Past Projects
Here you can see the films that I have worked on. I will give a description of the film and the roles that I had in it. Where possible I will give a link to somewhere the film can be seen.
Sometimes I Feel
January 2007 - February 2008
This was a music video made for comedy company Punchdrunk. They came to my college during my second year with a pitch for a group project. It mixes CG backgrounds and characters with live action faces. After the first few months there were only four of us still working on it - David Bates, Desmond Walsh, Jessica Soderstrom and my self. We received help from our friends in the year above, Sarah Ricketts and Ian Mathews, after they had finished their year's work. I modelled and textured three of the vehicles in the film and textured some of the characters as well as animating some of the scenes but my main input was lip-synching the main characters for the 5-minute duration. The main characters are the members of Punchdrunk who were filmed singing the song on a blue screen stage. I then had to match up the sequences for each shot so they were singing. This became quite problematic when the version for the film was extended and so the footage of them did not match up and I had to cut bits from other parts of the song. Considering most of us only had one year experience at the time I'm amazed at how much we achieved in the course of a year. Punchdrunk are in the process of finalizing the grade and sound mix at the moment.
Alba Showreel
September 2007
While working on Sometimes I Feel, Paul McAleavey who is director of the film, put us in touch with Jim Brown. Paul worked as a freelance editor for Jim Brown of Alba Media International. One of the projects he was working on was a showreel for Jim. They were originally going to have a simple showreel showing clips of the documentaries that Jim had made. However Paul showed him Jess's showreel and suggested that we could make a more interesting showreel for him.
Jess took lead as we were essentially remaking her showreel but with rooms themed around the different documentaries Jim had made. The themes were Music, Film, War, and History. There was originally a Bollywood themed room as well but it was cut. Each room had a screen, which would display clips from the documentaries. I only played a minor role making assets for the War themed room.
There's a war in Wunderland
October 2007 - June 2008
In the final year at my college you make a group film. I worked on my friend Adam Smith's film There's a war in Wunderland. It is a crazy story about a monkey standing up and doing his part to stop a rebel robot uprising. The characters are inspired by Sjors Trimbach's character Brickboy and Vinnie Fiorello's (of Less Than Jake fame) vinyl toy range. More information about the film can be found on Adam's blog. Adam modelled and textured everything in the film so my main role was setting up the controls for the characters replacement heads so they could have different expressions and other technical roles such as making the vehicles and crowds work as well as creating an ocean. I also animated a majority of the crowd scenes using the trax editor in Maya, which was a first for me.
Watch There's a war in Wunderland here.
POD 003
August 2007 - October 2008
After working on Sometimes I Feel for Punchdrunk they asked us to do some work on another project for them. POD 003 is a sci-fi black comedy pilot show, about a man stuck in an escape pod with an out of date computer. A majority of the CG work in the show has been done by Simon Hilton. We were asked to design and create the Space pirates that attack the space station and cause the protagonist to get in the escape pod. I modelled the Captain as well as modelling parts for the basic soldier. Both were designed by Ian Mathews, who also modelled the soldiers and did the texture work on the Captain. David Bates textured the solider and made their guns.
Sarah Ricketts animated the characters, which will go in to live action footage that Punchdrunk have already filmed. While Dave was setting up the lighting I made the decision that we should do a specular pass, some thing we hadn't done before. It took us a while to undertand what we were doing, but I pleased with the final results. I have recently finshed rendering all of the shots and Simon is currently working on the compositing.