Sequence breakdowns for 2019 showreel
I'm a CG technician/artist/supervisor based in Wellington, New Zealand. I specialise in creatures and characters. I've been in the business for about 15 years, and I've worked on a couple dozen major motion pictures...among other projects. Most of these were at either Weta Digital, in Wellington, or at Blue Sky Studios, back when it was in New York. Check out some of the links below (imdb, linkedin) for more information about me and my work.
The most successful CG creatures involve four broadly overlapping disciplines:
- Rigging : The production of puppets of various types, driven by animation curves. These puppets may be realtime, or they may be slower, in order to provide more WYSIWYG feedback to stakeholders. They may involve animation controls and hence UX, however this isn't always the case.
- Creature Effects and Finaling : From static deformers to muscle, cloth, and hair simulations. This is where the artistry and realism happens, and is often the most expensive part of high end builds.
- Tooling and Pipeline : An array of work, from build schemas, to cutting edge MPM solver technology, to snippets of MEL used to organise shot options, to data wrangling backends designed to keep the creature factories pumping geometry through the system and into shots.
- Creature Supervision : Holistic creature-as-product; sculpting, lighting, surfacing, grooming, and the above three disciplines interwoven technologically and organisationally with motion (animation, performance capture, simulation, proceduralism) in order to produce the best possible overall results for clients. Producing the best CG is as much about relationships as it is technology and artistry, and this is where those relationships develop.
Also, I did TD work both on assets (creating all of two of the three hero ape builds for the show) and on shots, creating bespoke shot performances and effects. "Builds" in this case refers to various puppet products, anatomical deformations, and pipelining of creature assets for motion and shots.
This show was nominated for the VFX academy Award in 2015. Also, the character I was on, Caesar, was given the 2015 VES Society Outstanding Performance of an Animated Character in a Photoreal/Live Action Feature Motion Picture award.
Weta's work on this show was nominated for the VFX Academy Award in 2018.
Weta ended up getting nominated for a VFX Academy Award for the work we did on the show.
The first Hobbit film was nominated for the VFX Academy Award.