Not even half

a) Old Land Rover with spare wheel

b) Goldfield Unified School District

c) Desert A-10

d) Ambulance 705

e) Snow halftrack 

f) BRDM 2 Squad

g) Rebel Pilot

h) Argos

i) Quarry dump truck, from above

Each tray is a number, from 1 (top) to 29 (bottom).
Piece together the code by locating the tray number of the items above, and I'll give you a Micro Machine. 

If you're nice.

This is just the beginning of a bigger project involving my Micro Machine collection, unfortunately; with more cars, tanks, planes, helicopters, figures, Star Wars, motorbikes, bombers, camper vans, Star Trek, Aliens, blimps, Power Rangers, road signs, James Bond, trucks, tractors, Indiana Jones, boats, submarines, Terminators, crocodiles, Biker Mice from Mars, balloons, limousines, aircraft carriers and root beer-flavoured articulated lorries than you can shake a slightly-larger-than-N-gauge stick at.   

Rommel on Recon

That title sounds pretty cool if you say it fast.
Although, of course, it was never cool for Rommel to go on recon.
I can only assume it was very, umm, hot.
Anyway...some interesting pictures of a diorama shot in natural light. If you've visited my Imgur, you'll probably have seen these already. But I thought maybe they deserve some limelight on my homepage!

Give 'em a click to see the full image.

Think Big. Play Small.™

I've started a little project that really is quite little.



Right now it's just a tiny (unfinished) picture. But at the earliest opportunity, this tiny little image of a convenient two-thousand nine-hundred and twenty-five pixels will (hopefully) take on a new life, the likes of which you have never seen before.

Did you know I'm a photography model?

Whoops!

I meant, a photographer of models!

I don't see my big-scale models very often, but when I do, I spend most the time getting rid of cobwebs, evicting various creatures from the gearboxes and making sure the electronics are working okay.

Since I got a new camera, I've also been trying to capture some interesting images of them. (Videos too - but so far not enough successes to elaborate on...)

In some cases, the level of detail that can be captured in a sharp RAW capture far surpasses the detail of my modelling and detailing skills! Well, you know it's not real, so if you're prepared to load up the full res, don't be shocked to see plastic!

Catch 'em all at my Imgur gallery.

More of these guys are coming soon.



Lumen Soup: Production complete!

It seems that I haven't posted on here in quite some time...however, as Lumen Soup is pretty much done, I'm making a comeback to my individual blog (but will continue to update Lumen Soup's blog too...so many commitments!)

So here's an overview...

The Lumen Soup project has pretty much taken up all of my time since Christmas, so head there to see how we've been filling up the time!

In a nutshell, we did some visual tests:

And some concept art:





Until we eventually ended up with a whole bunch of digital assets:






And after projecting, acting and filming the whole thing:





Ended up with something like this:

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...