Adventures in Cinema 4D: Part 002

I found a tutorial to model some tank tracks, but I made these to my own design. I then managed to figure out for myself how to use the Xpresso editor to rig the wheels and track to move together.

Here's another one; a portable communicator of some kind.

And now it's the all-new TX2 handset from BeigeData.

Adventures in Cinema 4D: Part 001

Today I began the 42 day trial period of Cinema 4D Studio from Maxon. The evalution version lets you try out the full Studio option of the software with saving and rendering of projects enabled. The trial-version is limited by having an output resolution restricted to 800x600. I hope to use some of my 'spare' time to get to know this software and generally become more hands-on with 3D, possibly using this for some of my own projects in the future.

Maybe I'll post a few images as I go along. First-up some simple geometry in order to check out the Sketch and Toon cel-shading options here. I've also been able to make these wheels all spin around together using the Xpresso Editor to link all the movements together. Not bad progress for this session.

It's very early days yet, but I'm already finding this interface a lot easier to use and get into than Maya, I'm encouraged to find out more ...

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.

'The Score' film for Mr. Plastimime

This Behind the Scenes film shows the recording session of the musical score for the new film by Daniel Greaves. This is the seventh short video I've shot/edited in the Making Mr. Plastimime series. I shot this footage in the Slovak Radio auditorium a couple of weeks ago during the 5 hour recording session with the Bratislava Symphony Orchestra.

This was certainly one of the most enjoyable days work I've had in a long while. It was really inspirational to be down amongst these incredible musicians and also up in the control room to witness the scoring/recording process first-hand.

The edit for this four and a half minute video took a few days, because I used a separate audio recorded to capture the orchestra sound (for better quality) and had a lot of footage to sync. up in post.

'Cable Car' in Sony Production Awards 2014 Competition

The Sony Production Awards is a competition is open to short films made with any camera. I'm guessing there wont be many other entries shot on Super8 film. My film 'Cable Car' is on there now. If you click on this movie and watch it here, your click and maybe even your vote will be very welcome.

'Hat Trick' film for Mr. Plastimime

Here's the sixth webisode of the Behind The Scenes series I've been shooting/editing at TANDEM in support of Daniel Greaves' Mr. Plastimime project. In this episode, after a discussion with the director, we see how animator Steve Edge creates a scene in stop-motion animation.

Simon Draws: Tabby Cats

Here's another episode in the Simon Draws series of online videos I put together for Simon's Cat Ltd. In this lesson, the inimitable Mr.Simon Tofield shows us how to draw Tabby cats.

Bratislava Bound

Last Friday I had a somewhat interesting day out! I was invited by Daniel Greaves (TANDEM films) to accompany him on a trip to Slovakia to record the score for his new short film Mr. Plastimime.

The Slovak Radio building in Bratislava

The Bratislava Radio building is an immense up-turned pyramid building of early '80s vintage. It's a daring futuristic design and I really love it. Inside, there are miles of gloomy 'widescreen' corridors with concrete panelling everywhere. The auditorium was especially impressive, with an immense pipe organ taking up the entire wall behind the stage.

Composer Mike MacLennan records the piano parts for his score for Mr. Plastimime

Dan was there to supervise the recording of his film's score as composed by Mike MacLennan (Mcasso music). Mike Connaris (composer and MD of Mcasso who wrote the closing song used in the film) also attended the session. The mighty Bratislava Symphony Orchestra was conducted by Musical Director David Hernando Rico.

The Bratislava Symphony Orchestra in full effect.

My role was to document the occasion and make another Behind The Scenes video; the seventh episode in the Making Mr.Plastimime series of videos I've been making over the last year or so.

The incredible musicians of the BSO at the recording session.

I wanted to travel light (Ryan Air cabin luggage only!) and be able to move around stealthily, so I took a small bag with my Canon 600D DSLR camera, 3 lenses (11-16mm wide zoom, 30mm and 50mm) , Rode Video Mic Pro microphone and a Tascam DR-07 mkII audio recorder. I also took a Manfrotto monopod, with a small pan/tilt head and some additional monopod legs too.

