Finally, a subject close to my heart. I love food. I don’t know where I’d be without food. Some of my best friends are food.

So apparently these foodies festivals run up and down the country over the summer. What a great idea. Summer and food. Where do I sign up?

Anyway, this ad will be spreading the word this summer. It was a classic case of being given a bunch of random shots of previous events and told to do something interesting with them. Well, I’m not one to settle for a slideshow so I created this pop-up effect so that you’d have something more interesting to whet your appetite.

I insist you admire the butterfly at the end.

Categories: 3d Animation, Television Graphics | Tags: 3d animation, Scottish Television, stv, Television Graphics | No Comments

Clients hate it when you ask them to supply all kinds of material – images, video, high resolution logos, font details. I’ve taken to asking ‘what do you have?’ instead. If there isn’t much to go on or getting a hold of material will be problematic, I have a whole range of techniques that don’t require much of anything.

Kinetic text is one of them. It’s just a visualisation of whatever the voiceover says, but it can look pretty exciting and dramatic.

For the Wellgate Centre in Dundee, you could have been looking at a bunch of dreary stills of retail outlets. Here’s something fun instead.

Categories: 3d Animation, Television Graphics | Tags: 3d animation, Scottish Television, Television Graphics | No Comments

I get some unusual requests. ‘I want talking toast’ was a recent one. Last year I created a shivering house for the client, Direct Savings (see Direct Savings 3d Animation), and now it was decided the house should be inhabited by a family of toasties. You know, “you’ll be as warm as toast.” The last advert was a lot of fun to do, so this time I was happy to illustrate the concept of infranomic heating through the medium of warmed bread.

Categories: 3d Animation, Television Graphics | Tags: 3d animation, Scottish Television, Television Graphics, toast | No Comments

At first glance, you might think there are no graphics at all in this bumper advert by LA Media for property specialists McEwan Fraser. But do you know how hard it is to train a bee to land on somebody’s nose on cue? They’re really temperamental performers.

That’s why I was asked to create a bee in post-production and match it to the footage, a technique called motion tracking. This example isn’t particularly clever but I liked it because it made me laugh. The original script also used the line “Time to move?” which was even better.

Categories: 2d Motion Graphics, Television Graphics | Tags: 2d animation, Scottish Television, Television Graphics | No Comments

Kinetic text is a useful technique for when there is a lot of information to report but little in the way of visuals to illustrate it. Sky’s Aspire project was one such case.

An internal video communication, these graphics were used as part of a bigger whole that included interviews with team leaders and progress reports. Business graphics needn’t be dull..

Categories: 2d Motion Graphics, Business Graphics, Television Graphics | Tags: 2d animation, Sky HD, Television Graphics | No Comments

A nice wintry advert that’s been showing on STV recently.

The original ad that Direct Savings were using showed how loft and cavity wall insulation actually worked, in a particularly dry style. So the idea was to inject a bit of personality and life into the 3d proceedings and not get too wrapped up in the technicalities. Who cares how it works? It’s going to keep your house warm!

File under ‘cheap and cheerful.’

Categories: 3d Animation, Television Graphics | Tags: 3d animation, Scotland, Scottish Television, stv, Television Graphics | No Comments

This animation piece was commissioned by Sky Television for a management conference and was screened at the massive O2 Cineworld in London. The video above shows the rushes I created for them and the video below shows how these were used in the overall presentation by Edinburgh’s LA Media.

The idea was to illustrate the communication process between customers, engineers and sales staff and the fibre optic line effect connected the various satellite points in the galaxy.

It wasn’t the simplest of tasks, most notably because of the very short timeframe involved. It’s not every day you get asked ‘can you build us an inter-connecting galaxy by next week?’

This is a selection of shots that I treated for Sky HD using extreme slow motion and time distortion techniques which are part of their ongoing promotional campaign.

The technique involves manipulating time by accelerating and decelerating speeds in various ways on specific bits of footage. The shots here are unedited and I’ve just included various clips that I liked. Obviously these were rendered in high definition and are meant to be viewed on a large HDTV screen and not in a miniscule browser window, but you get the idea.

Sadly there’s no way of actually slowing down time in real life.

Categories: Television Graphics | Tags: HD, hdtv, Sky HD, Television Graphics | No Comments

These are examples of scenes that I created for the History of the Devil a while back. The idea was to show little stylised vignettes of various demons, angels and fairies as they were discussed. The documentary used a toy theatre theme throughout so it made sense to put the characters within the theatre.

We used front and back projection screens to create the effect, combining live actors with virtual sets. The 3d graphic theatre backdrops were designed and animated then back projected from a dvd onto an enormous screen behind the performers (Lauren Lamarr and Mark Donnelly).

We also placed a second mesh screen between the camera and the performers and used front projection to cast another layer of motion graphics onto. The set looked amazing. What you see here are the basic rushes, there’s nothing added, and the overall effect is a bit like moving 3d stills.

See also The History Of The Devil.

Categories: Television Graphics | Tags: projection screens, Television Graphics | No Comments

Scotland At The Movies was a one-off documentary made by STV and broadcast at peak time on March 22nd 2009. The programme focused on four Scottish films: Gregory’s Girl, Whisky Galore!, Heavenly Pursuits, and Comfort and Joy, and featured interviews with Bill Forsyth, Claire Grogan, Tom Conti and Bill Paterson.

I used the pop-up technique for this title sequence, taking all the promo stills I was given and cutting them up to form an animated collage.

Categories: Television Graphics | Tags: Scotland, scotland at the movies, stv, Television Graphics | No Comments