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Will MacNeil

Winter 2010

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A montage of graphics and animation from projects for Amnesty International, Liberty Human Rights, BBC Three, Discovery, E4, and Five.

Comments

Glenn Thomas

September 03, 2009 10:18 AM

Impressive show reel Will!

Just out of curiosity, did you use PFTrack for the shakey camera movement in the opening and closing title shots?

Will MacNeil

September 03, 2009 12:30 PM

Thanks, Glenn

Actually those shots are all computer generated, so PFTrack was not involved. The best examples of matchmoving would be the signature and paper man shots which both involved matching computer generated elements to live action camera moves.

Thanks for checking it out.

W

Glenn Thomas

September 03, 2009 02:05 PM

Hi Will, yes, I realise they're CGI :) The shakey camera movement looks like it's from a real camera though, so I thought maybe you'd extracted the camera movement from some live footage using PFTrack and applied that to the 3d camera. If that makes sense? I read that Jeff Lew did this for some of the camera movement in Killer Bean Forever.

The paper man looks great. I'd be curious to know how you did that. My guess would be the paper was parented to a skeleton and then blown away using a dynamics simulation?

Will MacNeil

September 07, 2009 04:31 PM

I see what you mean. I have used this technique and it's pretty useful. (and Killer Bean is one of my favourites) But when you get down to really motion-blurred images the tracking seldom sticks well enough to make it worthwhile.
In this case I animated the camera panning and tracking and then added the hard shakes in post using Sapphire Shake (in Apple Shake.)

You're very close with the paper man. The papers are locked to a skeleton (which is in turn animated by motion capture.) There isn't any real dynamics in there. One or two shots use a little bit of Cinema 4D's cloth engine. Some use the C4D MoGraph module and a few use particles.

I've done a little interview for Maxon about how I made the Paperman ad. I'll post back here when it goes live.

Thanks for checking out the reel.

W

Canvas Films

November 12, 2009 11:27 PM

Max Miller

Have you ever accomplished paper man with After Effects? Do you think it's possible. AFX is all I know and I have waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too many hours invested in learning it to jump ship now to Shake. I love what you did and of course plan to steal it the first chance I get.:)

Will MacNeil

January 17, 2010 04:17 PM

Max - I'm really sorry it's taken me this long to reply to this. I only jut saw your comment. Very little of this work was done in Shake other than matching color and roto'ing some background objects. These aspects could easily be done in AE. But this job relies very much on two other apps: PFTrack for matchmoving (which will export to AE) and C4D for all the 3D animation. While I'm sure you could do quite a bit of the particle work in AE, I don't think there's anything in AE that can handle character animation in this way (Sorry if I'm wrong about this, I don't use AE.) You really need a character animation toolset like MOCCA in C4D where you can edit motion capture sequences, manipulate joints in a character skeleton and animate constraints to control when and how the skeleton controls the papers. C4D is a great app. And from what I hear, the connection to AE is amazing. Might be worth a look.

Thanks for your comments, Will

heroes imaging

July 03, 2010 07:12 AM

WO WO !Great!!! good job Will MacNeil ! I want to learn it but i feel it maybe too hard to me . I want to know that 4D is better than 3D MAX is not it ?