Finished up a promotional animation for the newly launched Pottermore Shop. Creating a video version of the banner campaign. Mixing multiple baked dynamics calculations to have the owl fly in while forming from letters.

Working over the weekend prompted a little timelapse experiment with a sigma 8mm on a 5D, allowing for 180 degrees FOV. Which makes a great environment map to some 3D experimentation. Here’s the footage from the camera:

I’ve had time to play around with the Panasonic Lumix GH2 and found it to produce stunningly detailed video, particularly with the firmware hacked. In my opinion the camera produces more detailed video with less moire the 5D mk2, however there still seems to be some issues with the 25p and 30p modes, whilst they are progressive they seem to be encoded in fields, leaving odd interlacing artefacts when pushing a grade. Also Lumix lenses tend to over sharpen video due to various distortion and CA correction in-camera. Ultimately though I’m massively impressed with this camera and the quality it can produce in the right situation.

Here’s another video on a more cloudy day. Click through to the vimeo page for more information on which hacks were used etc.

We just finished up some work for Sky. Capturing slow motion steady cam moves and added CG elements. My role was mostly in post-production: match-moving, clean-up, CG, grading etc. While being DIT on set and consulting of VFX.

As Capture we were brought in to create the ‘time freeze’ films for use on the Sky.com product pages. We shot on the RED epic, allowing for 5K footage at 75fps, taking away 2TB of footage from the shoot (backed up 3 times). We enlisted Chris Ratcliffe , another 3D artist and split the shots up to work on. The final film were authored at 2K but delivered at about 720p for online integration on the Sky site.

A CG, match-moving test created in Lightwave 3D and shot on the RED Epic at Filmscape.

Started a little project creating and animating objects in CG. Choosing common place things that have subtle ambient animation and focusing on the details. I’ve created three little four second clips so far but hope to create more, then join them together to create a little animated short. Here’s the clips for far…

There’s also a work in progress thread here on Spinquad forums

Testing a substance called Morphium and its response to sonic vibration. Trying out some match moving and Glidetrack SD with the canon 5D and the CineStyle profile.

We went to a car park with to play about with some camera match-moving and effects. Shot on two cameras the Canon 5d mark 2 primarily as well as the canon 550d to pick up reflection shots.

From the shoot we got the background plates looking at the morphium blob, reaction shot from the blobs POV for reflection and a sequence of stills stitched together for an environment map.

The blob was built up from multiple collision balls within a larger ball with cloth simulation applied. That motion was exported to an mdd file to then be re-imported via DP Kits ‘MDD Pointer node’ and mixed up with more displacements.

The reflection shot of person ‘Jon’ was then roto’d out in After Effects, via the snazzy Auto-roto tools with the arm cut off and replaced by a CG arm following the same movement to better represent the reflection.

An image sequence of Jon was placed on a plane with an separate alpha channel effecting the transparency. I tried making a instance of a RGBA png in image editor with just the alpha but it seemed to always revert.

Motion graphic elements were then added in After Effects along with digital glitch artifacts, most via time and luma displacements driven by blocky procedural textures.

The audio was built in Sony Acid, using various effects to mimic the space and adding glitches.

Design and animation of an Ident for Lost Tribe Productions. Created in after effects using chroma keyed characters shot on a Canon 550D.

Design & Animation by Louis du Mont
Produced By Matthew Jones
Production Manager – M J McMahon
Sound Editor – Claire Ellis / Molinare
Audio Mixer – Steve Speed / Molinare

Been playing about with Microsoft ICE (free image stitching program) which has a fantastic ‘video stitch’ feature that allows you to create panoramas by waving your camera about when capturing video, I’ve also found it very useful for quickly capturing a wide FOV with a long telephoto lens, giving the effect of a much larger sensor.

Here’s a quick video of the process

Was annoyed by not having my textures in one place so I thought I’d put them online and share.