S H O W R E E L

Essentially... it's just the major projects from my first year as a CG artist... 

(with some help for Hans Zimmer... Thanks Hans)

BOOM... year one... DONE.

E... X... A... M

My first year exam... we were given the choice of modelling the bust of either Audrey Hepburn or Daniel Radcliffe... i chose Daniel because i have no experience modelling a female as yet... and as it turns out for once... i'm HAPPY with the result!!!

Firstly i built him in Maya

Then i took him into Mudbox and sculpted some details...

And here he is in 360 magical degrees

POTTER!!!

Concept Art - with PETER CHAN

Basically... if you have seen a good animated film in the past 10 years... Peter Chan has worked on it... he also designed for George Lucas... on projects such as "The Day Of The Tentacle" and "Sam and Max hit the Road" and the much more popular "Monkey Island" and more recently "Lemony Snicket" and "Rio" among many other great games and films

oh yeah... and... STAR WARS... 

he is also my new hero

he gave us 2 photos and we had to produce a "moment" from a fictional story that could be understood by this image alone... i'm pretty happy with the rendering but to get the point across... i had to compromise the image slightly (the facial expressions) which was unavoidable.

first there we had to create 3 characters... a good guy... a bad guy... and a creature...

then i had to tell a story with an of the characters... but it had to be outside my comfort zone... most of my class got the story... i hope you do too!!!

ESCAPE

the escape project was a collaboration between the CG students (me) and the animators (the others) in which we had to come up with a 5 second animation based on the theme "escape" it has been mentioned in this very blog before... it is about a pig whose butchery is imminent and his mental escape to a better time in his past... these are the results...

Character Design

This was an amazing project for me and a bit of a passion... we got to design our own character to build and sculpt in 3D... i chose the most iconic character (and my favourite) i could think of and tried to re-design him... i chose... of course... Doctor Emmett Lathrop "Doc" Brown first seen in Back To The Future... the best film ever made... i wanted to make him a lot more bad-ass... as if he'd been to the future and had to save humanity... more like a super hero.

This was the final design i settled on...

i made a maquette of my final design in clay... 

i was really happy with this design but sadly... due to unforeseen (personal) circumstances... i was not able to do the model justice in 3D... i do however plan to remodel him (and i also plan to be a part of the creative team when the film inevitably gets remade).

http://www.youtube.com/user/MrCrisp666?feature=mhee#p/u

...and...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbLrN-VXPaY

The Animation Workshop - Lighting Week 3

FINALLY THE PROJECT FROM HELL IS OVER... This is my final time lapse video.

click on the youtube button to watch in glorious 720 HD

The Animation Workshop - Lighting Week 2

Just a quick update of the lighting and texturing in my scene... still lots to do!!!

The Animation Workshop - Lighting Week 1

The Animation Workshop - Digital Painting

Well... i just spent half an hour writing and uploading my weeks work but the good people at blogger decided not to publish it and delete everything instead... so this will be a very condensed version.

This week we had digital painting and matte painting. first we had to complete a scene from the "Lucky Luke" cartoon. we had to keep in mind the light and shadow and we had to use masks and brushes to add depth and value.

i'm pretty happy with the results... except the clouds are at a slightly odd angle and the values of the buildings close to the horizon need to be more defined.

We then moved onto matte painting... which is trying to get photo real results from the combination of digital painting and using portions of photos to get a seemless look. the process i followed is outlined below.

I'm very happy with the results... but i think the foreground looks a bit cluttered and murky... but the sense of depth and the clouds over the mountains really works well. i definitely want to do more of this and get really crazy with some sci-fi ideas...!!!

The Animation Workshop - Colour

We had Lawrence again this week... but this time we were working in colour... i never knew it was so hard!!! colour theory and complimentary colours... and we were using PAINT!!! as such i don't have a lot of work from the week... except a few of the final images... the theme was "Neon Night Time in Monster City". I did a sketch of the monsters and the city... They are waiting to get into a club in the seedy slums part of town... longing to go to the cool bars in the big city. We then had to paint thumbnails of the sketch with light and shadow from the neon lights using complimantary colours mixed with the local colours of the objects/monsters... with PAINT... really really small!!!

These were my initial sketches... they were apparently not detailed enough so i had to do another more detailed sketch... considering the task i really think it was hugely unnecessary as we were working so small and the level of detail we could actually get with the paint was poor.

this is the final sketch... a LOT more detailed... and as you'll see below... very unnecessary!

I think i finally got it looking lit... and there is some good values going on and you know where to look... it was a very hard project... and i just want to point out that this painting is size A6...!!!

The Animation Workshop - Value and Rendering

We had Lawrence again this week and went over some things that we have done before but it was still very useful and i learned a lot more from him.

This was a basic value piece that we had to compose using black and white and 3 shades of grey. We had to use pure value to draw the viwers eye to where we wanted them to look. I'm hoping it works. (the floating Hitler) We had to use Scene 1 Act 1 of Hamlet, where the ghost of the king appears to the 3 gaurds, but we could change the setting to any period we wanted. this is WWII.

We then had to fully render a 2D piece to make it look as 3D as possible but again just using values. The theme was "A Weapon from Atlantis" i'm not too happy with the results as it still looks flat around the edges as i didn't use any depth, especially around the jaw and teeth. It's supossed to be a fish-gun... with a claw handle!

We then had to fully render a full scene again using value. The theme was "your imaginary childhood friend rescueing you as an adult" (this is not MY imaginary friend... just AN imaginary friend!!!) i think i good some good rendering and value on the tigers and the clouds... but there is still some line on the tigers that i don't want and especially on the imaginary friend and the rescuee... these are not done well at all and the values are very bad as this is supposed to be the focal point... also it doesn't look like there are two "people" there.

i am currently trying to fix the problems i outlined above by adding some more black in the clouds surrounding the people and bringing the value up... also i have gone fro a more dynamic pose... i think this will work a lot better.



The Animation Workshop - Storyboarding

This week we had Christian DeVita from "One Hand Clapping" in London. It was one of my favorite weeks as we got to learn about the stroy telling process and how to visualize the story from a concept. This is something i am really interested in and am seriuosly considering it as a career.

As it was an "ESCAPE" themed project that will be running for a few months off and on we wanted to come up with an idea that would keep us interested through out. We settled on an emotional tale of a pig's journey to slaughter and how he comes to terms with his imposing death. above is our first draught of the storyboard.

We refined and coloured the scene but it was still missing a lot of camera shots we wanted to use to tell the stroy better. Even though we will only be using 5 seconds of the scene to turn into an animated short, we really wanted the have a feeling of impending doom and get the impression that there is no escape.

This was our final storyboard... it is by no means the completed thing as we only had a week. but i think it really tells the story in a unique way. with the pig eventually submitting to his fate but doing it willingly and escaping the only way he can... into his memories.

I really learned a lot and would like to do more of this and this excercise has lead me to think about directing too.