implement them in time.
In the end the game was still a sidescroller but it became a platformer in which the player had to collect a key to open the door at the end of the level.

'the team'

For the game I wrote all the code and also produced the soundtrack. Everybody else's job was to produce the art assets for the game which I then implemented towards the end of production. At first things didn't run smoothly at all as I had a tough time figuring out what I could actual code. This meant a lot of the assets I had asked for didn't get used. However once we all agreed on simpler game mechanics we managed to work a lot quicker. Amazingly enough we finished producing the game within the time limit and it turned out to be quite fun (but probably too difficult). If I get the chance I'll definitely take part in Gamejam again.

The game can be played here on my website roboface.co.uk

Glyndŵr University Choir - Video Promotion

2013-04-02T00:37:00.001+01:00

I recently put together a video promotion for Glyndŵr University Choir for the university's student magazine 'G mag'. Producing the video involved recording audio and video separately and then syncing them up later in editing. The video needed to be quite short and snappy so I combined shots of the choir singing whilst overlaying the audio I recorded from Richard Adamson's interview (The choir's musical director). I had fun putting the video together and it was nice having complete control of the footage I obtained. My only gripe is I don't own a very good tripod so I wasn't able to get very dynamic shots, this isn't a massive problem however because I don't shoot a lot of video anyway.

Morpheus Animation rig

2013-04-01T22:45:00.000+01:00

I've been meaning to use a free animation rig for quite some time now. As my own rigs have always been a little on the simplistic side. I need to ground myself with more complicated professional rigs if I'm going get any good at 3D. For this test I used the Morpheus rig which was created by Josh Burton which can be downloaded here. I'm really impressed with the rig. It's capable of morphing into lots of different figures without breaking. Hopefully I will be able to do some more ambitious animation with this rig over the coming weeks.

Déjaview - Throwing Dirt Music Video

2013-01-26T22:42:00.000Z

Over the last few months I've been working on and off on an animated music video for Future Flavour's up and coming artist Déjaview. The video follows a bear through a forest as he discovers music. This leads to him having a psychedelic experience which he eventually shares with the other animals around him.
I really wanted to challenge myself creating this video by heavily relying on a broad amount of technical aspects for production. Primarily this meant I produced most of the backgrounds in 3D within Maya and animated characters in 2D within Flash. I then combined both worlds within After Effects; i'm very proud of the result.

For character design I didn't really stray too far from original concepts. The differences are pretty much unnoticeable in fact. However on the 3D side of things I did a lot of work trying to get a style that worked. At first every object in background was an actual 3D model. This proved to be a lot of work; neither did it look very good as the characters really clashed with the scenery. In the end I settled with 2.5D backgrounds which used curved planes of 2D images to give an illusion of full 3D. This had it's pluses and downsides. The good thing being I could produce backgrounds which blended well with my style. The downside was lighting was very hard to get right. I couldn't really use shadows as I rendered without raytracing. Meaning alpha maps wouldn't cast the correct kind of shadows. any shadows I made had to be faked later in After Effects.

An early concept render of the 3D environment.

I felt my approach to production worked pretty well for once on this animation. I had a clear idea of what I could achieve with each of the different set of tools that I used. Because of this I feel I scheduled appropriately. I deffinately want to keep animating using a range of different programs like I have. I think I need to work a lot on the 2D side of things in terms of animating. I felt some of my illustration could have been better but I'm not unhappy with it either.

I really Like the music for the video as well. And i'm not just saying that because I was paid either. I'm generally excited for Ben Potts (Déjaview) to release some new music. I've been whistling and humming this tune ever since I started working on the video and that's a very good sign considering I've been working on it for so long. Please go and support his music when his e.p. releases this month on the 31st

3D Forest - Maya Model continued

2012-11-27T14:48:00.000Z

I've continued creating 3D backgrounds in Maya. I've been mainly focusing on the forest environment seen below.
I've made a lot of changes to the assets for the forest; the most obvious being the trees. I decided that I wasn't happy with the 3D trees that I had before; as I felt they didn't really match the rest of the environment. So instead I've created a variety of hand-drawn trees in Flash which I then imported into Maya. I've made the trees slightly 3D by putting them on curved planes. This means I can still move my camera without objects looking skewed.

I have also created an interior forest scene. I wanted this scene to be darker than the other scenes but still keep the same colour palette. I think I've pretty much achieved my goal. The scene maybe a little too dark but this is something I can continue to tweak as I go along. I still need to create a few more environments for this forest yet but I feel like I should be able to make them pretty quickly seeing as most of my assets have been created now.

