I'm a Dublin, Ireland based 3d and visual effects artist working on some shiny commercials. I'm a fan of strong tea, anything monochrome and things that are arranged at right angles.
Over the past while i’ve worked on a couple of non-commercial projects with some friends, one of which is this music video for the band Orba Squara. It was directed by the very talented Lorcan Finnegan of Lovely Productions and features a tonne of his illustrations over the course of the video. 3d wise the main thing is the head replacement, modelled and animated by Vadim Draempaehl - work with this guy, he’s bloody good. On my end I did a lot of passes for it but mainly the tracking which I completely underestimated the complexity of - a single camera move over 4000 frames is not fun! It was great to do though first of all to work with lorcan but also as a pretty tough thing that I hadn’t done before. Here’s the vid:
One of the things that comes up again and again in our industry is the amount of planning that does or doesn’t go into something . Through conversations with friends it seems that this is something that affects a lot of different industries and it ends up being a source of annoyance, wasted time and money. As a visual effects artist the aim is always to do something cool, work with a great director and add something that makes the end result even better. Over the years I’ve worked on commercials and short films of widely varying budgets (hundreds of thousands down to zero) and one thing that makes a huge difference in every case is proper planning. If you know what you’re aiming to achieve at an early stage, it means that you can draw on all of the expertise of the people involved at each stage and think of the smartest, most efficient way of getting the best results.
One of the major advances in the past 10 years is the advent of cheap cameras - dv has made film making a lot more accessible to everyone and the software makers have followed suite with tools that are intuitive for the average person and allow them to edit and effect to a professional level. Personally while I’m all for it, there comes a consequence along the lines of “not everyone who writes a book should”. I’ve come to believe that anyone that gets something for free doesn’t respect it and to an extent this applies to cheap cameras. While I’ve seen mess ups at all levels of film shoots (and made some), the more expensive shoots don’t feature as many mistakes and I think it’s all down to risk. On an expensive shoot, the crew is highly skilled, efficient and know that mess ups will slow things down and damage their reputation, which is everything in this industry. If there’s a tonne of money being burnt and a lot of shots to get through, people are generally pretty sharp and they get hired for being reliable. On a shoot where there’s no budget you have the same consequences don’t apply and things are often done looser and I think this is where the issues creep in. The cheap, unplanned ethos starts creeping in to other areas of the production and in effect they aren’t treated with the respect they deserve. The idea is to plan as much as possible and talk to the crew involved so you’re well informed at all levels.
I’m going to be putting together some posts on visual effects and shooting for such over the next while as a primer for those planning their own visual effects epics to hopefully make life a wee bit easier for all involved!
On that note, here’s a presentation by Stu Maschwitz, the lovely man who heads the Orphanage but also knows how to do things on the cheap. It’s a fun 20 minute presentation primarily based around final cut pro and after effects but not tech heavy and goes into his ethos of making things in a smart fashion.
Here’s the last showreel I cut in late 2006. It’s a tough thing to get a proper reel together and it’s probably taken me 5 years of work to get something that I’m happy with. I’m going to cut a new one soon with the work I’ve done since joining Piranha Bar so hopefully there should be an update on the way. Good luck to all the aspiring students working on theirs at the moment!
Just a quick entry to start things off, I’ll mainly be posting bits and pieces on film and visual effects here so hopefully some useful information on the way.