Slow-Mo Summer

Sadly I am not talking about slow-mo dinners in the Sicilian countryside, but about me partecipating in the BFX, a visual effect competition for students taking part across Bournemouth, the same city that gifted me three enjoyable years of university life.

It was fun to welcome foreign students to the same labs we spit so much pain in and watching them growing a familiar love/hate relationship with them. It was a bit more fun to have VFX themed barbeques.

I joined a team made of former coursemates of mine, working on a sci-fi inspired short pieces where a man uses a time bending device to escape a shooting happening inside a pub, providing us with a mere excuse to trigger computer animated destruction.

Watch a small breakdown of the VFX I developed in Houdini for the project:

About a Planet

After countless hours of rendering and weighting blood and sweat lost, I have finished my Major Project, an academic-year-long project which is the culmination of my 3D and VFX course.

 De Planeta (latin for “about a planet”) is a short and stylised procedural animation that revolves around birth, life and death of a little planet, showing all the colorful wonders it has to offer by following it through the ages with a fast-paced and engaging rhythm, culminating into the triumph of modernity over nature, with all the consequences that may follow upon it...

 

Momento Featured on CGBros

"Momento", or as my friends call it, the "dancing cubes on trails", got featured on the 3D & VFX channel CGBros on Youtube. It's nice to see it alongside the VFX breakdowns of popular films and impressive 3D shorts and reels. Check it out if you haven't already!

One "Momento", please

I finished working on the Innovations unit on my course, where you have to come up with something innovative, which is apparently a word that holds many meaning (the example of a pair of cheeseburgers used as earphones I cam up with during my introductory presentation will never be forgotten).

I first got the basic idea at the start of the year, when my friend kept dragging me to salsa nights. Some of the dance skills inside that place were quite impressive, and the gears started spinning about creating pretty things from dance movements, which should make them even more pretty.


That's exactly what I ended up doing for the project, which was well enjoyed by both the tutors and the population of the internet, and got featured here and there (and still according to the same population, my taste in music are abyssmal).

Disintegrating Masterclass

It's the moment for the Masterclass assignment, which brief is set by industry professional which this year gave us more than enough interesting reasons to lock ourselves inside an animation labs for two weeks. I decided to tackle the Double Negative brief, which consists in disintegrating a Zombie (always them) developing a realistic and original effects.

I did not even have a choice. Cubes were the way to go (altough, to be honest, my first lookdev was about a black hole beam which I would find featured in Thor 2, but anyway). More details about its implementation are in the Vimeo description. What can I say? A fun (and hectic) project to work on, the Double Negative guys enjoyed this little minecraft beam after we visited their dark lair for feedback, I learned a few things or two about cloth deformers and particles, and everyone was happy. Apart from the zombie.

Major Project Update #1

My little planet is growing. It's no more a badly lighted default mantra material sphere with low poly golf ball in the background. It's a paper-like displaced badass with procedural galore written all over it.

Jokes aside, I am please of the direction my project is going to. Everything you see in that screen has been created procedurally and because of the style I am using, the production and animation of the assets shouldn't take too long. That's why on this first term I am focusing on lighting and shading with the Mantra renderer.

Going Major

As I'm approaching the third and (hopefully) final year of my computer animation course, I am starting to fill my sleepless nights with thought of my Majort, the project on which I will work on troughout most of the year. After many concepts, storyboards and proposals I decided to go solo and produce a fast paced project about birth, life and death of a small planet, hopefully improving my VFX skills trying to nail that formula for visuals that make people go for a combination of "Ohhh", "Awww" and "Whoa". I'll keep you updated.

Showreel 2012

Here is a showreel featuring a short and hopefully not boring selection of some of the things I've worked on during my first 2 years of University. It is by no means anything spectacular, but I feel confident about the amount of things I've learned and can only look forward to more. Let's keep being awesome.

QBeat

At this point, you probably got that I love cubes. Another thing that makes me feel all fuzzy inside are synaesthetic experiences. When I had to choose what to tackle for this University project, things went naturally in this direction.



QBeat is a music video I created with Houdini. All the animation you see in the video is procedurally generated by the awesome audio track from BIT.TRIP RUNNER. The Houdini asset I built samples a few frequencies ranges from the music and use the resulting data to make cool things happen. Neat.

The entire project was a stab in the dark as I never used Houdini before and what was I jumping in wasn't exactly the simplest thing to start with. But in the end I am happy with the result.

So Fancy: Opening Soon...

I assume everyone remembers about So Fancy!, right? And I assume the very same people are wondering where did that short go. Well, it was successfully rendered and submitted after a few brave sleepless nights, yet there are still a few little issues I had to compromise with due to deadlines. And lighting was quite rushed, too.

