Skin_n_bones_title

Sci-fi London 48-hour film challenge 2015: satellite Detail

The Satellite is based on an actual NASA model of a space probe called DAWN, that actually uses an ion drive for thrust. This appeals to my geeky sense of cool and is the reason why my engine plume is blue.

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Skin and bones

Sci-fi London 48-hour film challenge 2015: Skin and Bones

Its that no sleep time of year again…

Here is the short we made for the Sci-Fi London 48 Hour Film Challenge 2015. We made the shortlist. Which means we get to go to the award screening on the 3rd of June. We’ll have to wait til then to find out who wins. I’ve done a little post on the final shot here.

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sci-fi London 48 hour challenge: Back Issue

Once again its the sci-fi London 48hour short film competition. It gets bigger every year , and this time I almost managed to get some sleep.

I had a lot on over the weekend so couldn’t join the #TheCreepyGuys on location. It wasn’t until Sunday afternoon that I could get down to Modelling the DNA and Skeleton.

Spine_Gui

dna_Gui

I was beginning to feel squeezed for time but fortunately my house mate Dan gave up his Sunday evening help out.

We spent a while looking at  Jorge-Almeida’s work and some Oblivion UI’s. While they had weeks of design work compared to our hours. It gave us something to spring our ideas off.

Dan then moved on layouts in Adobe illustrator while I wrangled with the 3d elements and composite tests

With work the next day Dan went to sleep at midnight. But I kept tweaking the 3d elements until I got the final locked cut from Karel at 5am. That left me 4 hours for 6 shots on no sleep !

I liked the idea of a simple Blue colour palette to contrast with Red danger areas. I needed next to nothing render times to reach the morning deadline. After a couple of test I decided to use the Max Scanline render for the particles and Fusions OGL renderer for the skeleton.

I needed every minute of the 4 hours to drop all the elements into place and match Alix’s performance. But I got the final shot to Tom at about 8 in the morning, leaving him just enough time to render short and deliver it to the judges.

As ever there is loads more I would like to have done. I made some pretty cool particle tests to represent DNA sequences. We left a big space for them in the GUI. But alas there simply wasn’t time to add them.

It’s a joy to work with such a talented crowd. Hopefully I’ll see them all at the cinema for the final.

Amazing Short: Stardust

My Dad was in the Uk space program. As a kid I touched instruments that would fly to the farthest reaches of the solar system. It fueled my imagination. I found this on vimeo, and it reminded me of those exciting, mysterious days. It’s just beautiful. 🙂

PostPanic’s short film, Stardust, is a story about Voyager 1 (the unmanned spacecraft launched in 1977 to explore the outer solar system).

Sci-fi London 48-hour film challenge 2013:matte painting

The short film ‘Creep’ was our entry into the Sci-fi London 48-hour film challenge 2013.

Before

This was the unpainted frame from the Sony fs700 camera

creep_before After

Then, after 15 hours matte painting, our destroyed London shrouded in radioactive fog.
creep_after

With this kinda of thing there’s so much detail to add I’ll just keep working until some-one pulls the plug. It would have been nice to add larger broken features to the foreground but there simply wasn’t enough time.