Filmography 1999 to 2008
This is a run through of my most memorable projects in various
genres over the
years. I've dropped in some facts about their development. If
you want to read them all in historical order start from the
bottom of the University
page to get everything in context.
There are free links to videos where ever possible and many of
them have pages dedicated to each project.
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Showreels
Personal Projects
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Professional
Projects
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University Years
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College Years
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2006 to 2008 - Character based CG Short
I'm developing a short computer generated film. Cupid, The
Devil and a rather sexy Death gather in Heaven's War Room to
attend to their daily routine of manipulating our lives on
Earth, when someone gets a bright idea and turns their high tech
tools into the weapons of love. Mix mobile phones and online
dating and you've got a recipe for an unexpected love triangle
that turns into a frenzied shootout. Have a look at the project so far. If
you'd like to contribute your talents feel free to get in touch.
More...
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2008 - CGI Feature Film - Working remotely for Walsh Family
Media as a Character Animator
I'm doing some part time work on this budget CGI film
featuring the Cool Bean characters. It's an interesting
challenge working form home, but very familiar territory in
every other respect and involves some interesting characters and
strong cartoony animation. Here's their
website.
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2008 - Live Action & CGI Commercial - Working for Passion Pictures
as a Senior Animator
Back to Passion Pictures and I did the Previs on this advert
for Vodafone involving shot setup and more uniquely... a lot of
Dominos! Julian was handling the tech side of the Dominos as I
gave him feedback to get the tools to work. Working closely with
the Directors from the
Mixtape Club,
who came over from New York for this, I tried out lots of shot
and Domino setups, figuring out how the Live Action elements
would fit into the shots while making key phrases read as the
Dominos get more and more ambitious.
It was a simple yet fun project and I really enjoyed working
with Michelle, Chris and Jesse from the Mixtape Club. There are
a few other versions out there, with different edits and
endings. I just saw one on the TV with my spinning phone ending!
Copyright © of Vodafone 2008
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2008 - CGI and 2D based Effects and Compositing Showreel
This is a reel of my varied effects and compositing work on a
couple of HD CGI based projects. Most of this material was
created at a budget with very few specialist professional tools,
so it was quite an interesting challenge to invent this stuff
with what I had available to hand.
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2008 - Animated CGI Commercial - Working for Passion Pictures
as a Senior Animator
I started at Passion Pictures and I was working on a really cool
project which gave me plenty of room to flex my film making and
animation skills. I'm a huge fan of the various styles of
Passion Pictures portfolio and a few of my friends from MPC made
the move too for various other projects, so it was fun. The first
Rock Band cinematic was very... more...
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2008 - VFX based Feature Film - working for MPC as a Senior
Character Animator
Animating on Prince Caspian, I met lots
of great people while I settled into life in London. I got the
chance to work on characters combining live action and
animation, as well as full CG characters. Everything from
Tigers, Leopards, Cheetahs, Minotaurs and Fauns to Centaurs. Here's a sneak peak
behind the scenes.
Copyright © of The Walden Media
Group 2008.
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2008 - CGI Animation demoreel
This reel features samples of recent work from various
projects currently in the public domain.
The music is from "K-Pax" which
is the Copyright © of The Universal Classics Group.
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2007 to 2008 - CGI Animation - Personal Project
I'd wanted to do something acrobatic like this since my University
years but when Disney's Tarzan came out I opted not to do it as I
figured it would be seen as a rip off, since then Spiderman has also
achieved similar feats. Well I felt it was time to have a go anyway to
add a little variety to my reel. The character model and texturing was
done by my friend Jamie and I rigged it using Setup Machine 2. I've also
sculpted a series of facial expressions and incorporated them into the
rig with... More...
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2008 - Live Action Advert - working for The Moving Picture
Company as a Senior Animator
I spent a week pre-visualising how the little people would
work in the car's interior space. The results may look quite
simple but it was surprisingly tricky finding natural ways to
make each scenario work. Here's a
shorter version and here's a
higher quality version.
Copyright © of Toyota 2008
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2008 - CGI TV Advert - working for The Moving Picture Company
as a Senior Animator
A last minute move to London, started with about three weeks
working on this 'Pod Racer' style advert at MPC. It was a fast
schedule and the advert was on air five weeks after I started on
it, which is a really fast turn around the team can be very
proud of. There's nothing particularly complex in the animation
but the results were good, and the people I worked with were
great. I did most the work on the spark plug and wheel shots
moving through the corridors. You can read the MPC write up
here.
Copyright © of Renault 2008.