BlackJack: Animatic & Maquette

Arr, sailors! Grab 'yer grog and weigh in, we're talking about Pirate Beavers here. I've granted BlackJack an animatic for his own story made of adventure, treasure maps and... well, you'll see.

Also, I finished his maquette! Jeez, he should be a fearful pirate, but he's so damn cute! :3 Expect a mass toy production. Or maybe not.

This was quite fun to make, and I must say it doesn't look like an unholy blob at all. And yes, the protein shake was delicious. Dark moments when I tried to glue him to the base, having his legs cracking off under the weight of his awesomeness - "Oh, now he got two peg legs" (Cit.) - But as I say, live and learn. Here are some work in progress shots:

Manly Maquette Tutorial

I've been creating the maquette for my character design assigment those days, and even if I was quite scared not having any proper experience with sculpting, I must say the entire thing is so damn fun and the time just flew while making a mess with plastiline. Actually, I've got so good at it that I made a tutorial about it - a tutorial about manly maquettes. Click on the image for a larger version. Enjoy.

Jeremy & Brain

I started working on webcomic just to get my toughts stop for a bit. It's called "Jeremy & Brain" and it's about a boy who can apparently talk to his brain, and all the tricks and mental masturbation that the latter pulls on the poor guy. You can read it on its own blog.

In case you've been wondering, nope, the comic is not about me. Well... maybe just a little, but let's be honest here - It's about every one of us!

BlackJack: The Pirate Beaver

I just love beavers. I can't do much about that - it may be because of their smart expression, or my childhood spent among friends who were obsessed by them (true story). That's why this character came to life almost by himself, and thanks to some nice homemade by poppa italian food, my brain gave birth to BlackJack!

BlackJack is a pirate beaver that travels the sea in order to find the most precious wood on Earth. He just loves chewing up wood. And he got a wooden leg. And travel on a wooden ship. You can imagine which consequences are born beacuse of that. Oh, and he loves apple cider, too.

So Fancy! DevBlog

Hello, fancy people. Speaking of Fancyness, remember my Group Project? We're still working on that. I must say that working on a proper 3D short starting from zero is quite an experience. Getting everything covered - concepts, scripts, cinematography, modeling, rigging, animating, lighting, OH GOD - give you a chill is hard to describe. It may look like an easy task from the outside, but trust me when I say that you can lose a few years of your life due to stress if you don't plan things carefully - especially if you get the burden/bless of being the director.

Pierce the heavens with your drill!

Anyway, I've granted the project his own blog where I regularly post updates and images about its development, so do go and have a look at it. No, seriously, do it.

So Fancy! Pre-Production

In those days I've been heavily working on some pre-production stuff for an upcoming group project at my University. I called it "So Fancy": it's the story of a young girl that goes into a boutique to buy a pretty dress... but in the end things don't exactly go as you might expect. Here's is the animatic and some rough concepts:

I presented "So Fancy" at the idea pitch and it got chosen! That means I get to direct a group of 6 people including myself and we're getting the chance to make "So Fancy" a full-fledged, one-minute animation. I'm so excited that I already started to fantasize about the praise of animation festivals all around the world.

Annecy 2011

What a great week! Me, Simone and Tuomo decided to follow our guts and drill trough the English Channel and France (I will have nightmares about rush hour trains for a while now) to get to Annecy Animation Festival - One of the biggest festivals in the world.

The whole experience was just amazing - 3 days of pure animation and brilliant crativity floating trough every hole. I've got the chance to meet artists from Disney, Dreamworks, and Pixar (including Enrico Casarosa which screened the latest, unseed Pixar Short, La Luna, AAAAHHH) and dammit, I can tell you that's some effective way to get motivated.

Can you find Wald... erm, I mean, Leon?

Also, I got drenched the most in my life after rain caught me (and other 1000 people) under the Tour Eiffel, but that's a secondary detail.

Meet the Hoverbob

Summer is starting, exams are over and this means that animators can come to contact with this rare specimen called "free time" once again. Grabbing the chance to work on some personal stuff... this little guy down here, for example, is my frst proper rigging experiment. Controls are simple, but they get the work done. Incredible how only one eye is capable of so much expression...

Welcome to Leon City...

...Population: me. "Leon City" is a python script I wrote for Maya that lets you generate a cityscape within a few clicks. I'm no cityscapes expert, but I must say the results look pretty good and it got a fairly number of customization choices. I can't believe I am coding my own way to waste time!

You can download the script (it's basically plug and play) here.

Billy Bob Bros.

Here is my first character animation for a University Assignment, featuring this cute little guy called Billy Bob. The theme of the animation was "I didn't expect that!" - And this is what I came up with, from the top of my nerdyness.



Pretty sure he wasn't expecting that.