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Thursday, 30 July 2009 18:37 |
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It's summer again and I'll soon be working on Grandpa in my Pocket Series 2. Dinamo are providing the visual effects for the series and I’ll be working on set supervising the visual effects, setting up the workflow (using the new Codex Portable machines) and getting all the lighting reference for the CG stunt double. This time round we’ll be doing over 900 shots over the course of 26 episodes, an increase from last year of about 15%. That’s only an estimation and it could increase, as it did last series. To make things even more fun, we’ve decided to raise the bar and incorporate more moving CG shots and let Grandpa interact with the live actors. Not only that, we’ve got less time to do it in, thanks to BBC budget cuts. The difference, however, is that the experience of the first series and meant that everyone on the production understands the visual effects process so a shorthand exists to guide us. I blog more about Grandpa in a future post.
On the film front, Harry Potter and Moon have been the movies of choice. Potter was very disappointing and, for once, the trailer was better than the final result. It was a beautiful film and had some arresting imagery but completely lacked drama and pace. The characters wandered the halls of Hogwarts staring moodily at each other with tense anticipation of a dreadful event. When it did eventually happen, it turned into a disappointing romp through the great hall kicking over goblets and then standing around as Snape pushed Dumbledore over a balcony. Where was the large battle from the books? Where was the revelation that Harry’s father bullied Snape? Where was the mystery over the Half-blood Prince? Did they have a budget cut? In fact, while the visual effects were uniformly excellent, they did seems superfluous and simply added for the sake of it, as if they’d budgeted an extortionate amount for visuals they could have achieved much more economically.
Moon, on the other hand, was excellent. Although it may have suffered a little from its limited script and reduced locations, for $5m it was a tense scifi thriller that showed what could be done with a solid idea and clear focus. The visual effects were a mix of model work and CG extensions, the best way to give a credible location that doesn’t feel synthetic. It was a great example of an intelligent and serious scifi film that hadn’t become a comedy or bombastic blockbuster in order to get made. |
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Saturday, 16 May 2009 22:18 |
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Last week I went to the 2009 Bristol Comic Convention and got another twenty-four sketches for my collection. I've added them to the archive and it's great to see quite a few from previous artists. One of the reasons I started the hobby of collecting sketches was so that I could have more than one from each artist to show a wide variety of work. Since Christmas, I've been doing a lot of development work for Dinamo, helping to put together pitches for a couple of animation projects that came in one after the other. It's been good to do a mix of our own development work and service work, although it's frustrating that the excellent designs and animation that were put together have to remain hidden under non-disclosure agreements. I've also started on the next series of Grandpa in my Pocket, which will begin shooting in late July. The scripts have been trickling through the past few weeks and I've reviewed them all for the necessary vfx information. There'll be more challenging shots this time round and we're keen to do more moving shots and complex comps. I've always been critical of shows that fix the camera every time a vfx shot appears and I think it would be great to show that even a children's show can feature vfx that match seamlessly with the live action. Although we have to be more... efficient this time around, that's no reason not to rise to the challenge. In other comic-related news, I went to London a few weeks ago to get an advance copy of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: 1910 signed by Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill. I spent three and a half hours on the train there and back, two and a half hours in the blazing sun and god knows how much on food just to spend a couple of minutes getting my books signed. Am I getting a little obsessed with this comics thing? Still, it's good to have a hobby! On the movie radar this month are Star Trek, which I enjoyed very much, Wolverine, which I would gladly take up drink to erase the memories, and Angels and Demon, which I also enjoyed for what it was. I've been seeing plenty of older films on Blu-ray, such as the much under-rated Speed Racer, and Wanted, which certainly wasn't. Mad Men has been my series of choice, followed by The Mentalist and the finale of The Wire. I've long come round to the thinking that TV is now the superior artform to film. Although film has the budget for big spectacle, the length and depth of a TV series gives far more pleasure and better developed characters. That said, I wouldn't pass up the chance of making a film if it gave me the opportunity to make something that could measure up to the complexity of The Wire. Perhaps I'll get a chance to make The Player of Games one day. |