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2007 - CGI TV Advert - working for Ark VFX as the Senior
Animator
This Television advert for the Singapore Navy was an interesting
piece of work. The brief was; the buildings come to life and head out to
sea to engage in battle with office themed projectiles, we then cut back
to a man waking up in his office before we see the tag lines. We bounced
a number of ideas around and... More...
Copyright © of The Singapore Navy
2007.
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2007 / 2008 - 3D CG Character Animation
I decided to have a go
at the newly re-furbished ‘11 Second Club’
Animation Competition, where you are given one month to animate
a character to a sound sample. Here is a brief diary of my
progress, a few other notes and videos at various stages in the
process. More...
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2007 - Visual Effects Demoreel - working for Ark VFX in England
as the Senior Animator and Editor
I edited together two new showreels for
Ark VFX, one short
Teaser Reel and one longer
Professional Reel.
The main idea behind these was to show the breadth of Ark's portfolio whilst leaning it more in the direction of
the character animation work they'd done but hadn't shown much
of up to this point.
First I put together the longer video paying close attention
to keeping sequences of shots (related to each other) close
together within the edit so that they made sense to the viewer.
They were then split into smaller chunks and sprinkled in key
places in the edit to effectively provide 'sub-plots' that weave
together.
The second edit was much shorter and had to be cut purely for
the spectacle value in a way that only gave you enough of a
glimpse to tease you into finding out more... or watching the
longer video.
When you watch these videos I suggest you right click on the
link and save it to your computer for the best playback and a
seamless download.
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2007 - CGI HD Cinematics for a PS3 game - working for Ark VFX in
England as the Senior Animator
I arrived just as this project was nearing completion so all I
did was help where I was needed for a couple of months until it
was all done. It was a mixture of scene setup with mocap
performances. Mocap fixing, and full hand animated replacement
where the mocap wasn't providing the necessary performance. I
also animated a lot of hands and faces since the mocap doesn't
provide that. Then there was lighting and rendering, and a bit
of editing and titles work.
For more information go to the
Official Website.
In the mean time there's a good sample of the work in
this
trailer.
Copyright © of Sega 2008.
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2007 - CGI Animation demoreel
This reel features
Dogs on a Seesaw and some samples of my work on
Happy Feet. It also shows highlights
from my cinematic/FMV work on Kameo and my personal projects
Panda Pander,
In case I don't see ya
and What did I just say?.
 
The music is from "Ghostbusters" which
is the Copyright © of Arista Records, Inc. 1984.
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2007 - CGI Animation - Personal Project
I started this pet project with the intension of doing some four
legged animation, with a jump and some balance/weight issues to
address. It began with the dog jumping onto a seesaw with a
weight on the other side reacting to the seesaw tilting. Then it
occurred to me that the dog’s action wasn’t as interesting as
what the weight was doing as it flew up, bounced and rocked
around. So I thought it would be even more interesting to...
more...
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2006 to 2007 - CG animated feature film - working for Glasgow
Animation in Scotland as the Animation Supervisor & Lead
Character Animator
I spent six months in Glasgow, initially as a Senior Character Animator
but quickly taking over as the Animation Supervisor on this
CG feature film featuring the voices of Sean Connery, Alan
Cumming, Gail Porter, Ruby Wax, Richard Briers, Miriam Margolyes.
At first there were a number of interesting character
animation shots to do and I took a back seat to my usual role
while I learned the pipeline and evaluated the film's character
rigs. It wasn't long before there were some staff changes and
suddenly lots of slack to be taken up in other departments which
revealed new opportunities for development in the pipeline. In
time I took over as the Animation Supervisor and once we were
moved into our new animation room things started to really get
going, with a small but dedicated department of animators and a
number of outsourced studios in numerous locations supporting
and subsidising our work.
We got into a good routine of weekly group animation
critiquing sessions, on top of the usual one on ones I would do
dozens of times per day. Doug and I would also go over the
dailies for one of the external animation studios to give them
feedback and guidance. We were just getting going when personal
circumstances dictated that I had to move to another area, and I
leave them in the capable hands of my friend Roberto. I wish
them the best of luck and look forward to seeing the finished
film soon.
Go to the
official website for more details on the movie.
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2006 - Animation demoreel containing CG and 2D animation
This video has a small selection of my best character animation work from
a variety of projects currently in the public domain.
The music is from "Ghostbusters" which
is the Copyright © of Arista Records, Inc. 1984.
