Jock DVD Special

In the past 8 months we have been head down and working hard getting a DVD release out for "Little Jock Adventures". This was a great little project where we managed to produce a 40min episode of Jock as a puppy. Full of color and a fresh new approach to the character and his friends. We optimised and developed a workflow that was extremely sufficient and managed to create this great stylised look for Jock.  I was the Production Supervisor and TD on this. Was a lot of fun and looking forward to more of this fun and exciting work. 

Jock of the bushveld

 Almost three years in production with Jock-Animation. I have been working with Duncan MacNeillie on Jock of the bushveld. We have grown so much and developed many tools to improve production pipelines and hope to lead the way in the film industry for South Africa.

My duty as TD was to script riggs for the film and produce multiple characters in weeks. From quadrupeds to bipeds and birds to incests we rigged them all. We also manage to develop our own stereoscopic rig in the time when the 3d platform was still basic in South-Africa.

With the production I have create a in-house animation tool, this was used to assist in animation libraries and character managers. The animation team could preform faster and more effective to meet their daily deadlines.

I was required to generate DCP's of the film towards the end of the production and save costs on distribution. Because this was one of the first filly animated features in South Africa a lot of ground rules was set to assist us in being capable of producing the film with a very small team. We have learned and corrected so much and will be much more effective in our future productions.

Hero Cups

This project you had different cups with their personalities that would suite different scenarios. Where the robot cup was interacting with its owner at work. We tracked the movement of the cups and made 3D faces that was placed on top. This was great fun.

Massive Sim

This was a fun job where we needed to create interactive crowds dancing in sequence like blood running through the heart of Africa. We motion captured the dance sequence and reprogram little AI agents in Massive to follow and dance in sequence. This was a fun R&D project and made the challenge exciting.

Castle Light

This was a fun project where we needed to isolate elements from live action footage and re-project back onto planes in a 3D space. The background was reconstructed to fit the new camera move and made it possible to freeze time and space and let one character interact with water particles.

Malo and Milo

This was a great project at AnimMate, we used the motion capture suite to setup a stage for the two wooden characters. They where designed to assist in educating sensitive messages across to a broad band of audiences. The wooden puppets was an excellent tool to communicate with and added to the African theme content. The benefit of using the motion capture suite was that professional dancers and talent can be directed realtime with the characters. I was the TD on this project and managed the production.

Blackstone Water Project

This was a great opportunity to develop and improve some skills in the water simulation world. This project was fun and challenging, at the time we used Realflow4 and had a huge impact on getting the water simulations right. Some simulations would even take a week to solve and had made the project very challenging regarding our deadline. With a lot of the additional side line sims I did in Maya it made it possible to get all the required elements ready to transform into the water world we constructed.  At the end Realflow has shown its capabilities and made this project possible. Great project.