Filmography 1999 to 2014This is a run through of my most memorable projects in various genres over the years. I've dropped in some facts about their development. If you want to read them all in historical order start from the bottom of the University page to get everything in context. There are links to videos where ever possible and many of them have pages dedicated to each project. |
Personal Projects | Films | Game Cinematics | TV and Commercials |
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2013 to 2014 - Film - Working as a Senior Previs Artist at Proof I've started working on the third in this imaginative series. I can tell it's going to throw up some interestingly varied shot scenarios. Night at the Museum 3's IMDB page. Copyright © 20th Century Fox 2014 |
2014 - TV Series - Storyboard Artist at Heromation Storyboard test for Nickelodeon. Copyright © of Nickelodeon 2014 |
2013 to 2014 - Commercial - Director and Generalist at Heromation Here's a look at the storyboard panels for this. The Official Website. 
Copyright © of Green Team Energy Services 2014 |
2013 - Film - Working as a Senior Previs Artist at Proof I spent seven months in a surprisingly creative role as a previs artist on this film. It's a wonderful crew, lots of fun. We even got to spend the first few months on the Universal lot, which had it's perks. We were able to explore the backlot a little during our lunch breaks. It was nice to be able to take a step outside regularly to get a little sun. The roast chicken at the Cafe on Wednesday was well worth the long walk, especially with the gravey! Fast and Furious 7's IMDB page. Copyright © of Universal Studios 2014 |
2013 - Film - Working as a Senior Previs Artist at The Moving Picture Company I spent a couple of months working with a great crew over in Santa Monica. I have many fond memories hanging out with them, and exploring the area. Lots of excellent food options and things to see. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes's IMDB page. Copyright © of Fox Searchlight 2014 |
2013 - Website Intro Video - Director and Generalist at Heromation I'd worked with the client a couple of times before for some pitches, and this intereactive website was one of the ones that got commisioned. I was able to work from home, which made for a nice change. There was a good number of characters to rig and animate for various parts of the site, but the really fun part was the intro involving a character breaking out of a glass tube and all the effects surrounding that. The trick was making everything work with alpha transparencies and tightly times animated sections and loops so that it could all be coded into the intereactive website by the web developers. It was a quick turn around so I couldn't do anything too fancy and I was quite pleased with the resulting footage. The Official Website. 
Copyright © of Spin Master Ltd 2013 |
2013 - Film - Working as a Shot Creator at Third Floor This was a short gig setting up shots, and doing previs (camera and layout) for the film, Divergent. Some of the shots from one of the sequences I worked on actaully made it into the trailer. Divergent's IMDB page.
Copyright © of Red Wagon Entertainment 2013 |
2013 - Commercial - Working for Logan as an Animator This was a super quick project. I came in as a new animator at Logan in Los Angeles and found myself working on my third Skylanders project. I was assigned two of the most fun shots with Skylanders' biggest re-occuring series favourite character, Kaos. I worked, primarily on the last two shots, the ones with the Duck and Baby legs. I also helped out with a few other things including the text and titles. It was an incredibly quick turn around and the small team at Logan did a great job given the schedule. Here's the full spot, or you can see my specific shots with the button below.
Copyright © of Activision 2013 |
2012 to 2013 - Indie CG Short Film - Working with Martell Animation as a Layout Artist, Animator and Head of Story This is an ongoing project that I've put in a few of months of work so far. There's a small crew of dedicated CG artists working on it in Softimage XSI. I've been largely involved in the 3D filmmaking side of things, creating rough versions of shots, editing it together and figuring out what works to tell the story. It's been a very collaborative process with the Director, Lucas Martell. You can take a look at the thumbnail storyboards I did for the character shots int he film here. I'll post more on this further down the line. In the mean time here's the production blog and my blog entries detailing my inside story on the production. 
