Hi everyone, I recently finished directing my second animation of the year ‘Nitro Dust’ a psuedo-prequel to the hugely succesful animated movie Digitopia: Discover Me, Nitro Dust is set in the same universe a little earlier in the timeline of the story. I had a small team of artists and we made this movie in just […]

I’ve been asked so often how to integrate VFX and CG into film by low and no budget filmmakers.  I’ve written a quick guide on how you can put in VFX and CG into your movie, whatever budget you are working at this process will work for you. Follow this simple process i.                     Find out […]

Hello everyone, buoyed on from the success of VFX and CG Survival Guide for Filmmakers and Producers (Kindle – http://amzn.to/WTZByQ) I’ve been approached by independent film producers to provide VFX for their projects.  The requests have come from far and wide, some asking for quotes others asking me to carry out the work. This post is about […]

In this post I am going to guide you through the process of how to set yourself up as a your very own VFX studio.  In practice this post can relate to setting yourself up as your own business, whatever industry you are in, but seeing as this a VFX oriented site I’ll use the […]

So now the film is finally finished, I have been busy researching which are the right festivals to send it off to.  I want to avoid sending it off to every festival, not least because of the massive costs implications but some are not really relevant to the piece. All in all looking back at […]

  Hi this is a post from the sound designer on the project, his name is Yuval Gerstein, he did a great job scoring Digitopia: Discover Me.  I’ve taken the following with permission from Yuval’s blog at http://yuvalgerstein.com/2011/03/10/digitopia-animation-project/. You can find out more about Yuval on his blog at http://yuvalgerstein.com.     DIGITOPIA animation project Posted on March 10, […]

  Hi, sorry it’s been a while since my last post, been busy moving jobs and moving to a new city too (more about that in a later post). Super fast update – I  f i n i s h e d  t h e  m o v i e ! ! !  Now I […]

  I had initially wanted to put VFX everywhere in pretty much every scene of the movie.  However to finish the movie off on time I was left with one and a half days to do all the VFX off.  One and half days to do the effects for the whole movie = not going […]

I have just last night completed the first pass of Maya lighting,  in all I have lit 54 shots to light in two weeks.  Given that the typical work time is two hours per day (starting at 10pm), that works out to almost <gasp> two shots an hour </gasp>.  Obviously numbers are misleading, what I […]

It’s been a busy year, I’ve worked super hard on getting the various animation tasks in  Digitopia up to the point it is.  But has it been a successful year?  After all I had originally intended to finish the project on December 25th this year.  Why December 25th, was that a figure plucked out of […]