Bucks Animators Go to Blue GFX

Blue GFX

Last week Bucks New University students went to the Blue GFX Expo in London – a massive annual visual effects event sponsored by Autodesk, and a great opportunity to find out about the latest developments in our industry. There were presentations about Autodesk Maya, 3D Studio Max, a chance to try out the latest Cintique tablets, and best of all a talk by Framestore about the work they did on Gravity, a film that looks and feels like a live action movie, but is entirely animated. OK, George Clooney and Sandra Bullock were real – but the rest is CG magic.

Nomad Games

I went to a fascinating lecture by Don Whiteford of Nomad Games, who talked about how his company got started – an excellent introduction to the challenges of starting up a small games business and adapting to new technology and changing markets. They created Talisman – now a 30 year old game, and he talked about how business need “not just one product, but something that gets updated and can be rolled out over time, with expansions and extensions” to the existing game. He also explained that here in the UK, Creative Skillset will fund creative salaries at 50% for a year – hugely useful for a start-up company short on cash.

Autodesk Maya

Graham Bell of Autodesk introduced some of the latest features of Autodesk Maya, including how to use their hair tools to create realistic fur and grooming for CG animals and creatures.

Overall, the event was a huge success, and a great way for students and lecturers alike to catch up on new developments in our business.

Blue Zoo

To see more about Blue GFX 2013, see this post about the use of Maya's latest hair and fur tools, read about how Blue Zoo revealed the secrets of making a new animated TV series, find out about how Frame Store did the title sequence for Skyfall, and learn about how graduates can get a job with Blue Zoo, the UK's largest indie TV animation company.

---Alex

For more on the experience of studying at Bucks New University, come and visit us at one of our Open Days,  take a virtual tour of one of our animation studios, check out what our students think of our course, and see why we're ranked in the top 12 creative universities in the UK. Find out why we're giving free laptops to all our students, and why we give all our students free access to videos at Lynda.com. Also, see what financial assistance might be available to you. Learn which is better for animation, a PC or a Mac? Get hold of a copy of a map so you can find your way around campus, and learn about motion capture at Bucks.  

bluegfx expo - 6th November 2014

Blue GFX - in London 6th November

Blue GFX Expo is taking place in London on 6th November 2014. Last year's event was superb - in attendance were the founders of Blue Zoo, the UK's biggest TV animation company, the guys from Framestore who did the animation for the Skyfall title sequence, and representatives from Autodesk showing the latest hair simulation tools. There were so many talks on cutting edge CG tools that it was hard to choose which ones to attend. For all our students, this is a not-to-be-missed chance to catch up with the latest technology and meet in person the people who run the UK's top animation and visual effects houses.

What is bluegfx expo?
The bluegfx expo is an industry day which provides Media and Entertainment professionals an opportunity to hear about the latest developments in technology.

Hear from industry leaders
Blue GFX are in the process of lining up talks from companies of all shapes and sizes.

Get hands on with the latest technology
The expo hall gives you the perfect opportunity to discuss the latest software and hardware technology from your favourite manufacturers, and discover new innovations from developers you may not have heard from before. More details of speakers and sponsors to follow.

Location
The Coin Street Centre is 5 min walk from Waterloo train and tube station and Southwark tube station, 15 min walk from Charring Cross, and a few tube stations away from King’s Cross St Pancras. When you get to Stamford Street, look for the yellow building.

Coin Street Centre
108 Stamford Street, South Bank
London
SE1 9NH

When does it start and finish?
Blue GFX starts at 9.30am on Thursday 6th November, and finishes at around 8pm (if you stay for drinks)

What is happening?
You can see the full agenda here.

To Register for Blue GFX, follow this link. And to read about last year's event, see our blog posts here.

For more on the experience of studying at Bucks New University, come and visit us at one of our Open Days,  take a virtual tour of one of our animation studios, check out what our students think of our course, and see why we're ranked in the top 12 creative universities in the UK. Find out why we're giving free laptops to all our students, and why we give all our students free access to videos at Lynda.com. Also, see what financial assistance might be available to you. Learn which is better for animation, a PC or a Mac? Get hold of a copy of a map so you can find your way around campus, and learn about motion capture at Bucks.

Hair Simulation in Maya 2014

Rapunzel - great hair!

One of the best new features of Autodesk Maya 2014 is a big step forward in its hair simulation capabilities. The new tool is called XGen, and it comes free with Maya 2014. It was developed by Disney/Pixar and was used on their recent film Rapunzel, to generate the heroine's gorgeous, bouncing tresses.