Copyright © of Martell Animation 2013 |
2012 - Previs for Live Action Commercials - Working for The Studio NYC as a Previs Artist This was a short project of only about fifteen days total. We had a small team and we knocked out ten to twenty previs commercials to give the advertising agency material to screen for testing purposes, before the choose which ones to shoot in live action. It was my first time working with Viewport 2.0 in Maya which was interesting and allowed for real-time lighting. It had it's limitations but it was a lot like working in a games engine. But it meant nothing had to be rendered so you had a much better idea of what it was going to look like for the client. Nothing was properly animated, but there was a surprising amount of polish expected for previs and we went through a lot of variations in things like costume. The pieces I'm posting here are only a tiny sample of the work we did, and they're all collaborations. Where possible I've posted the version I did, but in many cases it's a blend of work done by several artists over the course of the project and I'm just posting the sections that had the largest contribution by me. As an indication of how fast these things came together, the first two thirty second commercials were created in one day. An all new crew, that largely didn't know each other, were recruited on the Friday afternoon started Saturday morning and delivered two watchable commercials to the client Sunday morning!
Copyright © of Budweiser 2012 |
2012 - Short Subject - Working for Panda Panther as an Animation Director and Generalist After the two large Skylanders projects had been completed the small team of staffers left at Panda Panther turned to creating some new showreel pieces for the company reel. They'd recently bought a motion control camera rig to shoot stop-motion elements. We moved it from one New York basement to another and took several days of professional training from a British master of motion control to learn all it's tricks. The desire was to find a good way to blend live, modeled and stop motion elements into CG and 2D animated elements. It was something I'd wanted to have a go at for some time and a good excuse to experiment. The idea was to create an intro and outro for the company reel. The visual elements came purely from the the creators and owners of the company but within that brief we experimented with how to make something that gelled well between all the unique elements. A unique challenge was trying to make a camera move in Maya, that would not make the real world camera collide into the walls or ceiling. The basement roof was covered in pipes and there were pillars to avoid. This is a very expensive piece of kit so we couldn't have it hitting anything. After a lot of experimental maneuvering of the camera rig I measured out an oddly shaped space that we could apply to our 3D scene to limit the movement of the camera. We also had to consider the speed the camera was able to move. Fortunately we were only shooting a static set. Truthfully two major things could have been done differently to make things easier and better. There was a black curtain behind the set that was supposed to give the sense of the abyss of water. The 3D camera move still had to be tracked to make it work in 3D as there were tiny variations with the source camera move in Maya, and a black curtain is about the worst thing you can imagine using to track. The hero object in the scene was also modeled out of cardboard, yet had to be animated like a living fish. A CGI version of the fish had to be made to match the real world version and naturally making them match was time consuming. If this had been a client's project you probably would have taken the simpler route to make sure it was done in a timely manor. As other work came into the studio and people took much earned holiday time this project got put onto the back burner, and as chance would have it I moved on from the company before they finished, it so it's with great curiosity that I saw it turn up on their reel. There were some immense challenges that needed to be overcome but I'm glad they finished it.
Copyright © of Panda Panther 2012 |
2012 - Stereoscopic Cinematics - Working for Panda Panther as an Animation Director Hot off the completion of the main Skylanders Giants cinematics we were tasked with a set of four new cinematics for a different Nintendo 3DS game based on the Skylander characters. This time we had to work in Stereoscopic 3D, which was actually new territory for me. I understood a lot of the fundamentals from following the business and taking some lectures from experts, but I'd yet to spend much time practicing it. There was no time to worry about it though and we dived in... more...
Copyright © of Activision 2012 |
2012 - HD Cinematics - Working for Panda Panther as an Animation Director After the release of my short film 'Devils, Angels and Dating' I was just putting my name out there as a potential Animation Director when I came across this unique opportunity in New York. Panda Panther was recruiting for animators for their next big Skylanders job. After a conversation with the Directors it was clear there was a good opportunity here for me to help them at a high level and I was hired as an Animation Director. There were a few related projects around the franchise and the first was a number of cinematic sequences for the XBox 360, PS3 and Wii games due out before Christmas. I took a Lead role alongside a good number of other talented Leads, heading up two of the twelve sequences... more...
