Back in October I was approached by several of my co-workers with the notion of creating a video along the lines of the intro to the movie Contact or Powers of 10. The video was to become the intro to a portion of the McDonalds / Avatar online promotional efforts.
The intro tells the tale of the first mission to Pandora. You travel from Earth, past Polyphemus and several of it's moons to just above Pandora and see the first exploration rover descending towards the surface of the planet. Once the intro finishes you are given the opportunity to explore the jungles of Pandora.
I did all of the 3D and Comping work for this piece. The planets were done in maya using textures from planetpixelemporium.com. The piece was finished in After Effects using Knoll Light Factory for the stars, and Particular for the flames around the pod as it hits Pandora's atmosphere.
As with the movie, it took MANY people making contributions to pull this site together. I was a huge undertaking and for some on the team represents more than an year and a half of work to push this one out the door.
You can visit the ROVR experience here.
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Thursday, September 3, 2009
Halo: ODST
xbox.com/halo
After the success of the Believe and Iris campaigns a few years back, along with Gears of War 2 last year, Xbox once again tasked my office with doing the online marketing for their next AAA title: Halo ODST. In this game you play as the rookie on a squad of Orbital Drop Shock Troopers (get it?) as you make your way through a myriad of levels killing aliens, saving humanity, and blah, blah, every first person shooter you've ever played.
While the game itself may play out like Halo 3.5, the site and production that went into it took our team marching into all sorts of brave new territories. The site revolves around an interface which allows the user to review interview footage of the 3 members of the ODST team you fight alongside in the game. During each interview, the soldiers are instructed to put a device on their head that allows you to see what they're thinking.
The interviews were shot on a sound stage in LA and were later matched up with b-roll, shot in both Budapest and SF. My role in all of this was to work alongside my co-worker and friend Jeremiah Wassom, and support his effort to assemble the video feeds of the thoughts / memories. Since he'd been brought into the project earlier and was on-set in Budapest his role was to ensure the interview questions matched up with the memories we'd planned on producing.
While he was laying out time lines and establishing timing, I took over the visual effects work for individual shots that would be part of these memories. initially we'd planned on having 4 shots, only 1 of which was anticipated to involve 3d motion tracking and animating game models.
By the end of the project we had 10 vfx shots, 5 of which involved some tricky matchmoving, and 3 of those included animating models from the game into the shots. In all of these cases, I tracked the shots using PFTrack, animated and textured some of the game assets in Maya, and composited it all together in After Effects.
Pelican
Tribute
Covenant Sky
Probably the most complicated of the shots I worked on was the Banshee Attack. While initially this shot seemed to be an easy track, it turned out to be an incredibly difficult shot. In fact, due to a crazy exposure shift and the smoke that felt it had the right to casually waft through the shot, I never actually tracked the entire shot in one continuous take. Instead the shot was broken into 2 parts, before and after the banshee explodes. The explosion was done using footage from Detonation Films, and the rocket and contrails were done using Trapcode Particular.
Banshee Attack
The shot was later cut down to accommodate client request (and cover up the fact we had nothing for him to be shooting at when the camera panned back down).
After individual shots were finished and placed into their respective timelines they were treated with a process that jeremiah came up with to scramble them up and add that digital noise that's so indicative of a scrambled digital signal.
the last step of the project was to animate the various EKG / Brain activity meters that needed to reflect the soldiers stress levels as related to their memories.
At the end of the day, this turned out to be the kind of project I love. I got my hands dirty doing things like shooting extra assets and making a bomb (turns out everything I know about explosives comes from the Die Hard Movies), I pulled just about every compositing trick I could think of out of my hat. and walked away with a whole bunch of work I'm really proud of.
After the success of the Believe and Iris campaigns a few years back, along with Gears of War 2 last year, Xbox once again tasked my office with doing the online marketing for their next AAA title: Halo ODST. In this game you play as the rookie on a squad of Orbital Drop Shock Troopers (get it?) as you make your way through a myriad of levels killing aliens, saving humanity, and blah, blah, every first person shooter you've ever played.
While the game itself may play out like Halo 3.5, the site and production that went into it took our team marching into all sorts of brave new territories. The site revolves around an interface which allows the user to review interview footage of the 3 members of the ODST team you fight alongside in the game. During each interview, the soldiers are instructed to put a device on their head that allows you to see what they're thinking.
The interviews were shot on a sound stage in LA and were later matched up with b-roll, shot in both Budapest and SF. My role in all of this was to work alongside my co-worker and friend Jeremiah Wassom, and support his effort to assemble the video feeds of the thoughts / memories. Since he'd been brought into the project earlier and was on-set in Budapest his role was to ensure the interview questions matched up with the memories we'd planned on producing.
