Archive for January, 2008

Yep, The Bass has beaten yet another long-term goal of theirs!

Not content with getting their work on national television (with 1.5 million viwers) before they’d even finished getting the company incorporated (3 years ahead of that particular goal), the boys at EESB recently completed a project which will be shown in cinemas soon in 2008!

The job, completed in November 2007, means that Dom and Paul’s goal of getting work into cinema within 10 years of starting the company has been utterly obliterated – by a 7 year margin!

The anti-drink drive project, which came from video company ST16, had already been graded once (see other blog posts) and exported by Eight Eyed Sea Bass for use initally on youtube, and highly rated there too. All the filming was done in High Definition, so it was pretty close to the resolution required for film.

We played with the colours a bit more, and made all the text as sharp as possible, before we exported the whole thing, ready to go to film.

Below are some frames from the piece in HD:

For those people in the Lancashire area, we hope you enjoy this as much as we enjoyed working on it!

A journalist from the nationally distributed magazine, Broadcast, came to Birmingham before Christmas to talk to companies about digital video.

We were invited to be interviewed for their article entitled “Digital leader” – as published in their 18th January 2008 copy of their mag!

Speaking of working in Birmingham, and the use of the internet, Dominic’s comments were noted in a couple of paragraphs. He was quoted as saying:

“There’s definitely a talent pool in Birmingham and the West Midlands,” … “It’s well servered but of course we’d like to see it grow. Geography doesn’t and shouldn’t matter now – we’ve had clients from as far afield as China and the US – and you can get a London-standard product here but at a better price.”

Nice one Dom.
Thanks to the journalist Robert Gray for talking to us.

Well here we go!
My first bit of real 3D since last touching 3DS MAX in 2003.

I’ve missed doing 3D terribly in the exciting time that we’ve spent growing Eight Eyed Sea Bass. So far, Paul has done all the 3D graphics for the company. He began his conversion / re-configuring of skillset from 3DS MAX to Lightwave 3D back in 2004, not long after he joined me in Birmingham, and so has been in the thick of it for a number of years now. Lucky man.

I have genuinely been hankering to get my hands dirty again in the awesome World of 3D. So, I sat myself down in the little spare time I get, and worked through a Lightwave book to get some kind of familiarity with this application. After that, I had a bit of a further break from 3D again due to busy-ness, got miffed, and then decided to throw myself back in to it. For some reason, I decided I wanted to model a boot. I don’t know why… I just…. wanted to!

So I did. And to keep track of what I was doing, I took framegrabs of the progress.

I cannot tell you how joyful it was to be seeing 3D wireframes of what I was working on, and now very recently, to actually be rendering something! What a sense of satisfaction after a lot of dedication. It may look like something simple, but it meant a lot to me. This is what I am made to do.

And this is, after all, a step closer to EESB becoming the leading effects and animation house in the region. One step at a time.

Keep your eyes peeled for more animation and effects work coming from us. We have a heck of a lot planned.

Thanks. Keep well, everyone.

While I’m waiting for somebody to arrive here at Studio Sea Bass, I thought I’d post these frames from a project we were working on in December.

Having worked closely with one of our allies, @Warblefly Productions, we were doing a fair amount of post-production for a TV commercial. The whole thing was shot and completely edited in HD, which was nice.

After a lot of careful planning of what shots to film, careful direction on set and nice lighting to give rich colours, we felt it appropriate to have a nice looking end frame – as you would. With the usual attention to detail we like to have here, I had a brief discussion with the producer and we decided I ought to replace the sky and warm the scene of the final frame – as it was rather overcast when filmed.

See the ‘as shot’ and ‘post-productioned’ frames below!

We EESB folk had gone to the extent of creating a warm sunset behind the buildings, with photoreal sky generated carefully in the tools we use on our workstations, and animated 3D volumetric clouds (ie. nice), all lovingly rendered in HDR format for the ultimate in ‘niceness’.

Funnily enough, it looked well nice, and everybody complimented The Bass on their efforts. But strangely, the client suddenly decided they wanted to use an image of their own for the final frame. Something we strongly advised them against. So sadly, the nice image you see above, with carefully animated clouds and nice lighting, will not be appearing on ITV1 at all….

Such a shame, but never mind. The nice-looking image is here, in static form anyway!

Enjoy.

Keep well, everyone.

No, not the sort where you’re taught about long-division or trigonometry in a petrol station – the sort where sound information about car dealerships is proffered.

An advertising agency in the West Midlands came to Eight Eyed Sea Bass, as a one-stop-shop (sorry, we don’t sell crisps or chewing gum) for their clients needs.

Their client; Hilton Garage, wanted a TV advert produced, voiced, and also fronted by a teacher type character, complete with motar board and cane – all lovingly animated in 3D.

We at EESB believe that knowledge is King – and a decent education is a good thing, especially if it excludes long-division, trigonometry and petrol stations.
The ad agency came to us with a rough outline for the character, which was refined in 2D to establish the correct style. This was then modelled in 3D from the 2D drawings.

While this was happening, a leading voice artist from the West Midlands was brought in to record the voice – this dialogue track was then used as a guide for the animation.

EESB also worked some pixel-pushing magic in order to create the moving backdrops. I have it on good authority that the teachers cane was a little miffed at not landing more of a leading role.

The completed animation was then put to broadcast tape, and shipped off to ITV for tranmission. The advert in all of its beauty, is being run in the Central-East region of ITV from December 27th 2007 to February 2008.

Keep well all, more soon.

Well, who’da thunked it?!

Today is Paul’s birthday! The man with lamb chops has successfully completed the last stage in life that he was tackling, and has now gotten on to level 34!

Never one to rest on his laurels, especially when fuelled with dark beers, Paul will no doubt be readying himself for level 35 imminently.

“Happy Birthday, El Duder!” from all at Eight Eyed Sea Bass (and no doubt from all the Stepnians too)! Have a good one.

P.S. w00t !
P.P.S Would you like pineapple fritters with that, Sir?

HELLO!
Happy New Year to you all!

We hope you all had a great time during the festive period, and are not too unhappy to be back at work!

Eight Eyed Sea Bass are definitely glad to be back, and we have lots of things we want to do this year – ranging from animation to special effects, let alone all the other video, DVD and motion graphics work we’ll be doing!

As you may have gathered from previous posts here, we always have something cooking. This time of year was no different, and there was some very enjoyable research & development happening.

I thought I’d start the year’s posts off with some pictures to look at. The first four show some development of a 3D landscape – with no materials applied.






The next image was much more involved, and has some complex materials applied to the scene – which was the point of this exercise, and some very distant mountains – if you can see them!

Finally, I made a scene with a simple large hill / small mountain, but with no materials applied. I knew the look I was aiming for would make the hill almost like a silhouette, so for this test that was fine. However, what I was really studying in this example was the creation of the atmosphere, clouds and lighting. This one in itself a bit of a carry-on from a project where I had to replace the sky in a shot which was originally overcast, and I replaced it with a nice sunset with CG (computer generated) animated clouds, and graded the foreground appropriately to make it warmer too. Anyway, here’s the image…

Right, that’s it for now. We should have some more images of work to show you in the near future, so until then, take care, Everyone.