Copyright © of Activision 2012 |
2012 - CG Animated Series - Working for Rooster Teeth as a Technical Director I returned to Rooster Teeth for another stint on Red vs Blue, this time kicking off the new Maya department for Season 10. Previously Poser had been their primary 3D package and it was still in use for this season too, but it was becoming obvious that they'd need to develop a more widely adopted package for most things in order to expand the goals of the show. I headed up the initial stages of that, built up a team, techniques, tools, work flow etc... I wasn't actually around for the earnest filmmaking or animation but I had some fun creating the pipeline. One of the primary tools that was needed was a fast way to rig a large cast of characters and apply mocap/animation from one of three sources; Maya, Poser and directly from the mocap capture studio. The rigs also needed to be animator friendly, which is usually not the case with mocap related material, so that they could do all kind of crazy physical things with the characters you wouldn't want to do in a mocap suite. It was an interesting challenge I'd only ever touched on in parts before. But the end results were pretty good. I left it in the hands of Joe, another TD that joined the team a little later, who will no doubt have refined the process. By the time I left there was a small but dedicated team of people ready to start the first episode and already on deadline to produce some content for the premiere announcement of Season 10 at PAX. I had a hand in only one shot that was intended for the teaser trailer, and I'd like to have shown it here, but as always if you're not the last man standing when these things go to the wire you can't count on your work making it through in one piece, and it appears the same happened here which is always a shame. I wish them all well for the rest of Season 10 which you can see weekly episodes of on their website. 
Copyright © of Rooster Teeth Productions, LLC 2012 |
2006 to 2012 - Indie CG Short Film - Director I developed a short computer generated film called 'Devils, Angels and Dating' purely for the love of animated filmmaking. The goal of the art and tech in this project was to produce a film that's so unique and beautiful in every frame that it would catch the attention of any internet browser and make them... More...    
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2011 - CG Animated Series - Working for Rooster Teeth as a Filmmaker / Animator / Generalist Red vs Blue is a spin off comedy web series created in and around the Halo game universe. Much of the footage is captured from the game itself with voices added, and that's how it started. But nine seasons later it's developed into a hybrid CG animated / game captured series. I joined Rooster Teeth in August and found that they use every trick in the book to get the footage to the screen. It was very refreshing, that we could use whatever tool was best for the job. It felt a lot like a games development house in its culture, but in many ways it was also a bit of a wild card and they would make short films and commercials all the time. They've attracted a huge cult following over the years. I wasn't really there long enough to do anything amazing, but I dove in and helped out with all kinds of tasks. Essentially helping them to reach their DVD deadline. The most curious thing about their pipeline was the use of Poser as their primary 3D software. We quickly found that it was going to be faster to adapt the pipeline to use Maya and I helped out in that process as well... although it did mean that not only did we have a season to finish in a month but we had to create an all new pipeline. There were a lot of corners cut, but the work got done. You can see several episodes containing my work at the Rooster Teeth website from about Episode 11 onwards.
Copyright © of Rooster Teeth Productions, LLC 2011 |
2011 - Coke CG Animated Short Film - Working for Psyop LA as a Senior Animator After spending a couple of years working on confidential projects it’s refreshing to have worked on something I can talk about again. I’m writing this after returning to Austin, after spending a couple of months in Los Angeles. I got the call to work at Psyop and when I found it was going to be on Happiness Factory I couldn’t have been… happier. Ironically another job option came up at the same time (why do they always come along at the same time?) ... more...
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2010 - Game and Real-time Cinematics - Working for Armature as the Lead Animator During my two years at Armature as their Lead Animator I worked on a number of, as yet, unannounced prototype games for a variety of publishers. This evolution of the Megaman franchise surfaced on various games news sites and video portals in 2013.
Copyright © of Capcom 2010 |
2008 to 2009 - CGI Feature Film - Working remotely for Walsh Family Media as a Character Animator I did some part time work on this budget CGI film featuring the Cool Bean characters. It was an interesting challenge working from home, but very familiar territory in every other respect and involves some interesting characters and strong cartoony animation. Here's their website. |
2008 - Live Action & CGI Commercial - Working for Glassworks as a Senior Animator At a time when Glasswork's in-house animator was busy on another project I was brought in as a Freelancer to handle half of the new batch of Churchill adverts. Only two and a half weeks, this one. I setup the shots and animated the Churchill dog for two adverts. There was actually a total of four to do but Alastair handled the other two. Setting up the cameras was a manual affair of lining things up crudely based on some rough numbers we had from the shoot. Not everything fit as it was supposed to though and more...
