Finalist nomination: Red and the Kingdom of Sound

   Word on the grapevine is that Red and the Kingdom of Sound, the animation project I contributed to back in the second half of 2017, has been named a finalist of the 2018 Le Petit Cannes film festival. I wasn't in attendance, as I was but a humble animator on the project and it was the district and project leads who got to tour Europe with the film. But it is wonderful news to hear that the final outcome did so well at Cannes and is being so well received across the continent and beyond.

  Win those accolades Red! It was an amazing experience and a beautiful project to lend a hand with and I couldn't be prouder of being a part of making this massive accomplishment happen.

Red and the Kingdom Of Sound: Out the Doors

  The Project that I have contributed for since July has since begun rehearsals for initial tour of Europe, starting in France and then moving to Germany before containing across the rest of the continent. I was only brought in on July, when a good two thirds of the project was complete but that didn't detract from the enjoyment of it all.

To paraphrase; the whole effort was a 14 month development involving 17 people to realise and everyone on the project had a wonderful time making it.

  The bulk of my contributions were on the bystandaer animations for the Overture, where I worked with my classmates Jack White and Max Ashby. The bulk of the models for characters and environments had already been completed, providing focus for the animation phase. The library of movement sequences I had contributed were used among other libraries in a number of the other districts including the trombone and trumpet districts and the finale. There was certainly no shortage of work, especially near the end when there was a push to get everything ready for rendering over at GarageFarm by the beginning of November.

  The work was certainly ambitious, I don't envy the studios that have far more resources so it was exhilarating to get some really busy but well-designed layouts processed for our small team. It's going to be exciting watching it travel around Europe.

There might be more of the sequence to come. The scenes we have may be out the door but there is no shortage in the variety of instruments that make up a healthy-sized orchestra, each of which is ideally going to be represented at some point.

  Photographs are courtesy of project lead Phil Gomm and his assistants when they accompanied the project to a rehearsal in France.

YPGTTO: Crowds, Gatherings and More

  With a month to go work has been getting intense in the YPGTTO team as we all pursue the project's completion. One of my leading tasks as of late has been assistance in populating the environments with large populations to make the city appear busy and lively.

I expect the next five or six days are going to keep me extremely busy as the team prepares to get everything out the door. But what we are creating so far is looking rather impressive with the numbers the city in the Overture is being filled with..

YPGTTO: Modeling Crowds

   To get some of the crowds, the YPGTTO team developed a plugin for preparing animations for  use in large crowds. In order to do this, each animation cycle was processed into an alembic cache, where it would be brought in and looped. A random generator allowed for the random application of colour and an animation offset was set for each citizen to give a bit of randomness to what stage of movement each of the population were in.

  The most time consuming part, once the caches had been created was to insert the crowds into the scene and have them follow a path, this was slightly tricky due to the meandering nature of the highways which went up and down as well as curving around.

  For a first test however, this turned out well. The crowd feels reasonably organic and there are plenty present to demonstrate the scope of the population within the Kingdom of Sound

YPGTTO: Yellow Runs of Excitement

Finishing the second half of the task of creating a few running animations. The first was based on one created by the other team members who created quite a feminine gait, which I attempted to convey with these animations. The second, where Yellow runs while holding her dress, may have been a little ambitious. Based on how one way to run in a dress is to hold it up so it does not snag or trip you, in hindsight the dress may be a little short for what was intended but at least some variety is available for the crowds.

YPGTTO: Animating the Audience

Carpe Diem, as the Romans say. I've felt like things are quiet on my end; a bit too quiet to be comfortable so, introducing some more work done for the animation to accompany the Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra. So fat I have been asked for two jobs. The first, now clear, was to create a series of bows and curtsies that an audience to the king were to perform. The keywords of 'ostentatious' 'slow' and 'ceremony' gave me clear ideas of what I needed: Something elegant, something graceful and dignified. The highest leaders in a baroque realm were being greeted by a grand audience so nothing short of regal was required.

As well as this, the crowds needed some variety. As the Trombone and Tuba districts were a mix of golds and blues, so did the people need to match the palette of their surroundings. Some colours form other districts were also thrown in to the bundles to provide a more diverse crowd, which in the final production would speckle the seas of people with odd colours to add variety to the otherwise monochrome palettes.

With these, time was dedicated to some running. The project already had some neutral runs so I was asked to create some runs for characters that would be excited for one reason or another, and thus running to a particular goal.

The remaining sequence to make is one or two runs for the female character Yellow.

YPGTTO: First Tasks on a New Role

In the past couple of weeks I've been brought on to a design team to help with creating an animation sequence for a film that will play alongside a performance of Benjamin Britten's The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra, which for development has been abbreviated to YPGTTO and at present is entering the sequence animation phases of construction.

My first task has been simple so far: Six animations for the two commuter types that have been designed to act as members of crowds. Nothing too complex so far but so far the work has been engaging, and more could easily come very soon.