first decent shots of john carter are here!

as usual, I have been terrible at updating my news section - really the whole site needs updating, but finally Disney have realised some decent screen shots of the John Carter of Mars, and behold a beautiful render of an airship! which I worked on.

In additon to which, there is a nice little review from Harry Knowles at ain't it cool news on these pics.

http://www.aintitcool.com/node/52084

finally we come to the big write up....

disney screened about 20 minutes of the film to a select group of press and reviewers.....

AND THEY LOVED IT!

you can check the first one here:

http://www.denofgeek.com/movies/1145066/john_carter_our_thoughts_on_20_minutes_of_footage_that_weve_seen.html

This sort of write up actually gets me excited about the movie and I worked on it! This may be the sort of film , that whilst your working on it, you become quite detached because it consumes so much of your life, for me it was over a year and half, i know plenty of people that worked on it for over 2 years...but maybe just maybe its going to be the massive blockbuster we all hoped it could be...will just have to wait and find out now...

fingers crossed.

here come's WWZ!

So the days of John Carter of Mars are over, and I've moved onto a new production - WWZ.

Im hoping some of your will heave heard of it, if not for the book - An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brookes, then almost certainly for the media circus a surrounding the lead star - Brad Pitt!

Im short, its a post apolalyptic zombie film, set all over the globe. Cant really say much more than that for now, but there is plenty of information available online, and the book is really good, so i definatley encourage you to pick up a copy!

John Carter of Mars

Well, sadly there havent been many updates from me in a while. The reason for this, is that i've been on one project for the best of part of the last year and a half, so my updates on projects etc, have been rather limited.

That being said, i see no reason why i can't familiarise people with the project, and also offer you exciting news of a personal project i am working on, that i will be posting about in august! so stay stay tuned, because its coming soon!

Anyway, as the title of the post suggests, i am working on a filme called 'John Carter of Mars' can't really say too much about it, but it exists in book form, so i suggest you go out and buy it, there are 11 books in the series, written way back at the beginning of the 20th century, its old school sci-fi. Im working my way through them at the moment, but have only got up to book 7. They are pretty entertaining, i wouldnt go so far to say they are well written, its all pretty one sided, the hero always wins, get the girl and kills the bad guy, there is very little depth, but what can you expect from a science fiction novel from 1917?

anyway to clue you all in a bit im posting some of the book covers, that depict the rather colourful world of mars (or barsoom as it is refered to in the books). these covers were designed by Michael Whelan, who is an awesome fantasy artist, i bought his book after seeing these images, and i thoroughly encourage you to look him up! anyway, enjoy:


A Princess of Mars

The Gods of Mars

Warlord of Mars

Thuvia - Maid of Mars

The Chessmen of Mars

Mastermind of Mars

A Fighting man of Mars

Swords of Mars

Synthetic men of Mars

Llana of Gathol


and the image at the top is from 'John Carter of Mars' which is the last book in the series.

visual effects work on Prince of Persia

This morning I found this article about the various effects work done on prince of persia, there is a breakdown of the roles of the different post production houses.

Nice little quote about the work I was directly involved in with Cinesite, the sequence involving the poisoning of King Sharaman, its from Sue Rowe, who was the Visual effect supervisor here at Cinesite:

"We cast two youth doubles who stood in straight after the take with the original actors so we could take high-res digital stills in the same lighting conditions. We added darkened eye lashes and thickened hair, and removed wrinkles and age spots. These were then tracked onto the actors’ skin using our in-house software Motion Analyser, which basically sticks the new skin on top of the old skin - like a digital skin graft.” A similar approach was used for the death of King Sharaman (Ronald Pickup), who is poisoned by snake venom, using a combination of 3D veins and skin graft, with smoke done in Maya Fluids"

you can check out the whole article here:

http://www.fxguide.com/featured/Prince_of_Persia/

plans for the future

I recently discovered the work of Manuel Augusto Dischinger Moura, he's a concept artist from brazil, and I really love his work! Manuel was kind enough to send me some copies of his artwork, simply because i liked it that much. one of his drawings in particular immediately had me thinking how cool it would be to model in 3d.

Its his take on the ninja turtles, I've always been a fan on donatello myself (everyone has their favourite right?) but his drawings of michelangelo had so much character that I instantly wanted to make him in maya! shame he hasnt drawn a Don, yet, but maybe in the future I hope?

here are the designs for the other three turtles:

you can see more of Manuel's work at cghub here: http://manuhell.cghub.com/

he also has a fantastic series of Street Fighter zombies!

check it out!

new tutorial character

Hello all, so thought i would give you a sneaky peak at a character im modelling for both a new tutorial series and also a short im working on!



The tutorial is a 12 part series, on full character modelling, its pretty basic, but i think it should help aspiring young modellers! :)

let me know what you think

Adam