Super happy to say I had a part in the production of this awesome new tool from Full Windsor. The motion shots in the above video were captured by me. Alex Fowkes did the graphics. Mark Windsor is the man behind this product. Be sure to check out the amazing response this tool is getting through Kick Starter. Good start of things to come…

Sony Music Timeline from Rob Antill on Vimeo.

Glad to finally get this project out! It’s been in development that past 5ish months and we’ve had to keep it strictly under wraps.

Check out www.sonymusictimeline.com for all the details.

Click below to see some behind-the-scenes snaps.

For most shots I used this mono pod. Originally I got the pole for gopro stuff.

Printers down near Portsmouth that had the laborious task of weeding (removing the negative vinyl) from 54, 2m tall columns.

DIY time-lapse GoPro Dolly in action.

Implementation weekend.

One of the biggest challenges of this project was carrying the ever increasing collection of gadgets around with me. For the implementation weekend I rammed two very large bags with nearly everything I own. Riding bikes 10 miles through London was interesting.

Make-shift track for the GoPro.

Had my old D90 set up capturing time-lapses of each wall. I was using the tripod for other things, so this construction made do.

You may have noticed some shots in the film pan down across the work. Well this was done by simply releasing the height adjustment clasp on the monopod enough to make the camera slide. Low-tech, but effective.

If you haven’t, already be sure to check out the time-lapse video we made using the left over footage that didn’t make it to the main cut.

Sony Music Timeline – Timelapse from Rob Antill on Vimeo.

Me, Alex (AlexFowkes.com) and Joseph worked together on the edit. Joseph (Avenue Beech) brought his mac round and produced the track to fit to the edit exactly. This was a luxury. Above is a shot of his project in Logic.

left to right: Audio – Design – Visual

We had a lot of fun over a couple of days getting the project wrapped up.

I’m super proud of this. It’s the cleanest project to date. Having the extra time to properly plan everything was a massive bonus.

If there’s anything you want to know more about just leave a comment below. Would be happy to answer any questions..

Follow on the twitters for more current beans.

Trent Snowsports 2011 – Val Thorens Video Trailer from Rob Antill on Vimeo.

Just before Christmas 2011 I headed to the French Alps once more, for a week of snowboarding and partying with 230 Trent Snowsporters. I’ve spent the past 6 months or so producing a 30min long DVD of the recorded antics. Above is the trailer.

Click MORE..

Below is a selection of images from the trip.

Oliver stacking hard

Tom picking up some speed

Launching a firework in the whiteout

Group stereographic projection

Olli 180

Crossing the channel

200 DVDs arrive just in time for the premiere. Graphics designed by Alex Fowkes

Premiere night at RIDE bar Nottingham. Good turn out. Video goes down well.

Very pleased to have complete my third and final Snowsports DVD. It’s been a lot of hard work but I’ve learnt lots because of it. I just hope someone equally keen will step up and take my position this year.

Immersive Theatre – Client Project from Rob Antill on Vimeo.

I finished and handed this project in on the 26th March but have been away last week so didn’t get the change to post up the finished result.

I’m really pleased with the results of this project. I have learnt so many new techniques in After Effects I now feel pretty confident with the software. The final push to get this all polished up and ready for hand in ended up a bit of a nightmare! There were quite a few late nights and many hours spent sat in front of the pc.

I tried a couple of music tracks out but finally decide on International Rustic by Modern Institute. This track seems to fit really nicely with the mood I was trying to express with the visuals.

Any way enough talking, here it is in its three minutes of glory…

Frames rendered – 8000

Total Project size – 13 Gigabytes

Number of compositions in AE – 63

Software used – 3Ds Max, Mental Ray, Final Render, After Effects, Trapcode Particular, Frischluft Depth of field, Alpha Plugins IcePatern Geometry, Premiere Pro, Photoshop

Time spent on rendering – 6 days approx

Total hours spent on project – millions

Any comments are welcomed :)

I realized I haven’t posted any client project stuff up yet. Reason for this is because I didn’t want to post up a load of junk, I’ve been spending a lot of time tweaking the lighting and rendering methods because I don’t have a lot of time to render the sequence so finding the balance between rendering times and quality was really important.

Its only one week until the deadline for this project and I think I’m on track, I currently have 1 minute 35 sec of fully composted footage.

I’ve already learnt loads of new techniques, one for example is the use of Depth of Field. Simon at Hot Knife showed me this great tutorial on how to get realistic lighting but it also shows how to set up Max to export the Z-Depth of an image which can then be used in After Effects to created DOF super fast.

Below is an example of how the theater is looking. This is a high res still taken during the dynamic lighting sequence. You can see how the use of Mental Ray and DOF gives the image more realism. I’m not going for photo realistic renders here I wanted to keep textures simple so rendering times wouldn’t sky rocket also texturing isn’t my strongest point and the purpose of this project is to improve on my post production skills.

I wanted to have a video playing on the dome as the camera panned round the theatre. One idea I had was to pan round a cluster of stars.

Here’s a still of the final composite.

I did this by first creating a Pcloud in Max I made sure the particles didn’t move and then I animated a camera panning around it.

Because the dome is half a sphere the image that will be projected on it needs to be a 180 degree fisheye image. Max doesn’t have an option to render out a 180 image like this so I had to get hold of a render plugin called Final Render. This has an option to replace the Max camera with a fisheye lens. I took me a while to get the correct settings but I worked it out in the end.

Here’s the 180 fish eye render of the stars, I added some blue glow to make it look a bit more awesome!

Then I just used this as a texture on the inside of the dome and rendered out the sequence.

Below are more stills from the current animation. I don’t have time to fully write about the techniques I used to create these effects but every shot here has been altered in some way in After Effects.

The Smoke and Snow were added as separate layers in AE because its a lot more flexible than trying to produce the same effect in Max.

I created the following aluminium texture in Photoshop as a background when the render doesn’t take up the whole screen. You can also see a vignetting mask I created to darken the edges of the video. This is a popular style at the moment and it seems to work well in this case.

I used a wire frame overlay on one section to define the shape of the dome. This worked rea
lly well. The laser section was nearly all created in AE. I started out with a very basic render of the scene and a simple animation of some extruded lines. Then applied lots of filters to create the glow and colour of the lasers.

Any comments or suggestions are welcome :)