3D Forest - Maya Model

2012-09-17T07:30:00.000+01:00

Recently I've been making a lot of 3D assets in Maya for several different animations that I'm working on.
One of the main things I have been trying to teach myself over the Summer is how to use UV maps to texture my models (UV maps are coordinates given to a models texture, allowing it to placed in any size, shape or position). I've still got a lot to learn regarding UV's but I'm particularly happy with my progress here. It's allowed me to create my own textures. Meaning I can keep a consistent visual style with each of my projects.

I've started to take more account into rendering times now as well, as it's pretty normal for me to compile a single shot three separate times. I need to make sure my poly count stays within reasonable limits as well as making sure my lighting isn't too memory intensive. But at the same time I want everything to still look good. For now I'm going with depth map shadows. Ideally I would want to go with 'raytracing' but It's proving to take too long to render.
Here's an example of different lighting techniques I've tried:

Depth map shadows (shadows correspond to a models shape but ignores texture) - medium render time

Raytrace lighting (allows shadows that use 'alpha map' data) - long render time

Flat shaded/ No shadows - Quick render time

Another way I've been keeping my render times down is by using 2D texture plains to fake detail. For example instead of having hundreds of tree models in the background I used illustrations I created in Flash instead. I used the same approach to rendering things like bushes, flowers and grass. Not only did this keep my render times down it also complimented my visual style. I imagine once I have all the animated elements in one shot; the combination of illustration and 3D should make for some interesting aesthetics.

I think this scene has still a lot to go before I completely happy with it but I've really enjoyed putting together what I've done so far.

Burnt Vampire - Concept Art

2012-07-26T04:10:00.000+01:00

Decided to do some concept art today. So I ended up drawing this burnt vampire. I wanted the picture to look like a frame from a film. So I made sure there was dramatic lighting and also depth to the picture. The proportions could be slightly better on the face but otherwise I'm happy. I took around three hours in photoshop to complete this.

Sonic Walk Cycle

2012-07-22T16:59:00.000+01:00

For my final year at university I want to create an animation that combines both 3D and 2D elements seamlessly. This little walk cycle was a test to see how easy it would be to achieve. Broken down the shot is comprised of three main elements. Firstly there's the goofy looking Sonic which I animated in flash. His cycle could probably use a couple more frames but otherwise I'm happy with him; after all this is just a test. I then modelled/animated the 3D chili-dog in Maya. I exported both the sonic and chili-dog animation as PNG sequences into photoshop were I gave them a stroke and bevel effect.
Lastly I needed a backdrop for animation. I wanted the shot to be an everlasting cycle, so I decided a scrolling plane would the simplest thing to do. I quickly modelled up a basic looking floor in google sketchup and then animated a camera path over the model in 3Ds max.
I then compiled the entire shot in after effects adding little details like shadows. I also added some scrolling background elements just to add a bit more depth.
This approach to animating definitely takes a lot more planning but I never felt like the process was anymore difficult. If anything I enjoyed making the animation more because I wasn't doing the same thing all the time. I think my next real test is to have 3D and 2D characters interact.

El Zergio Logo - Graphic Design

2012-07-20T15:23:00.000+01:00

I recently was commissioned to create the below logo. The illustration and text were drawn in Flash and then edited in Photoshop. Normally I only do my illustration in flash and then I will do any text in Photoshop. However this time I needed the text to look 3D. The text needed pop so flat colours were a must. I'm really pleased that the approach I took worked out; as I feel the text looks quite striking. I will definitely take a similar approach to text next time I do some design.

Cook With Dan - Animation

2012-06-30T04:38:00.000+01:00

Over the last two weeks I have been colaborating on an animated short called 'Cook With Dan'. Above is the final movie. The film is an adaptation from Dan Berry's comic and was directed and supervised by Dan Berry, Claire Fouquet and Christopher Mage.

I worked alongside a set of very talented French and American animation students who were in the country as part of a animation workshop. A detailed blog of the workshop can be found here.
I worked mainly on animating puppets in After Effects, I also did a small amount colouring in Flash as well. The animation was heavily planned and had a very strict deadline. This was great practice for our mangenment skills, we had make sure we didn't take too long on certian shots as well make sure all of our files followed the same naming convention. This insured that no essenstial files would be lost when came to editing the final animation.

