Oh, Be-Hiive

Online creative magnates, Hiive asked if they could display some of my work at a venue for one of their Swarm parties. I said they could and they sent me some photos of my images on display.

Book It

I just finished the final touches to my "Gilliam Animation", which I've tentatively titled Book - for want of a better name - and uploaded to Vimeo.

(You can see it here.)

It's taken me far too long to complete, what with laziness, tedium, losing a load of work and being put off and having to find the right live-action elements to include. But it's done.

It's almost ironic that the part of the process I knew the least about and had never attempted before, took me the least amount of time. I started this morning and finished a short while ago. (That was compositing the animation with the live footage of the book.)

I think it worked out well too, considering I took the lazy approach and avoided using After Effects and masks - instead winging it with the limited effects in Premiere and a prayer that the clumsy edits won't be noticeable during viewing. (I don't think they are.)

I'm actually incredibly pleased with how it's come out. Especially how well I managed to make digitally animated scans, combined with footage of a blank page, look like closeup shots of an actual book.
It was challenging given the inconsistent colouring of a lot of the source images (that I probably should've corrected at the first stage rather than last) and I ended up using a lot more and far different effects than I imagined when I first conceptualised it.
In particular not being able to chroma key the image backgrounds and having to add digital shadows to mimic those of the page-turn to make them more seamless.

Below are some screenshots to pique your interest/allow me to show off.

I had to write a load of nonsense to make the scenes look more like real book pages. They're not even complete sentences; there's nothing before the left edge of the shot.

I'm not going to pretend that I don't think I'm a genius for adding a layer of mirrored text to emulate the look of the adjoining page showing through the paper.

I think the overall effect is convincing. I'd believe this is a photo of a book page, and I KNOW that I made it.

 

Faces in Places

I've been doing a fair bit of travelling recently; taking my sketchbook about with me to practice sketching during my downtime. I realise now why there's so prevalent a cliché of illustrators drawing on trains.

Sleeping woman on a train to Birmingham

The challenge is getting faces without people noticing you staring at them. Easier when they're further away, but harder to see details.

Workmen on a break outside the station

Travellers waiting at the station

Figures on the left were on a train, chap at the top in a cafe.

Terry-ble at updating

I've been working for some time, on-and-off, on this silly little competition project. But I've been very bad at keeping anyone updated on its progress. There came a few stalls when I had some crashes and lost a lot of work - and some of it can get quite tedious to animate, so it's very demotivating to lose it. Additionally, I also intend to splice in some live action footage of an old book. Finding the right book for the job also hindered progress, but I have something now.

Here are a few images to show what caught my eye in the British Library's collection and illustrate the work I did to make them "animateable".

This, I believe, is the original, unedited version of this image that I downloaded.

Here you can see the edits I made to the base image itself...

...and this shows the embellishments and extra elements I added to animate the image.

Another of the images that caught my eye.

Side-by-side comparison of the original (right) and the edited version, with cut out elements in the centre.

Still of one live-action book shots, onto which I intend to superimpose the animations.