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2006 / 2008 - CG lip-synced performance piece
I used one of the 10 second club dialogue samples to start this
off... it's actually 13 seconds though. Unfortunately the
competition was struggling to keep on top of things at the time
so the judging wasn't very timely, so this wasn't entered and I
just did it for the practice. I did a few live-action reference
shoots, to get me started, and sliced together my favourite
parts. This was a really good pacer, as just when you find
yourself getting too close to the animation and focusing on
issues that are too small, you can take a step back and remind
yourself of the bigger issues by studying the
reference footage. The mouth on this rig turned out to be a
bit of a pain (it opens too wide), and the eyebrows look like a
giant caterpillar but I struggled on. I did most of the work on
a very slow computer so I had to really focus on the principles
of the animation without easily being able to see it playback in
real-time. It's still a great rig, for a freebie, and I'd love
to thank the people that made it.
The audio clip is from "Rush Hour" which
is the Copyright © of New Line Cinema.
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2006 - CG lip-sync piece
This short piece of lip-sync work was just something simple and
fun to fill a little free time. It's not very complicated just a
head... talking. It's a line from one of my favourite movies,
'The Truman Show'.
The audio clip is from "The Truman Show"
which is the Copyright © and TM of Paramount Pictures 1998.
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2006 - Warner Brothers CG animated feature film - working for
Animal Logic in Sydney as a Technical Animator
I was lucky enough to have an all expenses paid stay in Sydney
Australia for four months working on Happy Feet for
Animal
Logic. It's about singing and dancing penguins and in case
you haven’t heard about it… it’s the one that won the Oscar!
After a couple of weeks learning XSI I started an Audition piece
along with all the other animators, to learn how this production
wanted us to do things... more...
"Happy Feet" is the Copyright © of
Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. 2006
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2006 - Microsoft XBox 360 game - working for Rare in England as
a Senior Animator
I spent a month or so working on in-game animations for this
game. I’d been busy with numerous departments whilst I was
writing up pitch documents for a dozen game ideas and I decided
I wanted to find something focused to do while I was waiting for
these projects to work their way through the management
pipeline. I was stretched thin, so I volunteered my time on the
new Asset Creation Team that was currently creating animations
for new characters.
I spent most of my time working on a cute little cartoon Robin
character which made a nice change from the more serious things
I’d been animating for years. It was really bouncy and squashed
beautifully even though the geometry wasn’t all that
sophisticated. The design was very round so it was like
animating a ball with personality. I moved on to another project
after this, but it was the last proper piece of animation I did
for Rare before finally saying my good-byes after seven and a
half years.
I later discovered that my animation was used in Viva Piñata 2
rather than in the expansion packs that were intended for the
first game.
This is actually a teaser trailer for Viva Piñata (from
Rare) with some great animation, it doesn't actually contain any
of my work, but it gives you an idea of what the project is all
about. This has spawned an entire franchise now with an animated
TV series and a spin off game. Have
a look at the
Official
Website for more details. Viva Pinata is the Copyright © of the
Microsoft Corporation 2006
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2005 & 2006 - Microsoft XBox 360 first person shooter - working
for Rare in England
I didn't work on this game directly. My contributions were only
promotional videos and a company logo...
more ...
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2005 - Demo reel containing CG animation
This showreel highlights a small portion of my work leading up
to September 2005... more...
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2002 to 2005 (Some videos in 2006) - Microsoft XBox 360
action/adventure game - working for Rare in England as the Lead
Animator
Over the three years I worked on Kameo I did a huge number of
cutscenes along with my other responsibilities. Many of them
changed dramatically as the game developed to fit the changing
story and gameplay. The best of the cinematics ... are here. There is also a selection of my
animatics at the bottom of the page for
sequences that might not have made it into production (or were
largely worked on by other animators). For examples of lighting
and rendering have a look at the
Stills Gallery. I did a lot of editing
for trailers over the years too so check out those at the
Trailers page...
more ...
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2002 - Microsoft XBox 360 game - working for Rare in England
I spent a couple of months working on this game (it's still in
development). I did a number of pre-production related tasks on
this one including ideas development, concept artwork, character
designs and pre-visualisation. The video link below does not
contain any of my animation, it's simply a teaser for the
project and it doesn't give much away. You will be able to find
out more about the title at
XBox.com
and at the Official Website.
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1999 to 2002 - Nintendo Gamecube action/adventure game - working
for Rare in England - Position: Senior Animator
Although I did a number of tasks over the years on this one, I
was predominantly responsible for the real-time cut-scenes.
There are about two to three hours of the stuff in this game! I
spent an awful amount of time with the characters of this world,
bringing them to life. I didn't really have much of a clue what
to do with them when I started, but one of the things I remember
doing was ...
more ...
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2001 - Live action with special effects - Pop video
This was a test project really. I had a yearning to work on
something different that I could turn around reasonably quickly
and just have some fun on without too much planning. It turned
out that my friend Dave was taking his band, Red Trap; as they
were known then, to various gigs to play their growing
play-list. So I offered to make them a pop video, which ...
more ...
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