Lumen Soup

Follow this link to Lumen Soup to have a look at the beginnings of our final project.
Here's a clip of some of our early tests. We are creating an animated live performance piece...


First Projector Tests from Livvy Brewer on Vimeo.

Summer work...

So, it seems I haven't posted anything on here since before the summer. To be honest, most of my own creative work has been on hold during the holidays, except for Lumen Soup, which is the start of my 3rd year collaborative project with Livvy Brewer...

Other than that, I have done a little bit of community outreach (is that the right term? Probably not...), including running a small drop-in animation studio at the Basildon Festival on behalf of the Basildon Arts Collective and Basildon District Council. This was extremely successful, over the two days I introduced hundreds of people to traditional 2D and stop-motion animation.

Photography by Darren Chaplin

  
Many people popped in to my animation studio to just have a peek or to contribute a frame or two towards the 2D animation or stop motion film. As well as many children, parents and grandparents, I was visited by artists such as Aden Hynes , and also got a bit of help from Stephen Metcalfe MP.

I've been having a bit of fun with my new Canon 7D, which has replaced my 40D because of its HD video capabilities. I also grabbed some fat memory cards and a Rode mic just in time for the War & Peace show.

(The quality of Blogger-uploaded videos is AWFUL, by the way. I'm heading to Vim/Tube next time)

And, on impulse I grabbed the 7D on that night when they said on the news that there would be lots of shooting stars. Here's the time lapse night sky over Lancing for about 3 hours...

I did a little bit of standard photography in Lancing and Basildon. You get over 9000 points for correctly guessing which is which! It's not that hard if you look closely...

Combine my new camera with my annual desire to put my 1/16th army to use, and you end up with a few videos, a few gigs of strange model photography and a couple of juddery After Effects compositions that feel a bit Attack of the Cones in style, but with more Olive Drab. I hope I don't ever get in a spot of bother for telling people that I do 'Model' photography.

This is a rough source image (It was not my intention to advertise Kid Robot, but hey), for capturing a model at various angles in a stop-motion kind of way, to be composited in After Effects. That rubbish crinkley blue screen is actually my old apron from Asda, which would seem like a bad idea if it was ever actually used...

Also over the summer I have run a few animation and game design workshops which have all been very successful. So, from now on it's back to my own creative work...

Project: STEAMWELL

More on this story later.

Background and Scenery Design

Here's some of the background and scenery designs I've been working on this year...

'20th Century Participation' - 1910


'20th Century Participation' - 1942

The Fall of the Wall - 1989
(The year I was born, actually...)

A screenshot from the first render of the 1989 Berlin Scene

Here are some of the wall sections, with graffin' painted digitally on top of an acrylic-painted texture of a concrete wall...

La-De-Da... Cos' it's a Lada? Get it? Yeah.

It's a cheesy, hippy-sort-of line, but apparently it was a popular one.

A lovely picture of some sort of peaceful bird (dove maybe?)
emerging from the barrel of a Soviet tank.
Bloody Commies.

The original textures, created in acrylic paint...

The original planned image was first produced as a sketch...

An incredible scene...

The Mongolians have swarmed the border!
(hmm, sounds a bit like a military code...)





A really, REALLY flowery and camp forest scene.
I would definately die of hayfever in there.

IN THE NEAR FUTURE...

In the near future, the escalation of transport congestion must be countered by a new traffic control system. Programmed to evolve by calculating more effective methods of control, it concludes that the extermination of mankind is the only way to resolve the problem.
With an army of 5 billion robotic cones, barriers and bollards, it coordinates a devastating blow to human civilisation which is only the start of the massacre of mankind...

Working together with my production team and a small army of extras, we created this film in just under four months.