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The Phoenix Gene

by Michael Cawood October 11, 2023 in
VR Action Game, Narrative Experience and Book being developed for Meta Quest 2 and Quest 3

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Third Planet Problems

by Michael Cawood January 26, 2021 in
Animated Series Pitch

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Cupid’s Apprentice

by Michael Cawood January 26, 2021 in
Feature Pitch

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It’s a Squirrely Life

by Michael Cawood January 26, 2021 in
A wild holiday adventure that teaches the value of friendship, community, and responsibility. When all the nuts are stolen from the Oak Creek bank, George the squirrel feels guilty for leaving the vault open. If he doesn’t find the nuts, Christmas will be ruined. He goes on a journey to learn what forest life would be like without him and gets the courage to face the thief. It’s a nutty spin on the Christmas classic, It’s a Wonderful Life, great for kids ages 7+

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Headspace – Mindful Eating

by Michael Cawood November 10, 2020 in
Series

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Maisey the Dragon

by Michael Cawood July 26, 2020 in
Animated Series Pitch

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The Wrong Rock

by Michael Cawood May 18, 2019 in
Short Film

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Eru and the Ghost Kingdom

by Michael Cawood May 17, 2019 in
Art Direction for Animated TV Series

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Devils, Angels & Dating

by Michael Cawood November 17, 2016 in
In 2006 I started developing a short computer generated film called 'Devils, Angels and Dating'. This film was made with the internet in mind, fully aware of modern trends. I was inspired by modern dating trends and let those themes influence the core ideas behind the film.

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The OceanMaker

by Michael Cawood November 17, 2016 in
I put in a few months of work on this short film. I was 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.

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Skylanders: Giants

by Michael Cawood November 14, 2016 in
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...

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Skylanders: Giants (3DS)

by Michael Cawood November 13, 2016 in
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 Skylanders 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...

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Rock Band 2: Cinematic

by Michael Cawood September 18, 2014 in
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...

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Singapore Navy: Be Somebody

by Michael Cawood September 16, 2014 in
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.

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Megaman: Maverick Hunter

by Michael Cawood September 15, 2014 in
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.

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Devils, Angels & Dating: Trailer

by Michael Cawood January 1, 2013 in
During the development of 'Devils, Angels & Dating' I knew it was going to be very important to create a strong trailer to attract talent to work on the project. So the trailer was planned out early in the process. Storyboards from the film were cut together and a score was created so that we could plan around those shots getting done first. It was updated almost as often as the main film itself so that the team could see how it was coming along. It was completed about six months ahead of the completion of the final film.

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Kameo: Thorn Beats Kameo

by Michael Cawood January 6, 2012 in
There were plenty of animatics created that dug into the story elements of the game with characters that actually needed to have performances, but this was probably the first one that I made with full animation. Previous to this all the FMV work had been cheated comic book style (semi-animated) scenes or the evolve scenes that were more spectacle than performance...

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Green Team – Mobile Rebates

by Michael Cawood February 5, 2011 in
Commercial / Product Demo HEROmation Director (Visuals) 2013 / 2014 Storyboards 63444 0 63444 0 63444 0 63444 0 63444 0 63444 0 64428 0 64428 0 64428 0 64428 0 64428 0 64428 0 64428 0 Storyboards and Previs Copyright © Green Team Energy 2014

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Kameo: Title Screen

by Michael Cawood April 7, 2010 in
This group shot plays under the Title/Start screen and shows off all the characters the player can play. It went through many iterations over the years...

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Monkey King: Theme Park Attraction

by Michael Cawood March 7, 2010 in
This is a test piece of animation made to showcase a new version of a classic character. I was given the character model. After a few tweaks to the model, I rigged him and animated this short sequence of action in a tightly styled way. It was very quick turn around but good fun.

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Kameo: Intro

by Michael Cawood December 5, 2009 in
Funnily enough this sequence was originally conceived for the purposes of a trailer. Nick and I (our concept artist and a past animator) both felt strongly that it was time we did an advert that eluded to the story of the game rather than just quick cuts of the gameplay. So after a meeting about what we wanted, I designed this idea of seeing mini pivotal scenes from throughout the story glimced briefly in the clouds before the camera sweeps down to the castle below to start showing off the characters in action. It was enormously effective and ...

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Rock Band 2: Teaser

by Michael Cawood May 29, 2009 in
Part of the same project to work on the cinematic for Rockband 2, this teaser presented some unique challenges. It's much shorter than the cinematic and the second half is all new shots. It was a combination of ...

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Kameo: End of Game

by Michael Cawood April 6, 2009 in
The magnum-opus of the entire game. This huge sequence had to top everything you'd seen, push the capabilities of Kameo beyond what you'd previously experienced, draw together numerous story threads, introduce a twist in the plot and give the player a satisfactory ending. It was developed towards the end of the game's development so was under pressure to be completed fast and there were other...

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Kameo: Evolve Pummel Weed

by Michael Cawood January 6, 2008 in
All the Evolve scenes were very complex pieces that required a lot of R&D, but they presented fantastic opportunities to do something imaginative. The only rules were that it had to start with the baby monster and it had to transform into the adult monster, ideally through a method that reflected their elemental theme. I've included an earlier version of this Evolve cinematic developed for the original Xbox. I later decided to upgrade all the FMVs to HD resolution at the same time as changing the characters to match their new Xbox 360 designs.

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Tenkai Knights: Website Intro

by Michael Cawood December 10, 2007 in
I'd worked with the client a couple of times before for some pitches, and this interactive website was one of the ones that got commissioned. I was able to work from home, which made for a nice change. There was a good number of ...