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Friday, 30 January 2009 22:33 |
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I've just uploaded a new banner by Jamie Smart, the writer/artist behind Bear and Space Raoul. I bought a copy of Space Raoul at Gosh in London before Christmas and giggled to myself all the way home on the train, much to the distress of my fellow passengers, I'm sure. I can't recommend his books enough - a twisted throwback to the Sweeney Toddler strips I remembered so well from Whizzer and Chips. In other news, Grandpa in my Pocket will be premiered on CBeebies on February 10th with Telly Tales following on a month or so after. I'm currently preparing a showreel for the project, as well as general showreels for Dinamo to use over the next year so I hope to update my site with lots more work in the coming few months. It's tough getting hold of still and movies from my early projects as archiving wasn't so much of a priority back then! One of my Christmas presents to myself was the complete series box set of The West Wing that's been on offer in all the media shops for £50. One of the best purchases I've made in the past year! It's taken me a month to watch all seven series (that's an average of three and a half hours a day) and I can't believe how good it is. I'm in awe of the scale of the show, its depth of characters, its intelligence and unwillingness to trivialise quite complex political and philosophical issues. Although somewhat sentimentalised, it's still beyond anything that the UK has produced on a similar subject. The only titles that come close are the admittedly sublime political comedies of Yes, Minister and The Thick of It. However, it's interesting that the UK seems only able to produce political thrillers and comedies where politicians are either corrupt, arrogant or inept. Personally, after watching The West Wing, I think we've managed to trivialise politics in this country but not taking it seriously enough, and that is perhaps one reason for the general apathy by the public towards their elected representatives.
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End of year, beginning of more content |
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Thursday, 18 December 2008 20:30 |
Surrounding this text should now be the new version of my website, an ongoing project for nearly a year now. I've moved hosting to Inch Hosting and upgraded the entire site to Joomla 1.5. This had to be done completely manually as I wanted to rearrange some of the articles, especially as the site had now changed from its original design and needed tidying up. It also allowed me to take advantage of some cleaner template designs and menus with rounded corners. And zooming thumbnails. These things make a different, you see. I've added a large number of new banners from the Bristol and Birmingham comic conventions this year, and a few more by my work colleagues. Some really great sketches in there and I'm looking forward to getting more next year when the first Cymru Con hits Cardiff in August. The comics section has been expended to add biographies for all the new artists and I'm almost done adding comments to all the sketches. I'll have to figure out what else I can add to this section in the coming months. In the work section, I'm slowing filling in the gaps of my professional work and rewriting some of the older articles to bring them up to date and tweak the sometimes undiplomatic language. There's already an article about my effects work on Caradog James' Blonde promo that I did last year and there'll be further articles on Jason King's Screen Gems film Horace and the most recent Dinamo projects. At Dinamo, we've now completed work on Grandpa in my Pocket and it's set to air in February on CBeebies. I spent the summer on set during filming to supervise the production and make sure that the completely digital workflow ran smoothly. Thankfully, everything went along fine and we only had a couple of minor hiccups that were more down to experience than anything else. Work continues on Telly Tales (for Children's BBC and BBC Wales) and a couple of other VFX children's projects that I can't discuss here but should be in production early in the new year. My recommendations this Christmas are to watch Life, which stars Damien Lewis and has just finished its first series run on TV. It's taken a little while to get going but Lewis makes for a watchable lead and the drama is certainly more character-based than most police shows, although it still doesn't hold a candle to The Wire. The comic series Fables has also just finished its first story arc (an eleven volume epic!) and a superb finish it was too. Coupled with the news that a pilot for a TV show based on the comic has just been commissioned, I look forward to the comics continuing next year. Joe Abercrombie has now finished his fantasy trilogy with Last Argument of Kings. I reviewed The Blade Itself in a blog post last year and I can say that the final volume lived up to the promise of the first. He has a spin-off book coming out next year. Until next time...
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Jon Rennie