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O2 Bubbles

British mobile network operator O2 has always had bubbles as an integral part of their brand. After years of service it was felt the old end-frame bubbles should change to something more energetic. I worked with head of TV at VCCP Olly Calverley to create this new ending which now features on all O2 commercials.

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Diet Coke – Gardener

For this commercial a Coke can was filmed, however it had a handle attached to it so it could be moved/rolled as required. Unfortunately this handle was on the side of the can facing the camera, obscuring it so much that painting it out wasn’t an option. I replaced the top section of the can with CG, as well as adding the particles floating in the air and the buttercups in the grass.

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Mafia Women

  • Director
  • Nick Gouldie
  • Creative Agency
  • NBCUniversal
  • Production Company
  • Freefolk

This was a to promote a new NBCUniversal show about women either in the Mafia or who had been affected by it. I was the lead working with the director, as well as doing the look dev, lighting and comp, plus the shattered version of the bullet for the print campaign. It won three PromaxBDA awards and three Kinsale Shark awards, including gold for best use of graphics in an international promo.

Warburtons – The Deliverers

  • Director
  • Declan Lowney
  • Creative Agency
  • WCRS
  • Production Company
  • Another Film Company

Warburtons is one of the biggest bread producers in UK, and while getting the weight of Sylvester Stallone behind this advert all the other actors are in fact Warburtons employees. I did the Bolton "Hollywood" sign and the title letters.

 

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Phones 4u

For these adverts I did the move from space to ground level, nesting multiple layers of textures for the various heights, plus some volumetrics for the clouds. The Christmas version required a bit more; changing the satellite/aerial images to nighttime and snowy, I also used vector roadmap data to generate road and urban lighting textures.

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O2 – Dog Heart

Part of British mobile network operator O2’s campaign of “Be more dog” (dogs are sociable, you should be too, use your phone lots). I did the heart, the VU bars that react to the music, the frisbee section, the kaleidoscope and the 4G logo.

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Durex – Earth Shattering

  • Director
  • Truman & Cooper
  • Creative Agency
  • Havas London
  • Production Company
  • Colonel Blimp

For this I did the room tearing apart and the clouds (both in Houdini and rendered with HtoA). I distorted the room geometry, voronoi fractured it and then undistorted, resulting in more organic, curvy fracture lines which was needed for a paper feel. I used a particle system to move the pieces and then ran all the geometry through a 3D noise to simulate paper/cloth dynamics.

For the clouds I would generate a random base shape, scatter distorted spheres into that, convert that into a volume and then use recursive noise on the positions of that volume to create the nice, fluffy shapes.

 

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O2 – Top Hat

  • Director
  • Si & Ad
  • Creative Agency
  • O2
  • Production Company
  • VCCP

On this advert I did the scenes with the balloons and the fireworks.

For the balloons I looked at many different behaviours and looks for directors Si & Ad, from Minecraft blocks, to square balloons with a more Tetris-like motion, finally settling on a more traditional balloon. For this I used a low res buoyant proxy for each balloon with a weight constrained to the base to get a convincing behaviour of the offset centre of mass. I did this in Houdini then took it into Maya and rendered with Arnold.

For the fireworks there was a fair amount of trialling different speeds which affected the feeling of scale. I kept everything in Houdini and rendered with HtoA this time around. HtoA was fairly new part of our pipeline but I was keen to get it implemented as we still lacked a robust way of getting particles from Houdini to Maya (our previous method being using the Realflow plugin and renaming attributes to liquid based properties, not ideal).

 

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Beagle Street

  • Director
  • Daniel Kleinman
  • Creative Agency
  • VCCP
  • Production Company
  • Rattling Stick

For this talking dog we wanted to go the full CG route as opposed to the old method of feeding a dog peanut butter and video editing the poor animal trying to get its mouth clean, or simply doing a mouth replacement. To start with my colleague and I took a trip to Battersea Dogs & Cats Home and took many of photos for modelling reference and textures as well as video for animation reference. I then did:

Lighting

A system to convert images of hair to individual hair colour (without this a single hair from a photo results in a streak of hairs all with the same colour)

Helped develop our grooming workflow

Dynamics (ear, jowl and tongue movement, flesh jiggle, paw compression)

 

 

As part of the pitch to win the job my colleague and I put together the test below in a little over two weeks. It came a long way from here though it's satisfying to see the beagle in it's early stages. Along with the above I did the rigging and animation, though I'm no rigger or animator (we didn't have anyone else!).

 

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