At the BlueGFX Expo in London last month, Autodesk demonstrated their new hair simulation tool, giving us a step-by-step tutorial in how to go about creating great hair effects in Maya with this new instancing system. So how exactly does it work?

XGen is found under the Dynamics tab in Autodesk Maya. You go to Create/XGen/description, and give it a project name. Pick groomable splines/create to create your new hair map.  You can use the Density slider to add to or reduce the density of the follicles.

Using the brush tool you can paint the hairs to make them bigger or smaller. You can pose them too, grooming the hair to make it follow the contours of the body, growing out in different directions, just like real hair.

On a facial rig, you can add stubble, a moustache, a beard. You will generally do this on a separate mesh. Underneath the hair mesh will be the original mesh, which will have its own skin shader.

You can also use XGen to create other effects, such as long grass waving the wind. You can use the same system to propagate trees in a landscape, or grass over a field, or roof tiles on a roof.

So, next time you're working on a character rig, have a go at XGen and see what you can create.

---Alex

For more about free online tutorials, see our post about Andy Sykes' excellent tutorials in Flash, and check out the free Maya tutorials at Animation Apprentice. Be sure to take advantage of free life drawing classes at Pixelovely.com. For more on the experience of studying at Bucks New University, come and visit us at one of our Open Days,  take a virtual tour of one of our animation studios, check out what our students think of our course, and see why we're ranked in the top 12 creative universities in the UK. Find out why we're giving free laptops to all our students, and why we give all our students free access to videos at Lynda.com. Also, see what financial assistance might be available to you. Learn which is better for animation, a PC or a Mac? Get hold of a copy of a map so you can find your way around campus, and learn about motion capture at Bucks. And find out about how our online video tutorials work.

How do you make an animated TV series? - Blue Zoo reveal the secrets

Q Pootle 5 by Blue Zoo

Last week Bucks New University students went to the Blue GFX Expo at London's South Bank - a treasure trove of visual effects industry lectures and workshops. Among the excellent presentations was a talk by Adam Shaw of London's Blue Zoo, who created the animated TV series Q Pootle 5. In effect, his lecture was a fully-fledged workshop in how to put a TV series together from start to finish. So, if you have ever wondered - how do you get your own TV series off the ground? - here's how they pulled it off.

The series was based on books by writer and illustrator Nick Butterworth, who was looking for a production house to bring his hand-drawn characters to life. Nick came in just as Blue Zoo had begun looking for children’s book properties - so the timing was perfect for both partners.

To get started, and to show potential broadcasters that they were serious, Blue Zoo made a fully animated teaser, which they took to Cartoon Forum in 2009, to pitch their idea in front of European broadcasters and distributors. At this point of course they had to spend their own money, in order to get the project off the ground - development of this sort is always a risky enterprise.

Cartoon Forum - the place to pitch animated TV series

The teaser only involved two characters, which was cheaper than animating the full cast, but it "gave a flavour of the show". What they needed to do was "make the broadcasters confident" in the look and feel of the project. They managed to get Martin Freeman to do the voice of Pootle, though due to a conflict with another show he ended up not doing the series.

The key to the cast is that they are all strongly contrasting characters. The stories are about the everyday things they get up to; in effect they are kids pretending to be adults.

Small black eyes are a challenge for eye expressions

To find the look of the series, they had to turn Nick Butterworth’s illustrations into 3D characters, as the series was to be a 3D project. They began by doing 2D expression sheets based on Nick's designs. One of the challenges was that the characters are all designed with black dots for eyes. This can make it more of a challenge to get expressions out of them, so they did 3D expression sheets to make sure they could get a full range of emotion, and also added some whites to the eyes for side glances.

They also had to design the universe, and create a full digital map of the planet that the characters live on. Nicks’ world felt "as if it was made by British Leyland many years ago - as if everything was tired and used, and didn’t quite work. It is very retro - things put together by hand but not quite fitting". This vintage feel "makes the alien world feel familiar, warm and friendly. The colour palette also is muted and aged, and a bit washed out".

British Leyland Austin Cambridge. Photo: Wikipedia

The landscapes were inspired by California, and the American West. Blue Zoo built a full digital map of the set; all the parts of the set fit together in hexagons like a honeycomb. They built the whole set so they would always be able to be consistent about locations and the relative positions of all the elements.

To render it they used Mental Ray, using Final Gather. They had a number of difficulties, especially aliasing problems with the grasses.

