My Showreel

I recently found out that the Raftas 2008 site has been exterminated so here's my showreel showing the best of my work from Uni. I've been working recently on some more High poly work getting my head around Subdivision modeling in Maya and ZBrush.
Mostly experiments but my new model will be Spaceboy from the Umbrella Academy comics giving me the chance to play with all the new techniques and possibly attack Maya Fur.
Watch this space...

There's a War in Wunderland - Full Film

With the Raftas site down and out here's my 3rd year film There's a War in Wunderland
enjoi

all work and no blog make adam a dull boy.

Things have been quite crazy this month and i haven't updated as much as i think i should have so here's June and July in retrospect.
The film got done after a lot of hard work and sleepless nights for hand-in on the Friday the 13th of July, i was so wrapped up in it all i completely missed tickets to see Less Than Jake that very day.
All the constituent parts of the film were there however it had some editing floors, rather than spend the weeks between hand-in and the degree show re-animating and re-rendering i chose to concentrate on editing the film a bit nicer getting a better intro and generally tidying up what we had if something needed an extra occlusion pass it got it but was pretty happy with what we had so it went to the degree show on the 10th and 11th of July.
*i just had to go back and change everything to say July as i thought it was still June it's been a mighty busy period*
As well as adding the finishing touches to the film i also had the task of putting together this years degree show website, i ended up using templates made by a friend to make all the individual pages and even uploaded the site and made it live, something I'd never done before but was actually quite easy. The site is available here www.raftas2008.co.uk and There's a War in Wunderland and the rest of this years BA films can be watched over there.
The grad shows at the RSA went of well and graduation was a fun day for all the family and now my attentions turn to trying to find a job, please if there's anyone reading that likes what they see don't be afraid to get in touch.
here's a direct link to the film:
http://www.raftas2008.co.uk/films/wunderland/film_01.php
enjoi. and watch this space!

ROA...DOA?

Hi, I haven't had much time to blog lately due to the fact that myself and the whole team have been working tirelessly to get the first cut of the film ready for the Rave On Air extravaganza at college. I should be able to say that i saw the film for the first time today but apparently it seems as if there was some jealousy of the coverage Wunderland was getting and when the film was supposed to show all we got was a black screen. For anyone that was dissapointed The film will now get it's premiere at the RSA on the 10th of July and will be show until 4pm the next day as part of the BA animation Degree Show.

Since my last post I've been modelling, texturing, mapping, rendering and aftereffects-ing like a madman to make pretty pictures like the one above. we're nearly there now just a few more weeks and we should be ready to rock and roll.
Oh, and in the middle there i got a year older too, where does the time go...

Not long now...

Environmental Action!

Ok, finally I’m back blogging again it’s been a while I know but things have made the jump to hyperspeed lately and I’ve had to concentrate on getting things done for the film and it’s been easier to write the journal than make it onto here. Anyway It would have been pretty boring to update every week any way basically I’ve been modelling building, mapping buildings and texturing… you guessed it buildings. So rather than seeing 57 variations of sash window you get the pictures of the whole finished thing, I finished the buildings now although the backplates and the road still need to be done but I’m quite proud of them even tho you can’t see the detail very well I hope they’ll be shown better in the film. Anyway I hope you like the pictures you may even be in danger of getting some of the obscure references.

Aswell as all the texturing, and there has been a lot, I’ve been directing the first scenes of animation and trying to drive the project towards our deadline for Rave On Air, Next Friday AHHH! We’ve decided to cut the submission to ROA by a fair amount in an attempt make sure we can give them a good piece of work. We’ve also had the opportunity to enter a competition to use the characters from the film in Idents for Nickelodeon which would be pretty cool Robots and explosions were definitely something I thought was cool when I was watching Nickelodeon back in the old days. This very day today I’ve also finished two expesssion sheets for Assassin and Science guy which have whizzed off to Caspar to set up the facial manipulators.

What’s Next: finishing off the texturing of the environment, Animating the science guy scenes, scene set up and direction for everyone else’s scenes as well as lighting and rendering tests to get things looking great.

Back into the chaos.

We went live and came back in one piece...

It's been a while since the last post so there's quite a lot to catch up on. In week nine dissertations were all handed in and i continued directing the animation cycles we were receiving. I've also accepted the job of heading the design team for the exhibition after the end of term, I've drawn up a few layouts so far for the brochure and just need to send them out. In the last week i drew up a new schedule for the rest of the production and things are getting increasingly tight especially with the deadline for ROA getting closer and closer.


We also started fundraising for the degree show having the first Rock at Rave guitar Hero tournaments which were won by Gemma Mariotti and fellow organiser Rob Evans, although i was quite happy to get into both finals. My producer role on the film was well in gear as i decided to press forward and finally get to work on the live action intro for the film. I had to organise booking the room and the equipment, but tracking down lights proved to be the most difficult part as apparently health and safety says animators aren't qualified to switch them on, hence why I've been sitting in the dark for 3 weeks making it difficult to post any new work.

My laptop was sent away for a week while we got on with the shoot. Caspar and I took it on ourselves to get things done having attended a tutorial earlier in the term Caspar handled the camera whilst i took control of set design and lighting although we did chop and change. The whole process was quite fun making the set and dealing with real lights we had 3 days to get it all done and it was amazing how it all came together without the need for modelling and texturing, it's definitely something I'd like to experiment with in the future even though we didn't get to animate much more than the camera. Here's some pics from the shoot.

building the floor plane for the set, made with Wickes cement and volvic, only the best.
Hey that hairy freak is touching my toys!

The set for the intro altogether and below lit with a spot, ambient bounce, and 3rd bouncing to light inside of box.

After that I've been concentrating on finishing up all the models, UV mapping them and getting the textures done for the office scenes in the film, it should be complete in the next few days and I'll put up some screen grabs of the finished thing. I've also been finishing up Red's facial expressions in Illustrator and Caspar's making a Set driven Key to animate them when the time comes, as well as thinking about the effects shots in the film.

As well as that after my laptop was away for the first week of Easter holidays, while we were shooting, it came back having had nothing done to it. Within 3 days it was up to is old tricks again and is seriously jeopardising our schedule to be ready for ROA. After much complaining its been taken away again now to hopefully be fixed, luckily i have a great girlfriend who has lent me her laptop to get through the next week and get some stuff done. Anyways lots more textures to do and hopefully putting up some of the animation soonly,

Can't think of a good sign off...