Why Is That Guy Sat On An Elephant?

An excellent question, and one that the second film for The Pioneers sets out to answer. This was the second of the two projects for The Pioneers, with this film focusing on the source of the inspiration for their logo design. It was also an opportunity to create some caricatures of Jonathan Haidt and Daniel Khaneman.

The video followed the same production methods as the previous film – based off scripts that were created by The Pioneers team, with some input and suggestions from myself and my brother. I then storyboarded out the film, working up concepts for each element, and got sign off from The Pioneers. After that, it was a matter of creating all the art and putting together the final animation, before handing it back to my brother to put together the sound design.

As always there was a lot of collaboration between myself and The Pioneers, a lot of back-and-forth communication, making sure the final film was going to meet their vision for the project. I’m pretty happy with the results (as happy as I am with anything that I make, admittedly).

The Pioneers have shown the film to both Jonathan Haidt and Daniel Khaneman, both of whom were happy with it – in the case of Jonathan Haidt, he liked it so much he got in touch with The Pioneers and (last I heard) was talking to them about putting together some new studies.

Advertisement

New Year

A year of changes, to be sure.

Before I jump into this post, I want to mention a podcast that I’ve tweeted about repeatedly but not mentioned on this site. Blu Mar Ten is a drum and bass artist in the UK, as well as having their own label and putting out some truly fantastic tracks. They have a podcast that comes out roughly once a month (they slip now and then) with a mix of music that’s brilliantly eclectic and I absolutely love them. You can find the podcast and old mixes from them on their site here.

And of course, check out the podcast on iTunes.

With that out of the way, some news about the new year – I’ll be moving into London at some point in the next couple of months. It’s all a bit uncertain at the moment, as I’m waiting to see if a room is going to be available in a friend’s house (if not, then SpareRoom here I come) – I’m genuinely excited about moving out, feels like the start of a whole new story arc for me. Am already making a list of free life drawing classes I want to start hitting up once I’ve found my feet a bit.

Just before Christmas I completed a film for Experian – working with my brother again – that was for internal use and unfortunately I can’t show it off anywhere. I was pretty happy with it, created some nice effects with particles (first time experimenting with them on a job).

I’m back to work on projects this week, for a theatre company based in Liverpool, and there’ll be more stuff for The Pioneers coming soon as well. I also have the second film that I did for them (that I haven’t posted about yet) to show off too you all, so that’ll be coming soon.

Love Cubed, my short film project, is undergoing a revamp. I’ve decided to move it into Modo and complete all the 3D work in that package (so modelling props, rigging, animating, the works). I love the lighting and rendering option in Modo, and with a recent upgrade to 701, feel like I’m in a good position to just bring everything into Modo rather than some convoluted Modo to Maya to Modo pipeline. We’ll see. I’ve been digging through various lectures from Digital Tutors about rigging in Modo and it all seems very straightforward (especially given the simplicity of the characters). I just hope I can get the expressiveness out of those little dudes that I want to.

Fun times ahead.