The production is all made in the UK in London, there is no outsourcing to Asia. One advantage of this is great communication between the departments - nothing gets lost in translation. They had a very diverse cast, which they were able to record ensemble in the sound booth in Soho - which really helped to get a great performance from the voice talent.

Redboard - storyboards and 3D previs combined into one process

They used Redboard for 3D previsualisation. They created 3D models as low resolution digital assets, imported onto Redboard. Then, they sketched expressions over the top, to make the characters and expressions stronger. In effect, they combined the process of storyboard and layout by going straight to 3D layout - which saved them the work of a whole extra 3D layout process after storyboards. It also helped them to makes big changes early on with relative ease. The only disadvantage is that it tends to restrict the performance of the board artists somewhat, but by using the drawing tools on top of the 3D models they were able to make the characters look more dynamic.

In terms of the overall pipeline, they had three animation teams going at once. At the top of the pyramid was the director, below him three animation directors (one for each team) and three post production supervisors to oversee the technical process.

At the end of the talk I asked a few questions, such as how much work was each animator asked to produce every week? They had five animators on each show, working over 3 weeks to produce the whole episode. Each episode is ten minutes long, so that's two minutes per animator. That works out at around 40 seconds a week per animator, or 8 seconds a day. That is a ton of work. But, on the plus side, with smaller teams, you get more ownership by each individual artist. And, frankly, we're lucky these jobs are staying in the UK, and not going overseas.

(Editor's note: For more on Blue gfx, check out our post here. Also, to see more about Blue Zoo, click here.  To read about how you might pitch a TV series at Cartoon Forum, read this article, and for the equivalent event to pitch movie ideas at Cartoon Movie, see this post. )

Framestore's Diarmid Harrison-Murray on Skyfall, Daniel Craig and Adele

Diarmid Harrison Murray was the keynote speaker at last week's BlueGFX Expo at London's South Bank. He was there talking about the title sequence for Skyfall, which he directed, tackling the project with a small team at Framestore, one of London's leading visual effects houses.

Below is a rough (and hopefully accurate) transcript of his talk, in which he explained how he managed to pull off the animated titles for the latest installment in the world's most successful film franchise.

Diarmid explained that the client brief for the title sequence was "an homage to the past but with a modern twist". In other words, they needed to produce something in keeping with traditional Bond titles, but also modern and sophisticated. They settled on a look that was "dark and sinister, a single camera POV experience", reflecting the very personal nature of the Skyfall story. The client wanted it to feel "as if Bond's life was flashing before his eyes".

The budget for the title sequence was, as seems to be so often the case nowadays, not really enough to do the job properly. They had a small team, who had to do a ton of work between them. The core team was just six artists, and they only had three months - not much time to produce something that needed to be seriously impressive.

On top of that, it was effectively one long shot, hard to break down into sections. As every animator knows, long shots are the toughest, and the render times become incredibly unwieldy.

Adele - top secret. Photo: Wikipedia

In addition, the client's master edit kept changing. The song, sung by Adele, was a big secret, and the team were not even permitted to hear the music for first 2 months – it was completely shrouded in secrecy. So it was only in the final month that they could actually time the animation to fit to Adele's song.

So how did they get started?  They began with mood boards, sketches and visual ideas to "get the creative juices flowing". Once the client had signed off on the look, they did a story board animatic. Then they shot the live action scenes with Daniel Craig. These were all filmed at Pinewood Studios over three days. They filmed in the famous underwater tank and also filmed green screen footage.

Pinewood Studios

The CG animation was all based around the idea of a beating heart, pumping (through digital simulations) blood around the body.

One of the team's persistent problems was that the director was reluctant to commit to final approvals, leaving the overall look of the project in some doubt until near the deadline. The team did many early tests to get him "buy off" on the style - but approvals were slow in coming.

When the final deadline loomed, work became so frantic that some people on the team "did not go home for 3 days, they just slept in the offices". Or they simply got no sleep at all. Diarmid himself did an all-nighter at the very end, which he described as "Day – night – day – pub."

At the end of Diarmid's talk he was asked what was the biggest lesson he had learned on the project? He answered: "Working with clients, they routinely mess up your beautiful work. Being able to do this and not scream into a pillow is vital. And that goes for all client work".

Amen to that.

(Editor's Note: You can read more about our trip to Blue GFX at the South Bank here. Among the highlights, we heard an excellent talk by Blue Zoo, the Uk's leading TV animation production co.  You can also find out more about how Framestore helped us to develop our new animation and visual effects course here at Bucks.)