While he was laying out time lines and establishing timing, I took over the visual effects work for individual shots that would be part of these memories. initially we'd planned on having 4 shots, only 1 of which was anticipated to involve 3d motion tracking and animating game models.
By the end of the project we had 10 vfx shots, 5 of which involved some tricky matchmoving, and 3 of those included animating models from the game into the shots. In all of these cases, I tracked the shots using PFTrack, animated and textured some of the game assets in Maya, and composited it all together in After Effects.
Pelican
Tribute
Covenant Sky
Probably the most complicated of the shots I worked on was the Banshee Attack. While initially this shot seemed to be an easy track, it turned out to be an incredibly difficult shot. In fact, due to a crazy exposure shift and the smoke that felt it had the right to casually waft through the shot, I never actually tracked the entire shot in one continuous take. Instead the shot was broken into 2 parts, before and after the banshee explodes. The explosion was done using footage from Detonation Films, and the rocket and contrails were done using Trapcode Particular.
Banshee Attack
The shot was later cut down to accommodate client request (and cover up the fact we had nothing for him to be shooting at when the camera panned back down).
After individual shots were finished and placed into their respective timelines they were treated with a process that jeremiah came up with to scramble them up and add that digital noise that's so indicative of a scrambled digital signal.
the last step of the project was to animate the various EKG / Brain activity meters that needed to reflect the soldiers stress levels as related to their memories.
At the end of the day, this turned out to be the kind of project I love. I got my hands dirty doing things like shooting extra assets and making a bomb (turns out everything I know about explosives comes from the Die Hard Movies), I pulled just about every compositing trick I could think of out of my hat. and walked away with a whole bunch of work I'm really proud of.
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Gears 2 takes a Bronze CLIO!
We're getting on towards award season and first up for projects I've worked on in the last year is Gears of War 2. We got a bronze, not the best in the world, but considering the quality of work we're league with, it's nothing to be sneezed at either.
Kudos to the team and everyone who worked on it!
Kudos to the team and everyone who worked on it!
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
My 2009 Demo Reel
This demo reel is a sampling of my work as of January 2009. It's my first reel to not feature any student work. I'm very proud of all of this and in seeing my growth over the last 4 years look forward to the future and to seeing what 4 more years of growth will look like.
Featured projects include:
Xbox
Gears of War (1 & 2)
Halo 3 (Believe & Iris)
Forza 2
Crackdown
The Together Experience
AKQA
AKQA: Woof!
Microsoft
Vista In-Store Experience
Nike
Laced (Trailer & Selected Title Cards)
Tiempo
Monday, February 9, 2009
Halo Wars
Look upon the war torn planet of Harvest. This experience site gives you the point of view for both the Human and Covenant sides in the Halo universe.
http://halo.xbox.com/halowars
My role in this was creating the planet itself in Maya and creating the transitions to the surface which had to seamlessly flow into actual footage captured from the game itself.
Friday, February 6, 2009
Gears 2 Award Site
It's always good to finally be far enough removed from a project you worked on so closely to see the whole picture and realize that it's something you're really proud of. I had a moment like that today when the Awards submission site for the Gears of War 2 project I worked on went live. It has a campaign overview video that I cut together on it, as well as clips and links to the various pieces of the puzzle and the experience site itself.
You can check out the Award Site here.
You can check out the Award Site here.
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
More from Gears of War 2
So, as promised in my last post I'm back with a couple shot break downs and the one piece of content from the site that was entirely mine start to finish.
First off are the break downs. They're fairly simple and self explanatory.
And lastly there's the "Last Flower" content in which Cole is practicing his sharp shooting on what may well be the last batch of flowers on Sera. Truly a tender moment. For this I tried to go a little overkill given the short turn around but I think it came out well.
I tracked footage I shot to give it that hand held wiggle, and then layered a bunch of pre-rendered 3d objects into 3d Space in After Effects. A little particle effects for the popping flowers and a little smoke for atmosphere and it all stitched together quite nicely.
Well, that's it from me for this project, but the site is still up and everything is unlocked now so by all means give it a look and check out all the other goodies that everyone put together.
First off are the break downs. They're fairly simple and self explanatory.
And lastly there's the "Last Flower" content in which Cole is practicing his sharp shooting on what may well be the last batch of flowers on Sera. Truly a tender moment. For this I tried to go a little overkill given the short turn around but I think it came out well.
I tracked footage I shot to give it that hand held wiggle, and then layered a bunch of pre-rendered 3d objects into 3d Space in After Effects. A little particle effects for the popping flowers and a little smoke for atmosphere and it all stitched together quite nicely.
Well, that's it from me for this project, but the site is still up and everything is unlocked now so by all means give it a look and check out all the other goodies that everyone put together.
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