Copyright © of Churchill Insurance 2009 |
2008 - Live Action & CGI Commercial - Working for Passion Pictures as a Senior Animator Back to Passion Pictures and I did the Previs on this advert for Vodafone involving shot setup and more uniquely... a lot of Dominos! Julian was handling the tech side of the Dominos as I gave him feedback to get the tools to work. Working closely with the Directors from the Mixtape Club, who came over from New York for this, I tried out lots of shot and Domino setups, figuring out how the Live Action elements would fit into the shots while making key phrases read as the Dominos get more and more ambitious. It was a simple yet fun project and I really enjoyed working with Michelle, Chris and Jesse from the Mixtape Club. There are a few other versions out there, with different edits and endings. I just saw one on the TV with my spinning phone ending!
Copyright © of Vodafone 2008 |
2008 - Animated CGI Commercial - Working for Passion Pictures as a Senior Animator I started at Passion Pictures and I was working on a really cool project which gave me plenty of room to flex my film making and animation skills. I'm a huge fan of the various styles of Passion Pictures portfolio and a few of my friends from MPC made the move too for various other projects, so it was fun. The first Rock Band cinematic was very... more...
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2008 - VFX based Feature Film - working for MPC as a Senior Character Animator Animating on Prince Caspian, I met lots of great people while I settled into life in London. I got the chance to work on characters combining live action and animation, as well as full CG characters. Everything from Tigers, Leopards, Cheetahs, Minotaurs and Fauns to Centaurs. Here's a sneak peak behind the scenes.
Copyright © of The Walden Media Group 2008. |
2008 - CGI Animation demoreel This reel features samples of recent work from various projects currently in the public domain.
The music is from "K-Pax" which is the Copyright © of The Universal Classics Group. |
2007 to 2008 - CGI Animation - Personal Project I'd wanted to do something acrobatic like this since my University years but when Disney's Tarzan came out I opted not to do it as I figured it would be seen as a rip off, since then Spiderman has also achieved similar feats. Well I felt it was time to have a go anyway to add a little variety to my reel. The character model and texturing was done by my friend Jamie and I rigged it using Setup Machine 2. I've also sculpted a series of facial expressions and incorporated them into the rig with... More...
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2008 - Live Action Advert - working for The Moving Picture Company as a Senior Animator I spent a week pre-visualising how the little people would work in the car's interior space. The results may look quite simple but it was surprisingly tricky finding natural ways to make each scenario work. Here's a shorter version and here's a higher quality version.
Copyright © of Toyota 2008 |
2008 - CGI TV Advert - working for The Moving Picture Company as a Senior Animator A last minute move to London, started with about three weeks working on this 'Pod Racer' style advert at MPC. It was a fast schedule and the advert was on air five weeks after I started on it, which is a really fast turn around the team can be very proud of. There's nothing particularly complex in the animation but the results were good, and the people I worked with were great. I did most the work on the spark plug and wheel shots moving through the corridors. You can read the MPC write up here.
Copyright © of Renault 2008. |
2007 - CGI TV Advert - working for Ark VFX as the Senior Animator This Television advert for the Singapore Navy was an interesting piece of work. The brief was; the buildings come to life and head out to sea to engage in battle with office themed projectiles, we then cut back to a man waking up in his office before we see the tag lines. We bounced a number of ideas around and... More...
Copyright © of The Singapore Navy 2007. |
2007 / 2008 - 3D CG Character Animation I decided to have a go at the newly re-furbished ‘11 Second Club’ Animation Competition, where you are given one month to animate a character to a sound sample. Here is a brief diary of my progress, a few other notes and videos at various stages in the process. More...