Meet Blue Zoo - Britain's largest TV Animation Company

At the recent BlueGFX Expo at London's National Film Museum on the South Bank, Blue Zoo founders Tom Box and Adam Shaw gave an excellent presentation about their BAFTA-winning young company - now the biggest TV animation co. in the UK.

Tom and Adam were very enthusiastic presenters, clearly excited about their company and about the future of TV animation in Britain. They also offered some excellent insights into how animation graduates might go about getting a job with their fast-growing studio. Below is a rough transcript of their talk, plus some of the questions they answered at the end.

Blue Zoo are based in London's Soho. From small beginnings, they now employ 120 people, though as with most studios this goes up and down according to the flow of work. They have also won multiple awards – including a slew of BAFTAs.

They are a privately owned company, which offers their owners a huge degree of creative control over what they do. Unlike many of their bigger rivals, their business structure allows them to plough their profits not into shareholders pockets but into the animation, ensuring high levels of quality and a strong creative agenda.

Tom and Adam studied at the NCCA in Bournemouth. In 2000 they founded Blue Zoo, even before they had graduated. To finance their small start-up, they got a loan from a family friend to buy the kit they needed to get up and running. Their timing was fortunate; they were looking to develop new ideas just as the BBC was setting up CBeebies. 

Initially they specialised in low cost content, starting their first studio in a garage in Southend.When they began they had very basic equipment, and they had to hardware render all their shots (ie render them on their computer hard drives) since they could not afford a render farm (a so-called "farm" of computers, networked together to render out beautiful images, typically overnight).

Soon they moved to London and got themselves a single room in Regent St - their first studio, boasting four computers crammed into a tiny room. In 2003 they expanded, moved to bigger offices in Soho, and began to do more polished work. Soon they were making their own TV shows, doing 26 three minute episodes.

Stitch-Up Showdown. Deadly knitwear

One of the first was Stitch Up Showdown – starring knitted characters which kill each other in hideous ways. It was a success, but the broadcaster was a bit panicked when the material was first delivered. They had to cut some especially controversial parts, and they never did get US distribiution. But Blue Zoo soon moved on to new things - they pride themselves on doing work in different styles, not settling in to any particular house style.

In 2010 they got even bigger offices. They did Olive, Get Scribbling, and lots more adverts. In 2012 they won a BAFTA for the Best Independent Production Co. Today, the company has three main areas, which overlap and interconnect.

The first area is Creative services, which is mainly advertising. This is the most profitable part of the company. But, there is seldom time to fully develop the material, and advertising deadlines are relentless. The second part of the company is Long Form production, which offers more time to develop stories, but is less profitable. Adam Shaw is in charge of this division, which helps to develop the overall Blue Zoo production pipeline. The third main area of the company is Intellectual Property (IP) Development. This division generates new work, and develops new ideas and properties which the company owns directly. All three parts of the company inter-relate and inter-connect.

Blue Zoo do their editorial work in Avid, Final Cut and Premiere. It all depends on what the client wants, as the client will often want delivery of the raw editable files, so that they can make their own adjustments. To track their productions, and the progress of all the shots, Blue Zoo use Google Apps for production tracking. It’s free! And it works!

After the presentation, I asked them a few questions about recruitment. Specifically, What do they look for in animators?

The answer was, in a way, obvious. They want quality demo reels. And nowadays, they only look at online submissions. So don't mail in a portfolio - it will only get lost. Wannabe animators have to fill out an online form. And they say a personal statement helps – Blue Zoo want passionate people who really want to do the work, so a graduate who sounds really excited about animation - and about Blue Zoo - might just get noticed. However, they get literally thousands of applications each month, so the competition is tough.

So how do they weed out the reels they like? Well, it seems they don't look for long. They can usually tell “within the first 10-15 seconds” if they like a student's demo reel. That's not a long time to make a great impression.

My third question was - where do they hire from? Any particular schools?

The answer was - anywhere that produces great animators. They mentioned the NCCA, Teeside, Ravensbourne, and also overseas - they particularly like French students. Plus, they are closely working with Creative Skillset so they have something of a bias towards Skillset approved courses. But, in the end, they take the artists they like, regardless of where they come from. Also, they added, knowing someone at Blue Zoo helps. They like the "personal touch". If someone inside the company can vouch for you, it can be a huge help.

