Tag: terry

Series: The One Winged Bee Called Emily

faulknermanoLeave a comment

Only one episode of this aborted series seems to be out on the Internet, which is the video you see above. In fact, three episodes were commissioned and finished; the two other episodes are lurking in someone’s hard drive, and although I could get a copy of it, I don’t think I’m legally authorised to upload it, regretfully.

All of the character animation in those three episodes were done by Brett Tunnicliff, save the titles, which I had done. Terry and I had been responsible for modelling and texturing the characters. I rigged, rendered, composited, and cut the the episodes myself. The direction of the first 2 episodes was headed by the boss. But by the third, its future prospects for its continuation waned — as did interest in it — and I was given the honour of finishing off the series oddment as a quasi-director.

Predicatably, the third was my favourite as I felt a bit freer to experiment; no one really cared enough to put their 2 cents into it by this time. So I tightened the storyboard to make the cuts fit in better, and began with a beauty pass timing animatic that I would get sign-off from the boss, and things proceeded smoothly from there. Brett commented that he particularly enjoyed the flow of the third episode, which is a nice thing to hear, as I enjoyed running my own small project.

No one would probably see that work, unfortunately. And sure, the end result might look dodgy to some, but to remember one of the reasons why I post these things: many jobs come with disadvantageous circumstances that affect the outcome, but if people knew just how much work was put in, they’d know it would have been a surprise anything came out of it at all. Most people appreciate only just the bells and whistles, or the polished gold trims, but I’m here saying that there is a hidden engine that powers all creative endeavours that should be recognised on equal footing.

Commercial: Smith’s Chips (Mr. Potato Head)

faulknermanoLeave a comment

This commercial was a straightforward integration piece. Done back in May 2013, I had flown to Sydney for this job with Leoni Willis, who was the primary on-set supervisor. I came as a supervisor for the cg team, and mainly took HDRs of the scene lighting. There aren’t always that many cases in my experience that requires exacting HDRs — many lighting situations can be faked simply by observing the scene — but in this one, especially the indoor/semi-outdoor scenes, the HDR reflection maps were very effective.

We had shot throughout whole days, and one of the worries I had was changing light conditions. So I took HDRs at regular intervals (2-4 hours apart), depending on whether the direct sun was affecting the intended subject area, and whether or not the ambient had changed drastically, as it does when cloud cover comes and goes. Shooting in this way was much better for the production crews as well, as I only did them when they were well within between takes and they didn’t bothered.  I kept track of the time that scene and takes were taken on the production book. Back at the studio, I organised the HDR sets by their timestamps; I matched that with the final offline correlated to the production book notes.

Besides the set work, I contributed the lighting of many of the scenes, though the shading was mainly developed by the Terry Nghe. I’m usually responsible for both the start and end parts of the job, which means scene setup/layout, and then rendering/managing outputs, fixing odd, tail-end issues, and this job was no exception. Will Brand worked on the mouth rig with me as well as worked up some scenes himself. I worked on the rig fro the rest of the, while Alfredo Luzardo, did most of the animation, though we also got a few others to fill gaps. Leoni did the job of compositing all of our renders.

For all its simplicity and straightforwardness, I really like this commercial because its simplicity looks good, it’s believable, and doesn’t take itself too seriously. To add, I liked the team I was working with.