National Film and Television School
The single best decision of my career was to apply to study at the NFTS, simply brilliant.
I helped bring a number of productions to the screen and here are a selection of my favourites.
The Pride of Wade Ellison
During my penultimate year of film school, I was involved in a number of summer fiction shorts. I remembered seeing props and costumed actors wandering the film school halls when I was approached to help out. The shot in question was a wide shot where a gunshot would be heard and a flock of birds would fly out of the trees. At the time, it was my first real VFX shot. Getting to work on a western was part of the charm but being able to craft something invisible for the director was the main reason for deciding to apply to film school. Certainly a highlight from my time at the school.
The birds were modeled, rigged, and animated in Maya and composited into the plate using Nuke. At the time I was still learning Nuke but I worked iteratively and slowly built the shot up one bird at a time before the director was happy. The shot remained on my reel for a long time.
Blood’s A Rover
Running alongside the traditional film productions are smaller projects, usually in the form of commercials or skits. During the first summer of film school I was asked to lend a hand to a book trailer which required on set SFX work as well as standard VFX back at home base. I helped smoke the shots up to simulate the engine damage and also the residue from the smoke grenade. I was also able to work in partnership with the production designer to help set fire to a couple of dummies.
I enjoyed being on set to help supervise the practical work and to work with the 2D supervisor back at NFTS. In the digital realm I added gun shot wounds, muzzle flashes, additional flames and plate clean up. The production was a real catch-all for my skills, I’ll always look back on that Saturday in the south of England fondly.
Jamon
The end goal of the graduation year is to help the live-action and animation directors achieve their vision for their shorts. I was part of the team that helped bring Jamon to the screen. I was charged with helping the director animate a sign that would have proved difficult through drawings alone. The shot was based on a scene in the film ‘Delicatessen’. I used Maya to model and rig up the sign, create the camera and animate based on the director’s own style.
The sign slotted into the film invisibly and even though it was a simple ask, I thoroughly enjoyed working on it. The beauty of film school was the ability to touch so many productions and work with the industry’s future directing talent.
DCM: The Last Cinema
Another project that came from the friendships you formed working so closely with other students. Here I was asked to help create a base for matte painting and also an old, rusting cinema sign. I tracked the camera and modeled a low-resolution shell that covered an existing London cinema, UV mapped it, and passed it onto the matte painter. The end result was just great, really captured the feeling of a cinema that had been left to ruin.
The sign was modeled clean from an impact-style font and then I went in and chipped away it, removed bulbs, changed rotations, and removed pieces to show weathering and age. Projection work is something I do frequently now as a visualisation artist but back then, it was a brand-new technique.
Cadaverblanca
Quirky productions pop up all the time, mostly as everyone at film school gets the chance to direct. This little commercial bumper was in partnership with an anti-piracy campaign. The director’s idea was to recreate the famous scene from Casablanca but with skeletons showing who piracy is killing film, off beat idea but it worked. I helped add background elements including a comedic plane take-off, was supposed to echo stop motion and rear projection techniques of cinema from the time of production.
The beauty of film school was that you get the chance to participate in such a variety of productions, this work probably didn’t take more than a day but it was successful, the plane was from my own model library, quickly rigged and animated to a static camera. Back then everything I rendered was in mental ray, not really used it since my film school days but I remember it being, very slow.
Sh Boom
The first time I was really able to jump into previsualisation was during the first year when the fiction directors get their first chance to make a film, with a budget and utilise the film school crew. I thought it might be fun and interesting to add some extra CG chaos to the background of the films opening shot.
Probably the most outlandish thing I was able to pitch to and complete for a director at film school. I remember being in a first edit screening and one of the other directors saying they felt it didn’t work, they were probably correct but the director liked it and that’s all that mattered to me.
Ernesto
The work for this film came from a graduating vfx crew member who needed some additional help. I was tasked with rendering some shots that needed tech fixes to get right and also a mouth full of teeth. I made a simple rig and the teeth wobbling was driven by an expression similar to camera shake and I could animate on and off, worked really well.
My stance at film school was to be helpful, it’s not to dissimilar to how I work now. I like to try and get things working for directors, use my skills to make the best possible work I am able too.
DCM: Silver Screen
Creature animation work was something I was always pushing for, a hard sell for sure. Finally I was able to flex a little of those muscles with a build for a cinema advertisement. The job required a model build and animation but the model would be used to displace a series of pins during render time akin to those games you see in gadget shops. The directing team mentioned the skit from Back to the Future II and I went from there.
The production gave me the chance to do a little creature animation, previs, rigging and also explore ideas. The final piece looked great but I wasn’t able to ever see it play on the big screen.
Bertie Crisp
I had a very intensive first year at film school, I formed some really good friendships with the graduating year and so I was often asked to help out. Another animation here, this time helping to both previs and animate how a caravan could fly off a cliff. This was probably the first time I ever worked with a director sitting beside me while we bashed out ideas, a real highlight.
The 2D rendering style made Bertie Crisp a little different in the animated films that year and it went on to do well on the festival circuit. The work rounded off an incredibly busy and rewarding first year.
Take One Painting
This isn’t a film or a commercial, it’s a module that all new students participate in, complete their disciplines and work together to achieve a final shot. The idea is simple, you take one painting, build the set, shoot the set and extend the set. It all takes place over one day and is a real learning experience.
During the day’s main shoot, you can splinter off and you are able to direct a little coverage, somewhere else on the set. As we were in the VFX area we looked for shots that might allow for set extension or CG takeovers. This one my version of a coverage shot, featuring one of the production design students. I added in the roof beams, staircase, and extra details. The shot was tracked in PF Track and Maya was used to model, texture, and render. The shot was assembled in Nuke.
This is a selection of the passes I used to do my first breakdown on a shot, I drew from the experience and took some time after the initial module had finished to test myself. I was really happy with the resulting work and looking back, I’m still pleased with the shot.
The original task for Take One Painting was based on the famous painting ‘Scene in a Courtyard’ by Ludolf de Jongh. I used to have a blog and I documented some of this module on their, and so I was able to scrub some of the images and upload here.
At the time, this was the first attempt at bringing all the standard VFX disciplines into one shot. I had started back at Uni with 3DS Max and Maya and had dabbled with that software over the years but this module and ultimately the course going forward solidified the knowledge.
If you made it this far, thanks for reading. Film school ignited my career and gave me so many experiences over those two years. The work here is really a great showcase for how skilled the next generation of filmmakers are and that I was able to walk the same corridors.