M&C Saatchi

Very difficult to provide any latest news at the moment due to confidentiality agreements. Contrary to what my blog would tell you, I have been very busy. Over the last couple of months I've been working on a number of projects with M&C Saatchi. Plus, Lambie Productions commissioned me to animate an ongoing series of sponsorship sequences. Hopefully more details to follow soon.

MovieMash

World's End Television has just finished production on a pilot for Channel 4's forthcoming Comedy Lab season. Moviemash is a spoof movie magazine show which perverts film star interviews, selected from old Moviewatch rushes, by juxtaposing them with fake reverses.
Mooschool were asked to create a 10" opening title sequence which reflected not just the programme's cinematic subject but also the more trashy entertainment influence of the E! Channel. The concept of the video walI in a cinema bridges this gap and enables the graphics to live up to the title.
The video wall was animated in Cinema 4D and I used the Hair module to make the dynamic cables. I discovered this useful tutorial if you want to learn how to set this up. Then I had trouble exporting the nulls of the monitors because I'd used a mograph fracture object to animate them apart. This would enable me to track the VT of the celebrities to the monitors in After Effects allowing more flexibility with grading or shot changes; no point re-rendering 3D every time the client requests a new face. Fortunately, Per Anders has a clever Xpresso and COFFEE setup here which generates the required information.
I concocted the end logo from fonts displayed in famous film posters and if anyone can identify every film and font I've used then I may have to award some kind of prize. Good luck!
Subject to any changes, Moviemash will be on Channel 4 on April 29th at 11:30pm.

Cielo OSP

Back in April of this year, Dunning Eley Jones commissioned Mooschool to help produce the On-Screen Programming graphics for News Corp's free Italian channel Cielo. Cielo means ‘Sky’ in Italian and DEJ developed this as the focus of the channel's new identity:
"Sky is above us, all around us and by its very nature intangible. By capturing it in a logo in a way that makes you feel you can almost touch it, we are expressing the idea of a bit of something for everyone”, says Liz Dunning.
Mooschool animated numerous air streams for Promo End Boards, Menus and Wipes using Trapcode Particular. The 3D logo idents were created at Prime Focus.
Cielo was supposed to launch last week with the advertising slogan ‘From today the sky comes to earth’. Unfortunately, the launch date has been delayed repeatedly and even the latest target of December 1st has passed due to regulatory problems which you may have noticed in the news. Consequently, the air stream design had to be reconsidered as its deliberately Summery appearance was at odds with a Winter launch. DEJ were asked to revert to an original idea they had pitched; a simpler approach set in a clean white studio environment. Therefore, these air stream animations will never be broadcast!

Living Dangerously

Maverick Television asked Mooschool to create graphics for their new factual commission 'Living Dangerously'. The 10 part BBC1 series tells the stories of everyday people who have been caught out in extraordinary UK weather.

The bold graphics treatment centres on yellow hazard signs being tossed around by extreme weather conditions.

Katy Brand Series 3

Following on from the titles update last year for Series 2, World's End Television returned to Mooschool this month for help with a couple of spoof music promos in Katy Brand's Big Ass Show Series 3. The music promos seem to be taking a more prominent role in this series after the success of last year's Amy Winehouse and Lily Allen piss-takes. Apparently, the latter caused phone lines at Radio 1 to crash when thousands of callers rang into request ‘the new Lily Allen song’
World's End provided me with green screen edits for U2 and The Pet Shop Boys which were keyed into various layered environments that attempted to re-create the originals (see U2 and PSB).
Katy Brand's Big Ass Show is on Thursdays at 10pm on ITV2.

Discovery ID

Discovery Networks International has launched a new channel called ID, Investigation Discovery. Already available in the US and UK, on SKY channel 551, ID has more recently headed east and made its debut in countries such as Russia, Turkey, and Poland. The 24-hour channel's programming focuses on the science of forensics and how it is used in investigation work. ID is targeting the female audience aged 25-44, who apparently 'like solving puzzles'.
Mooschool designed and animated filler idents for sequences edited by Lambie & Co. to highlight key clips from forthcoming shows. The sparse scene of a light bulb in a gloomy room was designed to give the viewer a sense of mystery whilst enabling it to work generically for the different types of programming the sequences will be promoting, the locations of which could range from a murder scene to a forensics lab. View Preview.

New Office in Golden Square

Along with our 'Guardian' company, Lambie & Co., we moved into new premises in Golden Square W1 last week. It feels quite posh round here compared to d'Arblay Street!

AXN Commercial

Visit the website for more information. This project was recently featured on Motion Served, which highlights 'fresh works from leading creative professionals'.

European Space Agency

Science never really appealed to me at school. Why and, yet more astonishingly, how did the teachers manage to make it so dull? Bill Bryson, in his book 'A Short History of Nearly Everything' suggests it's because the teachers never delved into whys, hows and whens.
"It was as if [the textbook writer] wanted to keep the good stuff secret by making all of it soberly unfathomable."
So when I began talking to Brook Lapping's director, Jim Franks, about graphics for their educational film, 'Life Support Systems', it didn't take long to establish that my scientific knowledge is sparse, to say the least. A little investigation uncovered a number of general science titles professing to 'explain science in ordinary language' - an increasingly popular genre - and I can personally recommend John Carey's 'The Faber Book of Science'. Some of the chapters about atoms and protons were over and above my poor little brain; one book hasn't turned me into a science champion but I did feel very clever reading it on the tube.
The film examines the conditions which make Earth so fitting for life compared with the effects Space has on the human body. ESA's project, called Melissa, aims to replicate Earth's self-sustaining features in Space to enable us to venture further away for longer periods of exploration.
The graphics helped explain the whys, hows and whens of processes such as the hydrological cycle, blood-flow and how Earth is the perfect distance from the Sun. The film was broadcast on Teachers TV for secondary schools across Europe.

BT Vision

BT Vision is what's known as an IPTV service; digital TV accessed over a (BT Total) broadband connection. Dunning Eley Jones were selected to create a visual identity to be used across all BT Vision communications and in December 2006 the service launched with a striking design, combining portrait images with colour streams that you'll undoubtedly have seen somewhere on your travels.
I'm not totally clear on how extensive this launch was but activity certainly ramped up in Spring this year when DEJ contacted Mooschool to help produce the BT Vision OSP (on-screen programming). We worked closely with DEJ's Ed Walker, who designed the graphics and, producer, Mario Fillo to animate idents for 10 BT channels contained within the package. The codec, which BT applies to deliver video to home users' set-top boxes, was a major factor in the simple design. Principally, we couldn't use any gradation of colour as this wouldn't survive the compression.
What, on first sight, looked like a remarkably straightforward job became something of a rubik's cube puzzle at times; specifically, with the generic versions we had to horizontally scroll through several different hues inside of a 5 second ident without it "looking like a deck-chair" as Ed, so eloquently, put it.