Finally I asked them how much an animator might be expected to produce on a TV series? The answer is, about 7 seconds a day, or 35 seconds a week. That's a lot of work. But then, they aren't outsourcing their shows to Asia, they are keeping the animation work here in the UK. We should be grateful for good quality jobs that aren't going overseas.

More power to their pencil (and pixels).

---Alex

(Editor's Note: For more on creating a successful demo reel, check out our post on what studios are looking for here, and also the Sony Pictures guide to demo reels here. You might also watch our ten minute video on what goes into a great student demo reel.)

Bucks Animation students visit Blue GFX at London's South Bank

Blue GFX Expo is the annual London showcase for the visual effects industry and the software that drives it, sponsored by (among many others) the software-wizards Autodesk - who make Maya and 3DStudioMax, and much of the other software that we use in the VFX industry.

Housed slightly incongruously in the vast and rambling Edwardian County Hall building on London’s South Bank, the Expo was marvelously hard to find, but highly rewarding to attend.

Visual Effects Artists aren’t generally the best speakers. Most of us talk in a strange form of jargon that is only intelligible to fellow sufferers of the VFX virus. How many digital artists can explain what they do to their Mum before her eyes glaze over and she says "that's nice, dear" before changing the subject?

Demonstrating software can be a dry business at the best of times. It isn’t a recipe for crowd-pleasing speeches. Still, with so much of our industry being technology-led, it’s essential to keep up with the newest releases, lest you get left behind in the race for pipeline efficiency and a speedy workflow.

Yesterday's river View. Earth hath nothing to show more fair...

The Expo was housed in the magnificent County Hall building on London's South Bank. It was built between 1911 and 1922 in the Edwardian Baroque style, the last gasp of high imperial self-confidence before architecture fell under the spell of modernism.

County Hall

Today, County Hall hosts an odd variety of attractions including the London Eye, The London Aquarium, a couple of hotels - and the London Film Museum.

Grand staircase at County Hall

Since the Expo took place next door to the London Film Museum, the corridors were filled with bits of old movie sets. Here's one from one of those end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it pictures that comes out every summer.

Lady Liberty is in the house

BlueGFX was excellent; a showcase of talent, including presentations from some of the very best animators and visual effects artists working in the UK today.

A number of the presenters were showcasing VRay, a relatively new rendering system that aims to render everything you need - faster better and cheaper than ever before. We saw amazing clips from the Elder Scrolls. We ogled at beautiful breakdown reels showing how CG elements were combined with live action to produce stunning visual effects work. Digital doubles, CG environments, smoke, hair simulation. Everything is faster, cheaper, quicker, bringing film-quality visual effects to episodic TV and games. 

IKEA Chair - real, or CGI? Who can tell?

But it's not just movies. Even your friendly local IKEA catalogue is now one third fakery. That means IKEA are photographing digital furniture in 3D software, rather than shooting the real thing. But why go to the trouble? Because its easier and cheaper, and the viewer can’t tell the difference. Plus, they can adjust the renders to suit local tastes. The kitchen of a Hasidic family in Jerusalem will look different from that of an uptown Manhattan socialite. Rather than re-build a real kitchen, you simply adjust a digital one. Quicker, cheaper, and more flexible.

The UK's largest TV animation studio

I got to meet Tom Box and Adam Shaw, the creators of Blue Zoo, who gave an excellent presentation on how they started up their studio from scratch in 2000, having just graduated from the National Centre for Computer Studies at Bournemouth University - an inspiring story for talented graduates everywhere.

And what an incredible opportunity for our students to meet the founders of one of London's leading animation studios. How often do you get the chance to talk in person with the people who - a few years from now - will be looking at your demo reel and deciding whether or not to offer you a job?

We also heard a fabulous talk by Framestore's Diarmid Harrison-Murray who directed the excellent title sequence for Skyfall. It took me back to some not-so-happy memories of Soho VFX work as he explained having to work 3 days without sleep in order to get the job done on time.

So secret even the artists weren't allowed to know

And, astonishingly, the team at Framestore were not even allowed the hear the music for the title sequence until near the end of production - it was too secret to let the artists hear it. But how can you possibly animate a musical title sequence without the music - and still do a brilliant job?

When he was asked what was the biggest lesson he had learned in visual effects, he said this:

"You have to get used working with clients. They will routinely mess up your beautiful work, make stupid changes. Being able to do this - and not scream into a pillow - is a vital skill to learn. And that goes for all client work".

Amen to that.

---Alex