Old works

Tokyo Ghoul (click on image)

My work on Ghoul marked my last major project in my studio. VisualMan Tokyo, who we worked with, did a great job animating and rendering the effects.


 

Kerry Logistics (click on image)

 

Now that I see Kerry Logistics again, I remember that we had to trim a lot of the ideas that we had gone through, many of which are still in some work-in-progress folder somewhere. Water under the bridge.

 

Kerry Logistics’ Video Wall

This project is not classified as a commercial. It was meant to be privately displayed inside the company’s (Kerry Logistics) reception area. It’s a couple of metres high, six times across. Pretty big, if you ask me, though I’m sure there’s always some guy who can pee higher. There always is.

Anyway, that’s the reason that I can’t show, at least in its final form, what it was. But I do have pictures — pretty pictures — of the stuff that I got to contribute.

Mocap data, to geo in Maya, then LW for point rendering.
LW nodal displacements with the help of Denis Pontonnier’s tools.

Particles made easy by LW’s nodal displacement fancy-footwork.
Additive particle morphing in LW using nodal displacements.
RealFlow HYBRIDO sim. LW for instance rendering.

Mass transformations using Denis Pontonnier’s toolkit and LW instancing.
Nixed scene. LW displacements, scene and render.
Motion graphic shenanigans in LW using 2-point polygons and instancing.

The keyword in this project was ‘repetition’. Now, a guy in the studio kept using the word ‘iterative process’. But no: this wasn’t iteration. Iteration means:

…repetition of a mathematical or computational procedure applied to the result of a previous application, typically as a means of obtaining successively closer approximations to the solution of a problem.

The operative phrase is ‘successively closer approximations to the solution of a problem’. If it were actually the case that in the so-called creative industry that iteration existed, of which my experiential opinion says is more of anomaly than a rule, it would follow that some end goal could be discerned at the beginning. This was not the case here. It began with an idea, then killed, to reincarnate into a new form, killed again, rose from the ashes, ad nauseum. Indeed, nausea is actually a good word for it. Isn’t just better just say repetition to be truthful? Instead, we are encouraged to think it’s iterative, so as to regard each ‘iteration’ not the pointless exercise it actually was.

Here, I also encountered the novel concept of ‘not second-guessing’ the client. What this actually meant was that ‘the client doesn’t know what they want, but we do.’ Basically, a Jedi mind trick. The hilarity of it all is that we’re not Jedi. No indeedy. Hence, the bulk of the setbacks were clients totally rejecting the concept and, despite the studio’s assumptive airs, we took it by the balls — what choice did we really have? They were the ones with the money — and re-did it again and again and again. Joke’s on us. Actually, joke’s on me, because I was at the bottom of that food chain. As I say, things like money/wealth may be too dense to trickle down. But work, overtime, and frustration, those things don’t sit at the top for too long.

At the of the day the repetition stopped. Where we got to is for Kerry Logisitics employees and guests to see. Where we had came from is, as they say, history.