RBC - Shiny Happy Relay - final 60 sec clip.

This was the final 60 sec spot. The delivery time-frame was tighter than a fishes asshole - so water cant get in ( as my grandfather used to say.) 
The result is pretty good considering the production schedule, and multiple language and time versions required, however ultimately I would have loved one or two more weeks on it. You can check a production diary on my site at bitstate.com.

credits

Director ( bitstate ) : Pete Circuitt
Modeler ( bitstate ): Jay Harwood.
Production : TEG
post production : Golden Square.

Yes Virginia : Mr Church - first version.

This was the first very version of Mr Church I developed during the early pitch process, his body in this case, was a portrait from the time period, so we stuck his head on that. In the early days i was also keen to push for smoking in the film, as it was honest to the time period, but this idea was dropped early on for obvious reasons.

Yes Virginia - full cast line up

This image is a line up of all the cast in the concept art phase - as you can see there is quite alot of characters to show development for. A special mention to Fola Akinola here who took over from Bill Sneed to be my lead character artist for the film after the Romantic Gentleman Sneed departed for the city of angels. I'll upload more character work next week.

Yes Virginia - first boardomatic ( excerpt )

One of the things that i felt was really beautiful was the original work on the first boardomatic illustrated by Marcus Reed. The amount of detail he drew in each frame was phenomenal. We sat outside in the fading British summer and talked through the film several times, postulating and acting out each role to establish the frames required in this short frame boardomatic. This is really early on in script development when the opening shot pulled up on Virginia in a classroom instead of her house. Virginia's dad was modeled after Morrissey, and he had wooden body parts on the kitchen table, and the bully Charlotte was a boy named Charlie. And finally that is Mr Church leaving the library as Virginia arrives. In the original script Mr Church secretly pines for the librarian's favour.

early mood film and crowd tests

Early on back in December 08 when Yes Virginia was perhaps going to be much smaller i set to work on the film by myself. One thing that i knew would be problematic would be to get the city streets to have the right density of extras for a busy city. So i made a quick hack-job of a crowd generator in my 3d software that actually became quite powerful. It meant i could have several character variations. Also all the crowd 'clones' of those variations would use the one 32 frame walk cycle but each use of that walk cycle would be randomly offset to give the impression that each clone was unique. The opening shot on this mood film has over 150 clones walking down the left hand side of the street. I dont have collision detection or anything like that but felt it did the job for wide shots. Music here is Wilco.

Introduction - Yes Virginia Production Diary -

 







The work in this Diary I am very proud of. Not only because I think its a great body of work but also because it was made in a very short time. Its no secret I worked myself breathless on this project but everyone who was involved in this film, from the voice talent to the artists on the production floor, genuinely felt affection for it and wanted it to be great. This film needed that sort of dedication to make it appear truly touched by the human hand, rather than a computer, which was very important to me.

Virginia - early concept art

Bill Sneed and I worked together on the original pitch back way back in August 2008. We executed this pitch together over a period of three feverish summer days and it fell to Bill to execute the concept sketches for Virginia. Bill fell in love, and so the romantic gentleman departed for LA not long afterwards, but you can see how the original concept art was key to the development to Virginia’s character.
She is a beautiful character, but to get her to look so sweet from all angles took ALOT of work in the 3D department. This is because her head is quite big and flat. Ultimately if virginia was seen in profile it would not be flattering to her character design so we determined during layout that we would try to limit these shots as much as possible. We did an enormous amount of tweaking on her face geometry to make it work for the shots and I think it payed off handsomely. I am so proud of this character, and there is so much to say about the character development in general which sadly I don’t think I’ll have time to do write this up at length just yet.



<--- Virginia - final character