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Thursday, March 1, 2012

Have moved!

http://contrastandaffinity.wordpress.com/


Check out the new blog here.

Thursday, June 16, 2011

Summertime

So the summer break is here and I am finding myself at somewhat of a loose end after the hectic final few months at college.

I have started some thumbnail versions of a storyboard for the final year film and am trying to get a head start on the dissertation which is somewhat less fun but needs to be done.
I am still hoping to secure myself an internship before the summer is over and have contacted some studios with that in mind.

Other summer projects include some flash work, sort of an advert for a gaming convention and working on learning the basics of Maya. I am very conscious of the fact that Maya is heavily used in the industry and I want to be prepared for that when the course comes to an end.

As soon as I have anything presentable I will post some pictures.
Right now I am working on finishing some scale models of some buildings for a friend of mine who is into Napoleonic war gaming.
There is more work than I realised in building a tiny village.
I have already gone through two tubs of polyfilla but I do enjoy keeping busy with creative projects.

Tuesday, May 24, 2011

Showreel



Bits and pieces of work a lot of stop motion from my time at Aardman and new stuff from the film.
I think the music works pretty well it's quite short but I think that short and snappy showreels are often better than much longer ones. I may put a longer one together in a little while.

Saturday, May 7, 2011

The Film is Finished

Had trouble trying to embed the video so I have put a link in below.
Check it out.

Here is a Link to the film

I am massively happy with the outcome of this film. It was tough work but it has definitely paid off.
I don't know what I will spend my time doing now but I am eager to get stuck into more work.

Now of course I need to figure out what film to do next year and make sure that I keep up to this standard and hopefully surpass it.

Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Life Drawing


So my life drawing is due soon so that is currently the priority. I thought I might share some of the pictures that I am happier with.






Friday, April 8, 2011

Animation has begun in earnest.

So I have gotten into the animation of the film in a big way and now most of my time is spent with one shot or another. The rest of the team have started on their shots also and we are making good progress. I am still a little concerned about the rendering but we haven't gotten to that bridge yet so there is no sense in worrying.

The tutors are telling us that we are being overly optimistic and that we may not be able to finish the film but I am confident that the film will be of a high quality and we have cut the story down about as much as we can and still have it make sense.

The models are holding up well to what is expected of them and the few difficulties that I have encountered are easily worked around. The dress of the girl which I had thought would be a hassle has turned out to be a lot of fun to animate and the secondary action really helps the character to come to life.



 





These are pre-render tests obviously and the plan is to use a lot of atmospheric lighting and to really concentrate on adding nice textures to things in order to give the film as high a quality as possible.
The second shot will ultimately have a strong light behind the girl in order to show the silhouette off and add to the sinister nature of the scene.

Here is one more pre-rendered shot this time the spider General trying to rally support from the rest of the spiders for an attack on the mean little girl. the difficult part of this shot was to get across what is happening in quite a short period of time.

 



So that is all for the moment and now i have to get back to work.

Tuesday, March 29, 2011

More News

The film is coming along and while some things are harder than expected I am confident that the final result will be worth all the effort.



To quickly interject here is one of my life drawings from the year which I think is one of the better ones. I am also currently compiling my drawings for the end of the year.

Back to the film,
The models are all ready to go now and we have started animation. Here are a couple of shots of spiders that I have animated in order for them to be used as templates for larger groups of shots in different parts of the film. While I doubt that these spiders will be easily noticeable it is nice to be
 finally getting some of the shots done.







The secondary action on the shako was achieved using an FFD modifier, which gave more control and looks a lot better than the flex modifier which we had experimented with previously.