I'm editing the orchestra footage this week and I think this is going to be a good episode and quite a bit longer than the previous ones. I hope I will eventually be able to share this new film at a later date , but in the meantime here I'm sharing a few stills from the session. 

Most of the previous videos I've made in this series are now publicly available online on TANDEM's Vimeo page. Here are the first 6 episodes of the Making Mr. Plastimime series.

2014 BAA prize

Every two years, at the British Animation Awards night, the cream of the UK animation 'industry' gather together for one rare night of celebration at the National Film Theatre. I was fortunate enough to be a finalist back in 2010 when my film TXT ISLAND made it into the last three in competition for the 'Best Short Film' award. Although TXT ISLAND wasn't a winner, it was great to have my film up there amongst the finalists. Professionally I can say that's been the high water mark of my career thusfar...

So it was an honour to be invited by Jayne Pilling (who tirelessly puts the whole BAA thing together) to create one of the prizes for this year's 2014 BAA awards. At each ceremony, the prizes are always hand-made artworks created by animators selected by Jayne and her team from previous winners and finalists. On the big night, the prize-winners each receive one of these unique awards rather than the usual plaque or statuette one might expect.

The brief for the design of the prizes is 'create some kind of artwork that alludes to Britishness, animation and ... sheep'. Sheep, because the acronym of British Animation Awards is of course ... BAA.

 

So here is my contribution to the occasion. I've used plastic lettering and pegboard material left-over from the production of TXT ISLAND to make this typographic artwork. I wish good luck to all participants in this year's BAAs, to the prize-winners of course, but especially the runners-up ; )

The Secret Nuclear Bunker (First Visit)

A couple of weeks ago I spent a day underground at the 'Secret Nuclear Bunker' at Kelvedon Hatch in Essex. It's a special, if rather eerie place; very evocative of the Cold War era.

I took my Nizo super8 camera, a tripod and a couple of small LED video lights and shot one cartridge of the Argenti B&W negative film down there. I found plenty of interesting things to shoot, but unfortunately encountered a jam on the second cartridge I tried to use that day. Although I was in there for four to five hours, I just ran out of time!

Anyway, this week I processed the first film cartridge (standard B&W Ilford ID11 processing) in my DIY spiral processing tank.

I then re-photographed some of the tiny 8mm film frames with my DSLR camera to get some still images like these...

Tonight I'm scanning the first 50 feet of Super 8 film frame by frame using my DIY super8 film digitizer. As I write this, the system is clicking away.

The current version of this device uses 4 stepper motors and some 3D printed sprocket wheels to drive the film and manage the feed and take-up spools. The motors are controlled by an Arduino micro-controller card and a DIY 'breadboard' circuit. The Arduino has been programmed to advance the film, trigger the Canon DSLR camera to shoot a frame, then wait a short while for the frame to be saved before repeating the process. I'm pleased to say I've finally got this capturing process automated, but it does take around three seconds to capture each frame of the cine film. If you 'do the math', that's almost four hours to scan a whole 50 feet (around 3 minutes) of film.

This process is very slow but does give very high-res images of the Super8 frames. The registration isn't perfect, but close enough to be fixed in post production using the After Effects stabilizer. Needless to say, this part of the process is very slow and tedious too.

I hope to get back to the bunker soon to shoot more footage there. Now that I've visited the place once, I'm getting a much better sense of the place and ideas for the kind of shots I'd like to come back with.

Late Adopter

Well I've finally got one of these new-fangled 'smart' phones without any buttons on. But don't be expecting to see photos of amusing pets and the stuff I'm about to eat...

Russian cine camera from the 1970s, the Kiev Alpha 16

TXT ISLAND in Cable Car Screening !

My 2009 animated short film TXT ISLAND certainly made it to lots of screenings and festivals in its day, but none so 'elevated' as this weekend's screenings at the popular Austrian ski resort of Lech.

In what looks to be a fine weekend of revelry and culture, animated short films are presented inside the cable car cabins for the entertainment of festival goers as they soar above the snow-clad mountains. I'm very proud to have had my film selected as part of this event.

The Cineastic Gondolas Festival brings together music, film and ... cable cars, a winning combination for sure; as readers of this blog will already know... I'm really quite fond of cable cars.

