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A preview of ‘Guard – a Pantomime shot’

I’m currently rendering out my latest animation for my demo reel. It’s a pantomime shot that I based on my Animation Mentor shot – but I felt the AM shot wasn’t strong enough, so I fleshed it out a bit more. Here’s a still preview of what’s coming in the next couple of days:

Final Render of 'Guard - Pantomime'

Huge thanks goes to the awesome Oasim Karmieh for lighting and setting up the shaders on the scene for me so I can learn a bit more about lighting. I think he’s done an incredible job, and I’m looking forward seeing the final animation all rendered out! Thanks buddy.

I’ll be posting the completed version within a couple of days.

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Grindelwald, Switzerland

The Bernese Alps

At the beginning of the year, we rented a little car, and headed down into Switzerland for the day. It was a nice little trip, filled with some sight seeing, and driving around.

This panorama was taken from a little touristy village on the foot of the Bernese Alps, called Ginderwald.  From left to right you can see the famous Wetterhorn, Mattenberg, Ostegg, and the Eiger (you can just about see the North Face sliding down to the right of the photo). It’s taken me a while to get this to look ok, as I was just beginning to really experiment with panorama photography back then, so my camera wasn’t set up properly, but with a few tweaks, I’ve grown to like it, and thought I’d share it.

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A few old Panoramas, Snowdonia – North Wales

Something that I enjoy doing is to sit at my (our) desk, shifting through the wonderful iPhoto looking at my pictures. Every now and again, I come across some un-made panoramas that I took whilst out on my various adventures. Here are 4, relatively old panoramas, that I’ve just stitched up, and played around with. Some of these photographs are about 3 years old!

The first is taken from the road leading up Nant Gywnant, looking over towards Gallt y Wenallt with the Snowdon Horseshoe behind it. The second is taken from Dinas Dinlle, on a great Wintery evening. The third was taken when our walking group headed up Moel Lefn on a freezing cold Winter day, but the light was just fantastic, and the last – although not visually brilliant, is a panorama of my ‘5 square mile’, Dyffryn Nantlle, taken from Y Cilgwyn.

Gallt y Wenallt & the Snowdon Horeshoe, Nant Gwynant
Dinas Dinlle Piws
Moel Lefn, looking towards Criccieth
Dyffryn Nantlle o Parc Bel, Y Cilgwyn
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Photography

I’m slowly in the process of re-vamping a lot of my website, especially how the photography section works. I’ve decided to use a pretty great Flickr Plug-in for my gallery, which does a great job at displaying my images.

Use the drop-down menu under the Photography tab at the top of the page to view my photos.

Here’s a couple of new Panorama images I’ve just stitched together today. The first is from Cors y Fron, located just outside the Snowdonia National Park, on the way out of Y Fron towards Llyn Ffynhonnau and Mynydd Mawr. The wee ruin is by far, located in one of the most beautiful spots in North Wales, overlooking nothing but the magnificent Nantlle Ridge. The second is a first try at a night panorama, taken ontop of Moel Eilio, on a Winters night, looking towards Y Glyderau and Snowdon. Snowdon is just under the moon.

An Autumn scene at Cors y Fron
Glyderau, Snowdon and the Moon
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Cwm Bwlch y Moch, Snowdonia

I headed back to North Wales for a couple of weeks to see my parents & friends, and to attend some meetings involving an animation project that I’ve been working on. As always, I took my camera out with me, but due to some pretty epic man-flu type symptoms, I didn’t manage to head on out into the mountains as much as I’d like.

Instead, I decided to experiment a bit with taking panoramas, which was great fun – as I’m getting a little bit tired of my normal panorama swoop. I headed on up into the Nantlle Valley, and came to Cwm Blwch y Moch, just North of Llyn y Dywarchen, which is nested just under Mynydd Mawr. This time, I tried to focus on a nice feature in the Cwm, as opposed to just a massive panorama sweeping across the landscape. I really enjoyed trying to capture the mood of the place.

Y Garn
Cwm Bwlch y Moch

For the first image, ‘Y Garn’ – I played around with the fisheye lens, and also graded the image, slightly de-saturating it, to try and bring out the feeling of the day a bit better.

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‘Catgroove’ – Got the Groove Dance

I decided to focus a bit on body mechanics over the last couple of weeks, and thought it would be a great idea to animate a full body dance.

It was a fun project to animate, seeing as I’ve never animated a dance scene before. The folks over at 11secondclub helped me out a lot by giving me some great feedback, and generally, I’m very happy with how he turned out.

I’ve dedicated this to my lovely girlfriend, Regina, who’s being super awesome to me right now, who loves Parov’s music so much, and today just happens to be her name day – Všechno nejlepší k svátku, Regina! xo

The audio is Parov Stelar’s ‘Catgroove’ and the Norman Rig is the ‘Cool Shirt Norman’ by F.C. Kiral.

If you’l like to see the Work in Progress thread for this, here’s a link from blocking, straight through to the final render: Got the Groove.

 

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Animation Mentor – Term 1 Reel

Whilst going through my old files, I decided to playblast my Animation Mentor – Term 1 Reel out, and upload it so that I have a reference of it on my website. I’ll render it out someday, so it’s all nice and shinny, but for now, the playblast version is ok. The exercises taught me so much about animation, and it’s good to look back at them now and again. I’ve also included my Baseball pitch from Term 2.

I’ve also created a new page, titled ‘3D Stills‘ which I’ve uploaded my Animation Mentor Poses, along with some other stills of mine. I really enjoyed doing the poses back at AM, I think I’ll start creating them again on a weekly bases, to get some inspiration flowing!

Chaplin Stance