It really fealt great to work on such a large project like this. It's refreshing to work with a team of people for a change. You get to see the a project come together so much faster than you would normally. There's deffianelty a huge sense of accomplishment seeing a group project like this finished with a consitant quality. I'm also really glad of the experiance with After Effects; as I have been meaning to learn the program for quite some time now. Overall I have met some great people over the last two weeks and I'm really proud to have work with them!

London Night Shoot - Nikon D3100

2012-06-04T22:42:00.000+01:00

Afar - Scrimshire - Music Video

2012-05-31T15:54:00.000+01:00

Recently I just finished working with Adam Scrimshire. A very talented musician based in London. I had the pleasure of making a music video for his lastest album 'The Hollow'. The track being titled 'Afar'. You can listen to the album in full here on Scrimshire's website.
I met Scrimshire through a chance conversation on Twitter, were we joked about making a music video for another song. Adam then mentioned his new album and asked if I would like to create a music video for it. Already being a fan of Scrimshire's work I jumped at the chance.
It was very important to keep similar aesthetics to the original album artwork. To do this this I stuck to filming everything live action; focusing mainly on plant life and also using a mixture of artwork from the album and shots of out of focus lights; mostly being off passing traffic.
I shot the majority of the footage in my hometown of Whitchurch. However I also did a lot of filming down in London. This allowed me to get a lot shots of slow moving traffic which I later synced up whilst editing the video.

All the video was shot using a Nikon D3100. The video was then edited in Sony Vegas.

It's been a real pleasure working with Adam and hopefully it won't be the last time either! Please check out Scrimshire's work on the following links:

http://www.scrimshire.com/
Twitter : @scrimshire
Facebook : http://www.facebook.com/scrimshire
Youtube : http://www.youtube.com/user/scrimshire
Soundcloud : http://soundcloud.com/scrimshire

Also Check out Scrimshire's label 'Wah Wah 45s'. They have a fantastic range of music That I can't rate highly enough!

Ignis Lake - Teaser Trailer

2012-05-16T12:39:00.000+01:00

For the ignis lake teaser trailer I realised that I was hard pushed for time so I decided to use several different methods in achieving my final goal. I wanted to make an underwater scene set at the bottom of Ignis Lake. With my limited knowledge of 3D animating packages I decided that the best way to get the scene I wanted would be to add GFX whilst I was compositing the video. I started off making a fairly simplistic scene in Maya. I then made a particle system in 3Ds max to simulate specs floating around in the water. Once I had these two elements; I placed them over each other in Sony Vegas. Finally I added a few blurry filter effects to make the scene seem like murky water.

'Creating the particle system in 3Ds Max'

'Creating the environment in Maya'

I also took a similar approach to the end titles. I layered over several pieces of video including smoke, fire and text and then had the videos slowly cycle through each other to make what looks like flames underwater. It took a lot of adjusting but I'm pleased with the results.

Overall considering the amount of time I had to create the trailer, I'm really pleased with it. I think it nicely caps off the end of this project as I've pretty much been able to use all the assets that I had made beforehand and put them together into one big collective piece. I as I mentioned the brief was a collaborative piece, more research and write ups can be found here 'andrewroberts.blogspot.com'

Ignis Lake - Source SDK map concept

2012-05-13T18:57:00.000+01:00

All the assets in the above screenshot are taken from Valve's game 'Half-Life 2'

I've got quite a bit of experience with Valve's source SDK 'Hammer' map editor (some of my previous work). So I decided quite early on that it would be fun to do some concept level design for the game. Creating these environments gave us a rough idea on what the town of Ignis Lake would look like. We took a lot of inspiration from the silent hill franchise. I wanted very dim light, grit and fog. This would help the town feel more isolated and claustrophobic. I find little exercises like this very important, grounding yourself with a game engine allows you to get a good idea of what your capabilities are. Often concept can be too optimistic on the artist's side. If I know what goes into creating an actual level or character; then I can do all of my designing around these boundaries.

Zombie Walk Cycle

2012-05-13T14:59:00.000+01:00

Here is a finished walk cycle for my zombie character. It was a lot trickier than I thought it would be to animate a limp for the character, I'm glad I tried though as I think it would have looked stupid if the zombie walked normally. I also wanted reinforce the fact the zombie is supposed to be a woman. To do this I gave the zombie an excessive amount of hip sway. I'm really happy with the end result. The legs don't bend perfectly but this is down to how I've modelled the character in zbrush. Next time I make a character in zbrush the legs need to be completely straight. I've also given the character some simple face animation. I never really intended to animate the characters face much but I'm really happy with the way it turned out. My next step is to produce a teaser trailer for the game.