This is an old test, but I dug it out for the blog after my friend Kyriaki showed me this video of Athens, and I got all itchy to get cracking on something tilt-shifty of my own!

The above was shot in 2008 in Liverpool from the Radio City tower, looking down towards St. George’s Hall and the World Museum. The original purpose of the footage was to capture some snap-zooms into key landmarks around Liverpool, so the footage was barely steady for more than a few seconds at a time, hence the looping in this video. It was however it was the best footage I was likely able to get my hands on at the time to try out the effect!

Back in December we headed out west from Athens to Elefsina with the lads to shoot some footage and take some photos. Elefisna has some great disused industrial structures to shoot around – eerie, isolated and full of decrepit detail. The footage worked great as a base to get moving on some new visuals.

Below are a few stills from some my initial animation and grading tests – I’m not sure about an end product yet but I very much enjoyed just seeing where the footage would lead me. More soon.

I really liked the look of the Inception titles as seen in the trailers and once I’d seen the film I decided to dig in and see if I could recreate the type-knocked-out-of-a-labyrinth effect. What started out as a supposedly quick test ended up as a crash course in labyrinth design and logic, as well as good workflow between Illustrator and Cinema 4D.

I want to work on this a little more in the future as I’m sure there are better ways to create the geometry for the labyrinth – I used Illustrator to trace the maze from an image, and then used the paths as splines in Cinema 4D.

Check out Think Labyrinth for loads of info on the history of labyrinths and their designs. I used MazeMaker to generate the maze image that I traced into Illustrator.

Here’s my entry for the latest Greyscale Gorilla CMYK Five Second Project. This was the first Five Second Project I’ve participated in and will certainly be taking part in more! It’s a great way to experiment with new software, techniques and ideas, with the added incentive of a deadline to make sure you get something out there instead of endlessly tinkering!

There were over 200 entries into the CMYK theme – check out the winner and honorable mentions at Greyscale Gorilla.

I thought I’d share a bit of work in progress from my entry into this month’s GreyscaleGorilla Five Second Project. This month’s theme is CMYK. My original concept was based on an idea I had a while ago while playing around with MoDynamics and Destruction in Cinema 4D, where I would smash expensive looking sculptures into dust. In slow motion. I was planning on these scenes playing out in a gallery-esque white space, as well as the sculptures themselves being cast from a white material, but I thought the CMYK theme would be a nice way to add some overall punch to the concept.

I’m not sure how it’s going to play out yet but I’m glad to have come across this 1989 New Order album artwork while thumbing through my copy of Factory Records: The Complete Graphic Album. Admittedly I wasn’t a fan of these at first but I remembered them once I’d started putting my scene together and thought they might be of some use!

Finally, I’ve used David O’Reilly’s free Walt Disney’s Head On A Plate model as the doomed sculpture. Yep, it’s kind of weird. But it will do until I can find a more suitable model!