KSB // Where are you from and how did you become an awesome motion guru?
PC // I am originally from just outside of London, UK. I started out working on VFX for documentaries in Bristol after I graduated uni there, then came back to London in 2005 where I started working in commercials, branding and music advertising.
KSB // Whats your favorite food and drink?
PC // I love Pad Thai, with a ice cold beer! Even better if it is consumed on a beach…
KSB // who and what influences you to design and be passionate for what you do?
PC // The first motion graphic films that I saw that really inspired me to create motion design, were ‘Ultralove Ninja’ by MK12, “Push Pulk / Spinning Plates” Radiohead promo by Jonny Hardstaff and “Hayling” FC Kahuna promo by Lynn Fox to name a few. I loved those films!!
In regards to the passion for motion design, I am just really thankful that it is still there for me after 10 years in the industry… I have seen that passion drummed out of so many designers over the years, and it is a shame because you really need to love what you do to be good at it.
Headphones
Headphones Breakdown
KSB // This is quite a job here for Ministry of Sound. It looks like its getting a lot of attention based your vimeo views. How did you start working for Ministry of Sound?
PC // I started working with Ministry when I came to London in 2005 through various design agencies.
KSB // Your head phones original piece has up to 63K views in 2 months, but your remixed breakdown has almost 45K in 8 days. Can you tell us a little about why you built this breakdown and what sort of reaction you are getting?
PC // I am amazed by the attention that it has received! With the breakdown, I really wanted to show how something that seems quite complex is actually made up of very simplistic parts… I wanted to inspire people to get into motion graphics by showing that it’s not a mystical process, and basic skills can be used to make something cool.
Liquid Logo
KSB // is the beer live action? because it looks real! How did you create the logo container and animation? (programs, lighting, how many work hours, etc.)
PC // The beer is actually live action… Perspex containers were constructed in the shape of the logo, and the liquid was poured in and shot in slow motion. I created a CGI logo in order to clean up the marks and imperfections in the perspex model. I honestly can’t remember how long it took… With client revisions and everything, it probably took a couple of weeks in total.
KSB // congratulations on the Nasdaq billboard screen in Time Square, New York. Was that awesome to see your work displayed publicly? did you see any viewers responses?
PC // Unfortunately I was not in New York when it was showing, but I hope people liked seeing it at such a large scale…
Anthems Hip Hop
KSB // where did you find the footage for this piece? if you shot it what kind of equipment was used?
PC // I shot it over 3 days New York city with a really small crew… a DOP, location scout and producer. I did a few days research into the kind of locations that I wanted to shoot, and then when we arrived, we just hired a van and shot lots of different locations all over the city.
Kit wise, we used a Canon5D mkII and a Canon 7D. We used some pretty old lenses which helped to get that slightly vintage feel… I also shot HDRIs on location in order to composite the CGI logo parts in in post. The city had been hit with a foot of snow a couple of days before we arrived, so when we shot a sunrise timelapse over Manhattan at 5am, it was pretty damn cold! This didn’t even make it into the final ad in the end… I am pretty ruthless when it comes to editing, I will lose a shot even if we spent hours in the freezing cold trying to get it!
KSB // If your willing, would you please share some compositing tricks that you like to use?
PC // I don’t really use many fancy tricks… The key to it is just subtlety. The smallest amount of blur like 0.4 of a pixel, can hugely help take that harsh sharpness off of CG. Also it’s just about being mindful of how light works in real life. Just basic stuff like if you are compositing a bright green object into a white scene, some of that green colour needs to appear on the white… A good knowledge of photography can really help too.
Cat Footwear
KSB // Whats it like directing a spot for Cat Footwear? (stress, client response, tight deadlines)
PC // As a director, if you are really prepared it can help greatly with dealing with stress. I did a full previz of the entire commercial, so I knew exactly what I wanted to get on the shoot day. The previz was created using a highly accurate CGI version of the physical camera rig so it was as accurate as possible. Thankfully the shoot ran very smoothly as a result.
The only thing that you cannot prepare for is the performance of the people in the ad… They were jumping into the air and had to be captured at the right moment, so it was just a case of doing take after take until we got the shot. The girl you can see midway through the ad must have done about twenty takes of that backflip one after the other… It was really impressive! Then we would break shortly before going back to doing more takes of the backflip… To get the hands and feet to align perfectly in the shot, you are talking a tiny fraction of a second that you must press that shutter release to fire the timeslice cameras. It’s just a case of keeping going until you get the shot.
KSB // Can you explain the workflow of using so many canons to shoot a 180 degree shoot?
PC // The rig was built by the guys at Timeslice films… They have their own method of firing all of the cameras at once, and downloading the images to a laptop, which can be previewed fairly quickly… It is a pretty slick process as these guys really specialise in that particular type of photography. The results were high res RAW image sequences to use in the final ad.
KSB // You mention that you are the compositor. Is this a difficult project to piece together or was the process fairly easy?
PC // The compositing side was actually fairly easy… It was essentially like compositing green screen footage against CG backgrounds so pretty straight forward. Getting to that point was way more involved.
Electronic 80′s 2
Electronic 80s 2 Breakdown
KSB // how long did this take to render out completely?
PC // It was mainly the GI caches that took the time because I had to calculate these locally… I think it took one long day. The rest of the ad was rendered in under a day as I used a renderfarm…. If I had rendered it on 1 machine it probably would have taken weeks!
KSB // how did you animate the lights to match the music?
PC // I used mograph in Cinema4d and keyframed the effectors to change the lights at the right points.
KSB // how did you build the city?
PC // I generated it using a program called CityEngine. You can feed in spline shapes and build cities around them. In this case I used the Ministry logo as the main framework, then generated the surrounding roads and buildings around it.
KSB //how much do you love C4d? HAHA
PC // Hey I love being creative! Loving software is just damn creepy…
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