Life Drawing...

More life drawings...I rarely get time to draw much these days. These life drawing sessions are basically it.

Sometimes I am so much happier with the 5 minute jobs than with the more labored 20 minute studies.

This model had a real 'Jose Gonzalez' look to her. There was something about her face that reminded me of the old black and white Vampirella comics. I didn't really capture it in my sketches, though.

The Lion's Den

This was an opener for a special on Brisbane's local AFL team 'The Lions'. I think it was broadcast nationally a few months back on the 7 network.

Now, I'm not much of a sports fan and I know absolutely nothing about AFL. Luckily my son started playing footy this year so (being the enthusiastic dad) I've had a crash course on the ins and outs of Australian Rules.

Can't say I'm any closer to understanding it...

The Great....Escapes.

Here's a job I did late last year. It was an opener as well as some graphics for Discovery's 'Animal Planet'. The basic premise was a series of documentary episodes showing mainly security camera footage of different animals making a break for it.

It seemed to have a fairly light-hearted approach at its core so I thought some cute 2D animation might be appropriate.

It was real fun to do. The producers were great to work with. I pretty much created it all in After Effects. Man, AE really is quite a cool tool for doing this sort of 'whacky' 2D animated stuff. I really want to do more of this.

Botanical gardens

The Brisbane Botanic Gardens are my sanctuary from the dimly lit, windowless room I have at work. The gardens are especially glorious at the moment. I try and go for walk through them most lunch times.
I thought I would try out the Konova 'slider' I bought last year. It's a great bit of kit, a real joy to operate.
Oh, and the music is from the sublime Sheila Chandra, Beautiful, haunting track.

Moreton Region TVCs

A couple of vids from me. Oops, once again, I've been MIA on this blog. The first vid here is one of a number of TVCs my company did for a local council. What was great about this project was that we extensively story boarded the ads knowing that the concept had to pass the approval process of a twelve seat council. Amazingly it all went really well with very little problems. The floating bits of the logo were animated in Lightwave and comped in After Effects.

This was done as an opener to one of the many Corporate DVDs we my company has produced Queensland Rail.

What...March already??!!@!

This was done over a year ago as a part of an overall concept proposal. It was felt that a comic book feel would best convey the background story.

 

Colorado

More After Effects fun. Basically I as given a bunch of stills of shoes and a one day deadline to produce two TVCs. This was the the result.

...2012 Life Drawing

Well a Happy New Year! (albeit a little late).
I went back to life drawing after a couple of months away. It was pouring rain and I had arrived 40 minutes late, so I wasn't expecting much from the night. The weird thing was once I got the pencil and paper out I felt utterly focused and kinda breezed through the session.
Man, I wish I knew what the secret formula for that was!!!

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.