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2007 - Visual Effects Demoreel - working for Ark VFX in England as the Senior Animator and Editor I edited together two new showreels for Ark VFX, one short Teaser Reel and one longer Professional Reel. The main idea behind these was to show the breadth of Ark's portfolio whilst leaning it more in the direction of the character animation work they'd done but hadn't shown much of up to this point. First I put together the longer video paying close attention to keeping sequences of shots (related to each other) close together within the edit so that they made sense to the viewer. They were then split into smaller chunks and sprinkled in key places in the edit to effectively provide 'sub-plots' that weave together. The second edit was much shorter and had to be cut purely for the spectacle value in a way that only gave you enough of a glimpse to tease you into finding out more... or watching the longer video. When you watch these videos I suggest you right click on the link and save it to your computer for the best playback and a seamless download.
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2007 - CGI HD Cinematics for a PS3 game - working for Ark VFX in England as the Senior Animator I arrived just as this project was nearing completion so all I did was help where I was needed for a couple of months until it was all done. It was a mixture of scene setup with mocap performances. Mocap fixing, and full hand animated replacement where the mocap wasn't providing the necessary performance. I also animated a lot of hands and faces since the mocap doesn't provide that. Then there was lighting and rendering, and a bit of editing and titles work. There's a good sample of the work in this trailer.
Copyright © of Sega 2008. |
2007 - CGI Animation demoreel This reel features Dogs on a Seesaw and some samples of my work on Happy Feet. It also shows highlights from my cinematic/FMV work on Kameo and my personal projects Panda Pander, In case I don't see ya and What did I just say?.  
The music is from "Ghostbusters" which is the Copyright © of Arista Records, Inc. 1984. |
2007 - CGI Animation - Personal Project I started this pet project with the intension of doing some four legged animation, with a jump and some balance/weight issues to address. It began with the dog jumping onto a seesaw with a weight on the other side reacting to the seesaw tilting. Then it occurred to me that the dog’s action wasn’t as interesting as what the weight was doing as it flew up, bounced and rocked around. So I thought it would be even more interesting to... more...
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2006 to 2007 - CG animated feature film - working for Glasgow Animation in Scotland as the Animation Supervisor & Lead Character Animator I spent six months in Glasgow, initially as a Senior Character Animator but quickly taking over as the Animation Supervisor on this CG feature film featuring the voices of Sean Connery, Alan Cumming, Gail Porter, Ruby Wax, Richard Briers, Miriam Margolyes. At first there were a number of interesting character animation shots to do and I took a back seat to my usual role while I learned the pipeline and evaluated the film's character rigs. It wasn't long before there were some staff changes and suddenly lots of slack to be taken up in other departments which revealed new opportunities for development in the pipeline. In time I took over as the Animation Supervisor and once we were moved into our new animation room things started to really get going, with a small but dedicated department of animators and a number of outsourced studios in numerous locations supporting and subsidising our work. We got into a good routine of weekly group animation critiquing sessions, on top of the usual one on ones I would do dozens of times per day. Doug and I would also go over the dailies for one of the external animation studios to give them feedback and guidance. We were just getting going when personal circumstances dictated that I had to move to another area, and I leave them in the capable hands of my friend Roberto. I wish them the best of luck and look forward to seeing the finished film soon. Go to the official website for more details on the movie.
Copyright © of Billi Productions Ltd 2010 |
2006 - Animation demoreel containing CG and 2D animation This video has a small selection of my best character animation work from a variety of projects currently in the public domain.
The music is from "Ghostbusters" which is the Copyright © of Arista Records, Inc. 1984. |
2006 / 2008 - CG lip-synced performance piece I used one of the 10 second club dialogue samples to start this off... it's actually 13 seconds though. Unfortunately the competition was struggling to keep on top of things at the time so the judging wasn't very timely, so this wasn't entered and I just did it for the practice. I did a few live-action reference shoots, to get me started, and sliced together my favourite parts. This was a really good pacer, as just when you find yourself getting too close to the animation and focusing on issues that are too small, you can take a step back and remind yourself of the bigger issues by studying the reference footage. The mouth on this rig turned out to be a bit of a pain (it opens too wide), and the eyebrows look like a giant caterpillar but I struggled on. I did most of the work on a very slow computer so I had to really focus on the principles of the animation without easily being able to see it playback in real-time. It's still a great rig, for a freebie, and I'd love to thank the people that made it. The audio clip is from "Rush Hour" which is the Copyright © of New Line Cinema. |
2006 - CG lip-sync piece This short piece of lip-sync work was just something simple and fun to fill a little free time. It's not very complicated just a head... talking. It's a line from one of my favourite movies, 'The Truman Show'.
