“Bavaria – The Drop” – Commercial – VFX Supervisor
This is one of my favourite projects, an animation challenge. I was asked to tell an epic story about a water drop. Not much to hang on to in terms of expressivity.. A spider was also in the picture, which involved minute research on jumping spiders and a macro-photo shoot at the National history Museum in LA.
Director Matthijs van Heijningen and I sat for 5 days editing and laying out a previz, with me switching between Maya and Final Cut in real time. The shoot was very close to the previz. I then spent a week on character development, shooting in my back garden, before distributing shots to my team.
Full CG game trailers at Axis Animation – CG Supervisor
*Gold winner at AEAF awards 2022*
Client: Magic The Gathering.
Client: Marvel
* Grand Winner at the NYX Game Awards 2023*
Client: Magic The Gathering
Client: Magic The Gathering
My role on these four projects was to work alongside director, art director and producer at a core level, bid with executive producer and heads of departments, and lead large teams (80+) across all departments involved in an advanced animation pipeline. Supervise their work, help technically and creatively where needed, maintain and moderate communication with the development team, help the dev team create new tools, design new methodologies. I was also responsible for grading.
More specifically, for the “Snap” Marvel project, I designed a methodology allowing for 3D coherent, noise free 2D “thick and thin” toon lines, in a way and with an output quality that are to my knowledge innovative. I prototyped nodal systems and data flow using various tools and my leads implemented from this a pipeline compliant workflow.
I also used “under the hood” nodal shading techniques in order to create this very specific 3D/comic look, the goal being to maintain a sense of 2D cell shading whilst also providing 3D lighting coherence.
“King-Kong Empire State Building” permanent installation – VFX Supervisor – Animation Director
I was responsible for supervising the creation of visuals, photorealistic CG against backplates, for the Empire State Building’s 2nd floor permanent exhibition overhaul in 2019, a multimillion dollar entreprise, consisting of three major installations.
In particular, I looked after, lit and directed animation for the King-Kong room, the cherry on the cake of the exhibition. My team and I produced two minutes of looped animation, running continuously on 9 synchronised 4K screens, involving King-Kong posing for spectators, fighting off planes, interacting with pigeons on a window ledge across the room. This is a permanent exhibition, a very immersive experience.
The rendition above is a single screen HD version of what is to be normally experienced as a multiple screen/windows immersive installation. Because of the nature of this project, I used VR extensively as a pre visualisation tool, and I don’t think I could have achieved this level of precision in setting up my cameras relative to the physical world without VR immersion.
Making of:
As seen on site at the ESB:
“2.0” – Feature film – CG Supervisor
I was asked by Unit VFX to produce the creature design and a bespoke Maya/Houdini/Arnold pipeline for a character made of mobile phones engaging into violent combat, as a key sequence in Bollywood’s largest VFX based production.
I worked with a team of 5 in order to produce 45 shots in a few months, which required me to come up with a very automated workflow. The character’s face needed to be mapped with footage from 6 different cameras, their distribution based on normals in world space, for which I created a linear algebra based Arnold shading network.
All of this was automated, through the use of naming conventions and having my tools and shaders communicate with the pipeline at an asset level. Setting up a new shot would take around 10 min.