Simon's Real Cats

Here's another short video I've just put together for Simon's Cat Ltd. in which Simon Tofield (the creator of the Simon's Cat cartoons) tells us all about his own real cats.

We created a moving collage of Simon's drawings and photos to carry the story along. compositing/editing is done in Adobe After Effects.

Once again, music and sound mix is by Russell Pay (a.k.a.'Shrooty').

The Simon's Cat Story

Here's another short online film I've just put together for Simon's Cat Ltd. The awesomely- talented Simon Tofield talks us through his life story, his love of drawing and the growing success of his Simon's Cat cartoons.

Simon tells us his story through his narration and his own drawings, this video includes clips from his animated films and examples of his childhood artwork too.

The voice was recorded first, then edited down in Adobe Premiere. For the 'speed drawings' we screen-recorded Simon drawing into Adobe Flash. These recordings were then re-timed and edited in After effects. Camera moves and transitions were then used to build up the story.

The Simon's Cat music and the final sound mix are by Russell Pay (aka Shrooty.)

London 3D Print Show 2013

Last Friday, I had a quick scoot around the 3D Print Show. I'm not going to write so much of a review of this event as last year... I only had an hour and a half at lunchtime to look around, but fortunately for me, this year's event was held at the Business Design Centre, a mere stone's throw from TANDEM's studio in Islington.

3D printing has been all over the news again this year, and the exhibits; printed objects and technologies on show have certainly moved on over the last 12 months too. One of the cooler things to see was a gallery of 3D printed objects made for the movie business. That's costume items for big Hollywood movies, Pacific Rim, Iron Man etc. and even Thor's hammer. The film people (in this case Legacy Effects) have been quick to embrace this technology, being ideal for one off, or small runs of high-detail custom manufacturing for props and costume elements etc.

Another trend this year seems to have been ever-larger printers taking on larger scale projects. Here we see a prototype for the 3D printed 'Urbee 2' car project with its designer Jim Kor.

As well as the varied prototyping and commercial applications on show, there's a smattering of 3D printed art on display too, I especially liked this reproduction of a Parisian headstone sculpture, the bust of George Méliès. The original sculpture (Renato Carvillani, 1951) has been laser scanned in situ then reproduced as a 3D print by Cosmo Wenman.

I then headed towards the Ultimaker stand to go and kick the metaphorical tyres of their new Ultimaker 2 printer... Christmas is coming up soon dear readers, and I'd really quite like one of these...

And here are some 3D prints they made earlier...

Another DIY film scanner

For anybody interested in the film scanning/digitizing aspects of my Cable Car Super8 film, here's a little sneaky peek behind the scenes...

Yes, this really is my home-made 8mm film scanner project in all it's current glory.

There are two 20 tooth sprocket wheels which drive the film along (each one has a stepper motor underneath) and a third stepper to turn the take-up spool. All the stepper motors are running together under control of the Stepper Bee card. The machine vision camera you see is the Sumix 150M.

The light source is 10 rectangular white LEDS with a small piece of opal glass diffuser in front of them.

The 2 sprocket wheels, the 4 pulley wheels, and the film gate are all pieces I've designed in 123D Design and had 3D printed at Shapeways.com.

The camera sits on a Manfrotto plate and there are crude wooden guides for sliding the camera backwards and forward and sliding the main deck from side to side. I pack layers of card under the deck to achieve the correct height. So this is not exactly precision engineering...

Although I've been fooling around with this for quite a long time now, there's still a long way for this to go... Did I mention there is no automation of the scanning yet and that the camera only captures in monochrome? The registration is not great either, but I'm using the Stabilizer in After Effects and getting passable results that way.

I've ordered some more bits from Shapeways so no doubt I will soon be tearing this one apart and starting again...

Cable Car : A new super8 film

Cable Car : super8 film, DIY processed & digitized from Chris Gavin on Vimeo.

Well here's my latest short cine film. It's very much DIY movie-making this one; shot on Black & White negative super8 film, developed in my home-made spiral processing tank and DIY digitized (using a home-made contraption) too. I hope soon to write a bit more about this.

Fun with Processing #001: Particle experiments.

