We are oh so happy to announce the completion of our parts for the TROLLEY project.
For those of you who didn’t know, we were taking care of all of the 3D modelling and animation for one of the Digishorts 2009 films, funded by Screen WM; TROLLEY.

The film was Produced by Rachel Carter, Directed by Anna Shelton, with Phil Wood drafted in as Director of Photography.

In our roles as animators and VFX artists we went the whole nerdy-nine-yards on this brief… turning up on set to take measurements, collecting more reference photographs of the trolleys we would have to model, and we even took our big shiny silver ball with us so we could record the correct lighting information for the 3D scenes we produced. Paul almost had a Dorkgasm noting focal length numbers from the prime lenses attached to the RED ONE, so we could match the camera in our virtual sets. He is easily pleased is our Paul.

Our pipeline (for those of you who may be interested) featured Lightwave 3D, Zbrush, After Effects, Premiere Pro and REDCINE, allowing us to work to the highest quality specs. The project was originated in a mix of 2K and 4K resolution plates.

The film is having its first outing on Tuesday the 3rd November at The Electric Cinema in Birmingham – where all of the cast, crew and us back-room boys have been invited to view our work on the big screen along with the other Digishorts from that particular batch. Awesome stuff!

Anyway, we’ll leave you with some images and vids of the parts that we took care of, and hopefully we’ll be showing you the full final edit sometime shortly after the Premiere.

The piece was shot in a mixture of 4K (4096 x 2304 pixels) and 2K (2048 x 1152 pixels) resolutions on the RED ONE.

We then used a mixture of REDcine, After Effects and Premiere Pro for the grading and visual effects. We kept a 16bit colour depth throughout our workflow with delivery as 2K resolution 10bit DPX files. We thought we’d put that in for the geeks out there…. you know who you are!

Here’s the complete piece, enjoy!

Inspired by traditional Greek folklore and mythology, this dark tale follows a jilted woman on her journey through love, betrayal, repentance and retribution.

Directed by Ben Lister
Produced by Victoria Emes
Set Design & Undead Puppets – David Curtis-Ring
Puppet Maker – Billie Achilleos assisted by Ashley Appaya
Scenic Painter – Andy Reid
DOP – Zac Nicholson
1st AC/Focus Puller – Benn Peacock
Gaffer – Chris Rhodes
Puppeteers – Jeremy Bidgood and Billie Achilleos
Runners – Tom Levigne, Oliver Nelson, Chole Sylvestre
antidote productions Ltd

Why not pop on over to http://www.vimeo.com/6404056 and leave a nice comment for Ben… we’re pretty sure that he and the rest of the crew would like that!

More soon, keep well all.

Filming was all done in HD, with additional filters on the lenses for added film-like richness.

Our team took all the footage and recorded audio, and edited the shots together.  Next we spruced up the picture quality by adding a nice warm grade to the pictures.  Finally, we applied the graphics and replaced the overcast sky in the final shot with some lovely animated 3D clouds in a sunset.

The sales figures for the restaurant chain received a large boost after this commercial aired on ITV1.

This was a job where, once again, @Warblefly Productions came to us at Brace with some rather nice looking footage (shot in DVCPro50 – for those who care) and asked us to edit together a promotional video.

Initially expected to be an 8 minute video, it quickly grew into a 20 minute corporate video, due to the volume of information and footage within! We spent a lot of time getting the edit just right, and during some of this period, the end client was enjoying the experience of sitting in our studio on sofas viewing the work as it was made on a large HD screen. After this, we then set about giving the film a bit of a Top Gear look through careful colour-correction and grading. The guys at Warblefly expressed how pleased they were with how much more depth and richness the finished footage had compared to the already fairly tastey original source video.

At the same time as the video was being edited, we were also working on the DVD menu and rough authoring in parallel.

Once everything was approved, we then pressed 2,000 copies of the DVD, with full-colour print, full colour case inlay and full colour 16 page booklet, and shipped them to the client just 7 working days after the master had been approved!

 










Needless to say, the client was extremely pleased with the quality of the finished product, and that it arrived 1 day before a big event they were going to attend.

Below is the complete video rather than just snippets, if you fancy a watch: