Working on Headspace Animations

For anybody reading this and wondering what I've mostly been doing this last year ... Well I've been working full-time as a freelancer at Nexus Studios in Shoreditch, helping to composite a lot of these beautiful animated short films for the Headspace mobile app. These films are mostly created as content to be seen by users within the Headspace app, but also quite a few of these are being published on the official Headspace YouTube channel now; so I feel it's OK to share a link to one of my favorite ones here ...

Back From the 'Bear Hunt.'

Well I've not posted much to this blog recently, and now I can reveal the reason! For the last 6 months I've been working in at Lupus Films where we have been making "We're Going on a Bear Hunt" for Channel Four TV here in the UK. The half hour animated special will be shown on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, but the official trailer has been released online now, so you can have a peek at what's to come. The film is successfully delivered now, so my role as Lead Compositor is done. Back to more freelance projects now, and once again, very much available for new work ; )

2014 Directing Showreel

I just thought it might be time to put my showreel together again. So I've cut-in a few newer jobs and fixed the broken link to this on my 'REEL' page. These are mostly jobs I've directed whilst at TANDEM, with a couple of extracts from my own short film projects too.

Information Film for Camelot Property Management

At the very end of last year I produced,directed,designed and edited this 13 minute corporate film for Camelot Property Management. The company rents out living spaces in properties that would otherwise lie dormant and unused. Camelot Property Management hired me to create an informational film to be presented to all prospective customers of their service.

Given the information-rich content of the film and the importance of the legal and safety information involved; the client and I decided on a very clean 'info-graphics' style for maximum clarity. The video contains text-animation, simple CGI animation, 2D graphical animation and some 'rotoscoped' live action characters too.

The entire video is now over on the Camelot website and YouTube channel, so I now feel happy to embed a link to the film...

Police 101 Promo

At TANDEM recently I was asked to make a promo video for the Police. A Learjet over to Sting's Tuscan villa? Well no, the client would be the UK Home Office, so instead I went to the M&C Saatchi offices in Golden Square to find out what it was all about.

My enquiries revealed that the police forces up and down  the UK are rolling out a new telephone response service for reporting 'non emergency' issues. The public are to be encouraged to use the number 101 for the types of calls which don't warrant the full emergency response of a 999 call. The police were asking for an on-line film to promote the new number and encourage the public to use it from now on.

I directed, shot and composited the film in about three weeks with a couple of days compositing help from Chris Forrester at the end of the schedule. Due to all kinds of constraints, I decided the film could be made (almost) entirely with stills photography and After Effects compositing, so that's the way we went. I shot the film all with my Canon 600D camera, mostly using the Tokina 11-16mm wide angle zoom , but I also experimented with some of my dad's old Pentax mount lenses when shooting the panoramic cityscape shots at the start of the film.

The film has appeared on-line now (It seems the Devon & Cornwall police have put it on YouTube already) so it seems OK now to embed that link here for you to see it...