I've been dabbling a bit with Processing lately. Processing is a free development environment, offering all kind of potential for geeky visualization and interactivity projects.

I've been working my way through the tutorials and here's one of the first 'sketches' I've devised.

This is NOT an embedded movie... I've written this visualization in Processing code. This is basically a bit of generative art that is served up to the viewer; there are some randomized variables so this will be a little bit different each time it's viewed. I've just added a little interactive feature too, so try clicking on the particle cloud and see what happens!

It's early days for me with this, but I want to find out how one can embed such a creation into a web page or blog like this, if you can see what I'm talking about below, then I guess it's worked...

Transport for London Film Released

I mostly use this blog to document my personal film-making endeavours, so there is normally much to read here about cameras, tests, super 8 and generally experimental film-making stuff.

I don't usually write quite so much here about my 'day job', working on commercials and promo films etc. For reasons of commercial and client confidentiality it isn't always possible to write about the things I've been working on. However, a short promotional film I co-directed with Tobias Fouracre a couple of months ago at TANDEM films has just been put online by the client, so I feel happy to embed a YouTube link to it here.

'Start Your Own Journey' is a short minute and a half film commissioned by Transport for London to introduce and promote the latest version of the tfl.gov.uk website. The TfL site is well-known to Londoners who use the site to plan their journeys around the capital. The team at TfL have been working hard to release an updated and improved version of the site so asked us to come up with an entertaining short film to highlight some of the main features on offer.

This film was shot in TANDEM's basement studio using A Canon DSLR camera and DragonFrame stop-motion software running on an iMac. Almost all of the 'travelling' shots you see in this film were realised by moving models towards a stationary camera to create the illusion of a continual journey. Tobias came up with the main concept of shooting the film from the first-person perspective of a traveller undertaking a journey through London. I helped out a bit on some model preparation and shooting, but my job was mainly integrating the client's website functionality throughout the film and compositing the piece to make a seamless film.

We fortunately had the services of Gordon Allen for the model-making and the very versatile help of Nicola Viargiu who greatly assisted us at all stages of the production. The music and effects for the film were created by Russell Pay of Shrooty. The producer for TANDEM was Emma Burch.

Super 8 Film DIY processed with ID11 developer

I've been out and about down at the Thames cable car (aka The Emirates Airline) the last couple of weekends with my Nizo camera and shot another couple of cartridges of Super 8 film (Argenti APX 100 BW negative.) So that's another couple of proper 50 foot loads I've put through my DIY film processing spiral tank already. One of the many joys of DIY cine processing is not having to wait a couple of weeks to get your films back!

I've processed the first of these 2 rolls using the Caffenol C-M recipe as before, and the last roll using the rather more conventional film developer Ilford ID11. I've written a bit about my experiences with Caffenol in my previous posts, but as I've been seeing VERY grainy results I thought I'd try some 'proper' developer by way of comparison. I do quite like the grain really, but when the images are only around 5mm wide, the magnified effect of the grain becomes quite overwhelming.

Now,  when I borrowed all of my dad's old film processing gear, there were a couple of packs of developer in there... There was a small pack for making up 1 litre of stock developer and a larger pack for making 5 litres. The smaller pack looked the oldest so I chose to try that one first... This had been bought from a shop called 'Techno' for about £1.60. I would estimate that this film developer was of early 1980s vintage. I read online varying reports of using such ancient chemistry, and there was a fair chance this just wouldn't work at all.

Not wishing to risk a full 50 feet of film with these ancient chems, I took the sensible precaution of developing a test strip first. The results looked good so I went ahead and processed the whole roll. The stills below are from this first test strip.

I think I'm seeing a lot less grain on these results already... These photos were taken of the film on a lightbox. I used my Canon 600d Camera and an old 50mm Pentacon lens 'reversed' to get the required macro.

First test frame of Super 8 film (Argenti BW neg APX100) processed with Ilford ID11 developer.

The same frame digitally inverted to a positive.

I'm planning to put a short film together showing views of the cable car, processed different ways and digitized using various methods too. I hope in the future to be able to present a more useful comparison of the Caffenol C-M and ID11 results once I've got some moving footage to show...