The audio clip is from "The Truman Show" which is the Copyright © and TM of Paramount Pictures 1998. |
2006 - Warner Brothers CG animated feature film - working for Animal Logic in Sydney as a Technical Animator I was lucky enough to have an all expenses paid stay in Sydney Australia for four months working on Happy Feet for Animal Logic. It's about singing and dancing penguins and in case you haven’t heard about it… it’s the one that won the Oscar! After a couple of weeks learning XSI I started an Audition piece along with all the other animators, to learn how this production wanted us to do things... more...  "Happy Feet" is the Copyright © of Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. 2006
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2006 - Microsoft XBox 360 game - working for Rare in England as a Senior Animator I spent a month or so working on in-game animations for this game. I’d been busy with numerous departments whilst I was writing up pitch documents for a dozen game ideas and I decided I wanted to find something focused to do while I was waiting for these projects to work their way through the management pipeline. I volunteered my time on the new Asset Creation Team that was currently creating animations for new characters. I spent most of my time working on a cute little cartoon Robin character which made a nice change from the more serious things I’d been animating for years. It was really bouncy and squashed beautifully even though the geometry wasn’t all that sophisticated. The design was very round so it was like animating a ball with personality. I moved on to another project after this, but it was the last proper piece of animation I did for Rare before finally saying my good-byes after seven and a half years. I later discovered that my animation was used in Viva Piñata 2 rather than in the expansion packs that were intended for the first game. Viva Piñata has spawned an entire franchise now with an animated TV series and a spin off game. Have a look at the Official Website for more details.
Viva Pinata is the Copyright © of the Microsoft Corporation 2006
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2005 & 2006 - Microsoft XBox 360 first person shooter - working for Rare in England I didn't work on this game directly. My contributions were only promotional videos and a company logo... more ...
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2005 - Demo reel containing CG animation This showreel highlights a small portion of my work leading up to September 2005... more...
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2002 to 2005 (Some videos in 2006) - Microsoft XBox 360 action/adventure game - working for Rare in England as the Lead Animator Over the three years I worked on Kameo I did a huge number of cutscenes along with my other responsibilities. Many of them changed dramatically as the game developed to fit the changing story and gameplay. The best of the cinematics ... are here. There is also a selection of my animatics at the bottom of the page for sequences that might not have made it into production (or were largely worked on by other animators). For examples of lighting and rendering have a look at the Stills Gallery. I did a lot of editing for trailers over the years too so check out those at the Trailers page... more ...
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2002 - Microsoft XBox 360 game - working for Rare in England I spent a couple of months working on this game. I did a number of pre-production related tasks on this one including idea development, concept artwork, character designs, storyboards, pre-visualization and editing an animatic to showcase what the game might look like.
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1999 to 2002 - Nintendo Gamecube action/adventure game - working for Rare in England - Position: Senior Animator Although I did a number of tasks over the years on this one, I was predominantly responsible for the real-time cut-scenes. There are about two to three hours of the stuff in this game! I spent an awful amount of time with the characters of this world, bringing them to life. I didn't really have much of a clue what to do with them when I started, but one of the things I remember doing was ... more ...
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2001 - Live action with special effects - Music video This was a test project really. I had a yearning to work on something different that I could turn around reasonably quickly and just have some fun on without too much planning. It turned out that my friend Dave was taking his band, Red Trap; as they were known then, to various gigs to play their growing play-list. So I offered to make them a pop video, which ... more ...
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Video JukeboxSome of the work I've done is available on YouTube and you can use this Jukebox to conveniently watch the playlist. |
: Season 10
