I used a tutorial to put this little scene together. How else am I going to learn? The results are really impressive considering how easy the shapes were to create. The texturing however is not good. From a distance, in these shots they're passable. I really need to learn more about texturing.

Nearly finished...

I've blown up a couple of my stencils, just thought I'd post a photo for people who might be interested. It's coming together very slowly, mainly when I get a day off work! Here's a mock up...

I've got some cool ideas for the background canvas, which right now looks rather bland. My intention is to find online and newspaper articles related to the invasion of Iraq, along with some maps of the country. These will be cut out, stuck across the entire background, then faded out slightly with a white wash.

The entire background will be covered in PVA to give it a shine, then I can spray my stencils over the top and scratch away at the whole thing. If it looks a little empty I've got some smaller stencils to fill the space.

The logo will have some work done to it too. Firstly I'll use red ink to paint around the 'O' so it looks similar to the real logo. I'll scratch away at the lettering to give it a similar eroded look.

Maybe some drops/sprays of red and black paint here and there, maybe some sand mixed in to my PVA white wash. Ideas anyone?

Since I love the show so much, and I can't find a poster for it anywhere, I've taken matters in to my own hands. I'm going to make my own poster, using stencils and spray paint. There's an A1 canvas that's been sitting in my wardrobe for months now that I made during my foundation year. I've been doing some tests today with making stencils from the images I've found. If you're interested in the process please read on.

First of all I had to find some suitable images from the show, and preferably in high resolution. I found some on the HBO site located here. I then went about converting the image to something resembling a stencil. So I fired up Photoshop and desaturated the image, then fiddled around with the threshold until I got what I wanted. I then printed the image out, and cut it out the black areas with a craft knife.

The result
















I sprayed this experiment on to unprimed MDF which explains some of the soaking up of the paint and the slight bleeding. I need to somehow create a larger version of this stencil (most likely by sticking sheets of A4 together). I've found the font they used for the logo of the show as well located here, for anyone interested. I'll more than likely have a couple of the characters on the final poster, with the logo located at the bottom. Not sure what details I'll add yet.

I haven't touched 3D Studio Max in a few weeks, and felt I should get back in to it. I'm still sticking to tutorials to learn the interface, so I had a go at making a fairly simple building. It was a pretty useful exercise. Now I need to learn how to texture stuff, and get a hold of Vray.

I'm changing the colour scheme of my blog so it's more consistent with my portfolio. I'll be doing bits here and there, so over the next few days it might look messy. Let me know what you think of new cleaner, more inviting look.

I'm really happy with how my portfolio has come along. At some point tomorrow I'll be setting it all up so that philiphowlett.com links straight to the new site rather than my blog. Please leave some comments and let me know what you think of it in it's current state.

http://www.philiphowlett.com/tests/Portfolio.html

Update
The finished version is now online at http://www.philiphowlett.com

A week or so ago I began working on my online Portfolio. I've been using carbonmade for a while to showcase my work, but I really wanted to make my own from scratch. Seeing as I've got the webspace, the domain name and a bit of flash knowledge I thought now is a good time to start.

So far I have the structure of the interface layed out and animated, and quite a nice preloader added in there. It's a really simple UI, but that's why I think it works. The idea for it came from a portfolio website I found on the FWA for Joshua Stearns. The technique used places blocks of contrasting colour behing text. This helps to keep everything structured, clear and aligned. Pretty good use of CRAP huh? I've seen the technique used a lot, especially on posters, but also on a lot of other websites. If anyone could point out to me where the technique stems from please let me know.

I need to tinker around with the finer details of this interface, but I want to get the rest of the site working first. My intention is to create a slick gallery showcasing images of my work at fullscreen resolution, and also to have somewhere to display videos of my work. It's still early days, but have a look at what I've done so far. TEST IT.

My client project is well underway, and I could not be happier with how it's progressing. The overall look and feel of the site fell in to place nicely, and it suits the services being advertised. If you'd like to see what has been done so far click here. It's still a work in progress, with lots to be done. I've got plenty of free time though so keep checking that link to see updated versions.

I'm not really sure what to do with the white background of the html file yet. Any suggestions/feedback would be brilliant!

Pre-loaders were once a nemesis of mine. I detested them, mainly because I didn't understand them. For my summer project I'll be putting a flash website together for a client who runs a golf coaching company. I want the pre-loader to look professional, so I've been getting to grips with putting them together in CS3. Here's one I just did using a 3D model of a golf ball spinning. I'll likely change it for the final website however. Let me know what you think of it.

TEST IT

I spent a fair few hours fiddling around with the morphing modifiers, as well as lighting and mapping in this scene. I wanted to make it look like the actual BBC Three worm clips, so I put some time in to the environment. The draw back of using extensive lighting has become clear...RENDERING TIMES. Even on my beastly P.C it's going to take hours to render the video I created. It's not even that great of a video, so instead I'll upload some stills and put the video up later. *Video Added* Forgive the poor quality but I had to lower the samples so the rendering time was reduced.

This was a useful exercise in animation, as well as frustration. At times I want to kill this piece of software. Still, here's an image render and some videos for you.



With some simple mapping

I've been doing some more playing around and decided to do a more advanced tutorial I found on youtube. Admittedly this has nothing to do with my identity, but this is helping me learn the software. There was quite a lot of mapping involved in this one as well as camera movements. I'm really pleased with the results, and for anyone who likes it you can download a high res wallpaper of it. Next up, world destruction.



I wanted to create an explosion at the center of this, but I think I might be getting a bit ahead of myself there. If the world ever ended like this everyone would be officially disappointed.

I took the photographs for this stop motion piece a couple of weeks ago, but I've only just got around to publishing it today. Ever since we did the pixilation project I wanted to play around with stop motion some more. What I've done was relatively simple and quick. I got my camera set up on a tripod, and started taking photos around my house. I didn't want to do pixilation, and instead I wanted to bring objects to life, a great feature of stop motion. I thought, wouldn't it be brilliant if everything that's monotonous and a chore in life was done for you? I can remember at the time I was going to take the idea further and have a series of actions happening around someone, making their life easier. When I came to edit my images together and add music to the video I could see that there's room to expand on whats happening.



I resized my images and used the auto levels feature of Photoshop to improve the quality of the colours and shadows. I didn't want to put any special effects on the photos because they weren't really needed for this video. In Premier I used a couple of simple transitions (Dissolve) to fade out sections of video. I overlayed some music which I felt was fitting to the tempo of the images on screen. I chose a song by "The Smiths" called "Rusholme Ruffians", it's a quiet acoustic track with a section devoid of lyrics which could fit the length of my video.

This was just an experiment with what we'd learned with Andy Love, but I enjoyed going back and doing something myself without a brief. I still want to create one of these in High Definition at some point, but the camera I have is a bit old and wouldn't do the format justice. Some really beautiful compositions and animations could be created and then displayed in HD. Just a thought!