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Panda Pander

by Michael Cawood June 28, 2007 in
Panda Pander gathered a few million hits at Crackle before they changed their format. After Two Face Tabby I didn't want to spend so long on my next project so I did some one off exercises to flesh out my showreel while I spent a few months developing the pre-production material for Panda Pander (working title "Shelf Life").

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Parkour: Personal Project

by Michael Cawood May 19, 2007 in
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, in 2007, I felt it was time to have a go anyway...

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Ark VFX: Company Reel

by Michael Cawood April 21, 2007 in
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.

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Ark VFX: Company Teaser

by Michael Cawood April 21, 2007 in
I edited together two new showreels for Ark VFX, one short Teaser Reel and one longer Professional Reel.

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Perfect Dark Zero: Walk through trailer

by Michael Cawood November 28, 2006 in
This is an edit I made for promotional purposes. It highlights a co-operative walk through of a level.

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Perfect Dark Zero: DLC Trailer

by Michael Cawood September 28, 2006 in
This short edit shows off the new multi-player levels you can download online. It was based on the title movie used as the attract mode in the game. The music from this and the general format guided my edits as I laid various key shots over the top and integrated them using a number of techniques to make them feel like they were originally designed to be there.

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Kameo: Attract Mode Trailer

by Michael Cawood August 19, 2005 in
Here it is, the last of my Kameo edits. I've effectively had several dry runs at this particular format as you can see from the other videos on this website, so it wasn't a stretch to know exactly what was needed. I put together a plan on paper that highlighted all the major themes, features and scenes we wanted to cover...

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Kameo: DLC Trailer

by Michael Cawood May 19, 2005 in
This short edit highlights the new demo and downloadable content for Kameo, including character skins and free online co-operative play. It presented an interesting challenge, featuring so much content in only 30 seconds and print so much text onscreen in so many languages.

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Kameo: Evolve Flex

by Michael Cawood April 6, 2005 in
Like all the evolve scenes Flex was a unique problem. He had to look like water and be completely malleable. So this required looking into water and water shaders, and some hand painted frames to blend between elements. There was another water themed scene, but I've not included it here because I only did a polish job on the effects and final look of it and the animation was done by Neil. Both scenes turned out pretty well though and I was lucky that they didn't change too much when the rest of the characters were being updated (spikes wouldn't have looked good on water!). Here's the animatic for the Flex scene.

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Kameo: Evolve Rubble

by Michael Cawood April 6, 2005 in
This was a scene that was initially worked on my my friend Neil, but when we decided to revamp all the cut-scenes for the Xbox 360 Neil had moved onto another team. So I polished up the first half without changing too much and started the second half again from scratch. The original version was done at a time when we were taking a lot of shortcuts as part of the style of the scenes, but we'd taken all the other scenes a lot further and it was time to do something equally impressive for this.

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Kameo: Evolve Cloud Monster

by Michael Cawood April 6, 2005 in
This was one of the more imaginative characters in the game. Unfortunately after this cut-scene was finished the character proved too hard technically to implement in the game and we were beginning to realize we didn't need so many characters so he got the chop. But this scene was made available to view as an unlock-able extra (along with the animatic below) and featured in some of the early trailers for the game.

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Kameo: X04 Trailer

by Michael Cawood May 19, 2004 in
Not quite as powerful as the X03 teaser trailer, this version actually had an early version completely done before we looked at it and decided to completely re-plan it. There were certain points we wanted to get across that we needed to highlight. One of those elements was the ability to tackle any given situation in a number of different ways by choosing ...

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Kameo: Theena Gives Book

by Michael Cawood April 7, 2004 in
This deleted sequence started life like most of the others as an animatic. But at this stage storyboards and animatics were fairly new to the team and they liked them so much they thought we didn't really need to do any animation. This wasn't initially a popular decision with the animators but ...

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Kameo: Evolve 40 Below

by Michael Cawood April 6, 2004 in
I originally created the Snowman Evolve scene with a more snowball like theme but as the character designs all changed this scene had to be updated as well. All the characters were generally made to look more detailed and aggressive, mostly through the addition of bumpy surfaces and spikes. In this particular case I actually preferred the original 'Snowman' design and I think he lost his snowball qualities in the update. So you can see both the final and the original versions here, along with the animatic I originally story-boarded below.

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Kameo: X03 Trailer

by Michael Cawood September 19, 2003 in
This is my personal favourite Kameo trailer up to this point. I've done a number of these and this is the one where everything just came together to form something beautiful (well I think so, judge for yourself). I found myself with a one month deadline to pull something really special together.

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Kameo: E3 Trailer

by Michael Cawood May 19, 2003 in
This early 'feel good' trailer was one of two videos released at the time (May 2003) featuring the same footage and music. This one was edited by me and was made available on the Rare website. It features a number of scenes that I worked on as an animator, that I'm still relatively pleased with.

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Starfox Adventures: TRex Boss

by Michael Cawood September 29, 2002 in
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...

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Starfox Adventures: Other Sequences

by Michael Cawood April 29, 2002 in
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...

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Starfox Adventures: Arwing

by Michael Cawood April 29, 2002 in
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...

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Starfox Adventures: Starfox and his Staff

by Michael Cawood April 29, 2002 in
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...

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Starfox Adventures: The End of Andross

by Michael Cawood April 29, 2002 in
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...

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Starfox Adventures: Meeting Tricky

by Michael Cawood April 29, 2002 in
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...

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Starfox Adventures: Krystal is Captured

by Michael Cawood April 29, 2002 in
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...

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Starfox Adventures: Lightfoot

by Michael Cawood April 29, 2002 in
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...

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Starfox Adventures: Drakor Boss

by Michael Cawood April 29, 2002 in
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...