Ipswich City Council

This is one of a series of TVCs advertising the virtues of the the city of Ipswich.
They were all completed entirely in After Effects. I do so love that program!!

More Dinosaurs

I've been neglecting this poor old blog lately...oops...Anyway here's a dino animation I cobbled together from bits and pieces for one of the local shows. As always there was no budget. The main sauropod was actually a bit of 2D animation.

History Alive

I've posted before about the History Alive weekend that takes place out at Fort Lytton during winter. This time I took the 550d along to try my hand at getting some cool action shots. Man it was hard. You couldn't really get close enough to the action and my 18 - 135 lens just wasn't long enough.So a fair bit of it is a bit shake-arama...

Still I had fun editing and grading it.

I'm baaaack!!

It has been months since I've posted....ouch. I've been playing around with a camera stabiliser for the Canon 550D. Initially it didn't work very well. I discovered that the 550 was simply too light for the stabiliser. After adding some extra weight to the camera end of things, it seems to perform much better.

This is the stabiliser I ended up buying:
http://www.b-hague.co.uk/hague_dslr_motion_cam_camera_steadicam_stabilizer.htm

GSE 2011

GSE2011 from Pete Mullins on Vimeo.

I recently had the privilege of redesigning the look and feel of one of the local television programs we produce here called 'The Great South East'.

The previous look to the show had a very graphical '2D' look. I wanted to try and get away from that and devote more time to the images and textures that are actually out there in our local area. I also wanted the talent to look as good and as larger-than-life as they could.

It was an interesting experiment to pull back the graphics content and just let the images do all the work. While I certainly don't think its perfect, I'm quite proud of this new take on a long running show.

It's funny, some have reacted really positively to it while others have been a little bit shocked by what is a reasonably radical departure from had been done before.

This is one of those rare times when something I have worked on really has engendered a wide variety of responses.

The music on this clip isn't used on the actual weekly show. GSE has its own original scored track. This music is taken from the opening titles to an absolutely brilliant show called 'Boardwalk Empire'. That series title sequence was the original inspiration for me.

...Hey! More life drawing sketches!!

 

Not sure if this really works. Strangely enough I was quite happy with my original sketch. It was only when I decided to do a colour version of it that I started to see all of its shortcomings. Oh well, I present it here as evidence 'yer honour..

RoboDingo!

Robo_dingo from Pete Mullins on Vimeo.
More animated Dingoes (for the company that has a Dingo as its logo). This was based on artwork supplied.

More Life Drawing

 

I've been a bit tardy of late with the posts. Work has really ramped up and my spare time has disappeared. So this time just a selection of recent life drawings.

 

I'm really enjoying these sessions. I'm finding them very useful.

 

My constant struggle is to loosen up without letting proportions etc. suffer. I think it's one of those things where it's all about the journey. You never really get to a point where you are absolutely happy. 

 

Ruff Graphics part 2

Dingo animated logo from Pete Mullins on Vimeo.


This is the logo for the company I did the previous graphic for. I found some footage of dog walk cycles on the net and took my animation cues from that. I pretty much did the whole thing in After Effects.

Ruff Graphics

old style TV from Pete Mullins on Vimeo.

An old style 'movietone news' animation for an intro to a segment in a corporate video.

The Fabulous Baker Boys.

 

These were done for a promo for the TLC network show 'Cake Boss'. It's  basically about a cake baking family empire in New Jersey. The concept was for you to think the mafia have moved in, then it's revealed that the 'boss' head 'gangster' is actually a cake baker. The style was in a sort of a comic-book/ paper cut-out look.

The elements I created were taken into Maya and intergrated into a 3D camera move.

Life Drawing....again....

A new post...at last...or to put it another way...who cares? Just a couple of life drawing sketches this time around. 

Also an animation I did late last year for the agency handling the Liberals campaign in NSW. Now being the sort of bloke who tends to dress to the left, I was a little hesitant about this project. But I figured Labor in NSW was screwed anyway and it was one of those rare paying gigs

Liberal Party Ad from Pete Mullins on Vimeo.

I was proud of my animated flies...basically a sort of 21/2 D solution. They then asked for the maggots, which I felt was 'gilding the lily' somewhat, but I guess they really wanted to ram home the message.

Anyway, despite my early misgivings it actually turned out to be a fun animation to work on.

Render sketches

When I returned from holidays someone had left a large A3 style calendar on my desk. I thought ...'Great I can mark off relevant dates right here in front of me'. I then noticed that the calendar was for the year 2009, obviously what I thought was an act of generosity was actually someone cleaning out their trash and dumping it on my desk.

Being the ever resourceful fellow, I flipped it over and I use it as a sketch pad for when I'm waiting for my computer to finish whatever calculation it's doing at the time. The top sketch (Hulk or Frankenstein's  monster) was sketched in blue biro. I then took it into Photoshop to ad the colour.

Summer by the Beach...

Local Show Summer Promo from Pete Mullins on Vimeo.

Forgive me Father it has been more than two weeks since my last post.....

A couple of sketches from a comic strip idea I've been working on.  A promo I created for the local shows over the summer. I shot the beach, surf and timelapse clouds on the Canon 550d then comped them all in After Effects.

Brisbane Flood

A piece of, now ironic, art outside the Brisbane theatre and art space 'The Powerhouse'.

When I posted a few weeks ago, I had no idea that here in Brisbane the roads really would turn into canals for a few days.

It really has been quite surreal to know that this great disaster has visited so many in my city and yet, where I live, life goes on as if nothing has happened. I guess I'm very lucky my family and I don't live in a suburb near the river.

It has been amazing to see how the Government and general public have pulled together to very quickly clean up the city and attempt to get life back to normal. Of course it will take years for some people to recover, if at all.

I guess what will come next is the discussion on whether anything could have been done differently to reduce the impact of a disaster like this and what can be done to mitigate future floods . There may never be definitive answers to these questions.

The floods of 2011 will certainly cause future city planners rethink how we interact with our beautiful and, at times, awesome river.

Check out these amazing aerial before/after views of Brisbane. I had lunch just after Christmas at the Eagle Street Pier....(It looks like the water came up to the roof).

Wet, wet, wet.

Offshore Superboats Opener from Pete Mullins on Vimeo.

Here on the eastern seaboard of Australia it has now rained constantly for over two months. I live in what used to be known as the 'Sunshine State'. Pretty soon we'll all have to start using boats instead of cars to get around.

Ok, that was a really dumb attempt to make this latest post relevant in any way...

I did the graphics for this show over a year ago now. I was happy with the way I intergrated 3D from Maya into After Effects. I love the way you can directly import 3D information from Maya into AE via the .ma file extension. At the time I think I was only just exploring the possibilties, now it's standard practice for me.

Happy New Year 2011!

Another one of them thar' Tharks from John Carter of Mars...