The Hollywood Reporter spoke to Ron Frankel and I about the work Proof did on The Mummy for the Zero-G sequence. Of course there was even more impressive work we did than just this sequence. I’d like to add that although the LA office kicked off the project, this was largely done by the talented Proof crew in the UK. This was an exciting project to be a part of. I saw the film in IMAX 3D and it’s a lot of fun! Read the full article here: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/behind-screen/mummy-behind-scenes-zero-g-stunt-1011921
The third trailer for Dawn of the planet of the Apes is out now, and it showcases a few shots I worked on, and many more I recognize. I worked on the film at MPC for a couple of months last year. It’s exciting to see it coming together. I’m still on the prowl for a big poster to take a picture alongside.
Some time ago I animated this Parkour piece as a one off exercise and it’s been in my animation reel for a while. You can read about it here. But as I was thinking about doing new pieces for my layout / previs reel I realized it would be a great piece to build on. Originally I kept the camera very plain so that the focus of the piece was the animation on the character. There were no cuts, as that could have been perceived as a way to hide cheats in the animation. But for this new piece that wasn’t important. So I could cut as often as I liked, explore angles and even use slow motion. It’s a work in progress and I intend to come back to it. I want to spend some time playing with the layout of the buildings, improve the textures, add motion blur, depth, focus, foreground elements passing the camera and possibly even light and render it. I had fun playing with Maya’s new Camera Sequencer to put this together which made speed changes very easy. It has a great tool for batch playblasting what ever shots you select in the sequence which […]
I pulled together a collection of some of the storyboards I’ve done over the years that have made it online. It’s a curious mix of quick thumbnail storyboards and more carefully illustrated panels. Most of these projects I’ve essentially been the Director and primary artist so I could get away with what ever it took to get the point across and rarely had to take it further than that. Someday I’d love to get my hands on a Cintiq and some proper storyboard software to do something quicker and prettier, even better would be a tablet setup so I can create without being locked to a desk. So far most of my storyboarding tends to be in little boxes on standard paper (A4 or letter format), scanned in and arranged in Premiere to a temporary soundtrack. For further details here’s a summary page about the projects I’ve storyboarded on over the years.
I’ve posted a number of website updates to include some recent work. I did a short stint in New York working on previs for commercials. It was a surprisingly quick job, but we generated a lot of content in that time. You can check it out here. In other news I’ve moved to Los Angeles and I’m looking forward to catching up with my west coast buddies. Devils, Angels and Dating picked up the Orson Welles Award, which I’ll be going to the California Film Awards ceremony to accept. It also passed a million views on YouTube over the Christmas break.
I’ve been doing a lot of spit and polish on my portfolio recently while hunting for work. Half of the shots in my Layout / Previs reel are new thanks to the release of Skylanders Giants.
I started my first full time job in animation and, along with another person starting the same day (later to become a close friend of mine), we found ourselves being taken into a large room with a cinema screen high up on one wall. We were sat down and told we’re about to see what we’re going to be making for the next six months. What we saw was (for its time) a very impressive action adventure role playing game filled with characters and cut-scenes (FMVs or cinematics as many prefer to refer to them). It was my first day at Rare, a 200 strong, growing company with a very strong pedigree working under Nintendo’s wing. My friend and I were given an outline of what we’d be expected to start working on. He was a software engineer so we weren’t going to be doing the same things but we were going to be working together a lot. I was fully prepared to be doing in-game cycles, when the Director turned to me and casually told me I’d be making the cutscenes. I forget now if it was verbal, but I know that in my mind I went “Wahoooooo!”. It was more […]
