MVA Titles In All Their Glory!
The Locomotion team recently had a fantastic night out at the 2009 Music Video Awards, hosted by Adam Buxton and held at the Odeon Leicester Square.
Loco were commissioned to create an intro sequence, bumpers and stings for the Music Video Awards 2009. Click the link above to the view the intro that was created using Maya, After Effects, with original sound score created in Pro Tools 8, all by our in-house team.
Locomotion Get The Producers Vote!
Locomotion climbed to number 24 in the Producers vote for the Televisual Top 50 Post Houses 2009. In a difficult year for the whole industry Locomotion held on to the number 27 position of Post Houses, but gained votes from Producers who gave it the thumbs up as one of the top post house in Soho.
So thank you to everyone who voted for us, we appreciate your support and value each and everyone of you who have contributed to our success.
MVA Awards – Nominations announced!
As proud sponsors of this years UK Music Video Awards, we were waiting with baited breath to read the nominations which were announced this week.
Designed to recognise excellence in music video production by UK individuals and companies, the MVA’s also aim to highlight the cultural significance of music video as an art form.
After viewing the list we’re sure the competition will be a closely run race with many fantastic contributors in each category. With the awards ceremony on 13th October there’s still time to book your ticket, check out our events page for further details.
In the meantime if you would like to view all the videos nominated, click here.
Two Saturday Specials!
June saw the two highlights of senior motion graphics artist Lee Bamsey’s year. In one week he managed to work on a project for the newest girl band on the block: The Saturday’s and get married– how lucky does one guy get?
Working with Global Radio, producer Kwok Manyau commissioned us to create Windows sponsorship bumpers, intros and outros for a Channel 5 programme ‘The Saturday’s at work: the making of a music video’.
Using After Effects, Lee helped to create a series of stylish idents promoting the versatility and creativity of Microsoft Windows software whilst incorporating the five fabulous ‘Saturdays’.
Staring at a screen full of gorgeous girls all week could be distracting to a man but Lee only had eyes for his Saturday at the end of the week, when he married the beautiful Steph. Thoughts of any other faded away as he jetted off to Bali and the single men of the office were left contemplating their favourite Saturday…
Baby Love…
Summer saw Locomotion come over all broody when work began for the new SMA Nutrition website. Working with Partners Andrew Aldridge and Bare Films we created a series of landing pages for the site as well as 10 x 3 min ‘know how’ films featuring real parents with their own babies.
The videos are aimed at helping new parents in mastering the art of having a newborn, from breast-feeding and preparing SMA milk substitute for bottle fed babies through to weaning and high chair feeding older babies. Using real parents and babies and not actors created a more natural delivery (excuse the pun) and gave our very own resident super-dad/ senior editor, Miland, a chance to add a warmth that made the videos informative and engaging and indulged heavily in the ‘awwww’ factor.
Loco Sponsor MVA Music Awards!
It’s no secret we love music, we love video; so it should come as no surprise that Locomotion are working again with the Music Video Awards to bring great titles, stings and bumpers to the event. Find out more by clicking below…
How We Gave Buzz Monkey Life… and featured in 3D World!
For most of us in the UK Buzz Monkey is a relatively unknown brand, in Australia it’s an alternative to Red Bull. Working in association with Click-House, Locomotion were given the opportunity of breathing life into the static Buzz Monkey character.
Our resident guru Lars Magnus Holgrem was the brains behind this baby, taking it from concept to completion, with many of the team taking part in bringing him to life. Lars managed not only the creative process, but also managed teams across the world, bringing the best out of our creative team.
Once we had the character moving, it was then a case of using Locomotion genius to colour grade, add foley and music to bring the Buzz Monkey to life.
We were over the moon to learn that our little green friend was to be featured in 3D World and are proud that the 3D Buzz Monkey is our baby- just another example of why people choose Locomotion to make their visions reality.
If you’d like to our monkey in action check it out in our showcase section here.
The 3D version of this character both still and moving are the property of Locomotion London (c) 2009
Cupcakes Featured In 3D World
We’re thrilled that our Cupcakes ident for BUG has been featured in the latest edition of 3D world magazine.
Cupcakes shows just what can be achieved when you push Maya to the edge of its capabilities, you can find out more about Cupcakes here…
Little Howard Gets Big Results
Little Howard was one of the most watched terrestrial children’s programme during April. One show achieved a 23% share of the available audience – no mean feat for any TV show.
As a Children’s TV show, ‘Little Howard’s Big Question’ has shown that children’s TV is setting the standard for makers of all TV to follow. In an industry swamped with derivatives and low budget reality shows, it’s great to know that the courage taken by the BBC team to make such a great idea, using new innovations, has paid off.
It just goes to show that people, even little people, still know a good thing when they see it!
More Award Winning Work By Locomotion
Locomotion are thrilled to hear that uber cool agency Lean Mean Fighting Machine have grabbed an award on a piece of ground breaking work. At last week’s Mouse Awards it was announced that LMFM were awarded a Silver Award for ‘The Exposure of Tom King’.
An ambitious project from the start, the idea of getting people from all over the world to audition and then take a role in a movie, all through the use of their webcams. Mad? Perhaps, but we can’t help it when people suggest the impossible.
It took an enormous amount of rotoscoping and other tricks by our talented team to take all the parts and make a web-based movie as part of an Emirates campaign.
Chris Condron of LMFM comments ‘This was down to an unbelievable effort from the Locomotion team and we would like to take a moment to thank everyone again for what was an exemplary effort in very difficult circumstances.’
Our pleasure Chris…
Locomotion pioneers a new format for CBBC
Now you have a great reason to watch TV on Thursday afternoons!
Little Howard’s Big Question, a new BBC Childrens TV show premieres tonight, 8th January, at 4.30 on BBC1 and brings comedy live act Big Howard and Little Howard to the small screen with a unique blend of animation and live action.
The 13 x 28 minute programmes feature the cheeky 2D character of Little Howard as he interacts with people and places in his quest to find answers to his questions.
Little Howard’s Big Question examines the questions that children most want answered such as ‘could the dinosaurs ever return?’, ‘how will I know when I’ve fallen in love?’ and ‘can I believe my eyes?’. The show takes the form of a road movie in which Big Howard played by Howard Read is accompanied in the real world by his animated side kick, six-year old Little Howard. The production uses Flash to animate Howard’s 2D characters which are then composited into live action sequences filmed on location.
With responsibility for post production, animation and visual effects, Locomotion worked closely with comedian and animator Howard Read and the CBBC Production team to create the 2D character of Little Howard in Flash and bring him to life.
Locomotion beat numerous other post production houses to the ambitious project and won on the strength of the team’s technical expertise, capabilites, workflow and enthusiasm for the project.
Post Production Producer and MD, Danny Coster, and Editors Anuree De Silva and Scott Flyger, worked with Read to develop the character and each programme features 20-25 minutes of animation. Under supervision Locomotion’s VFX Director Lars Magnus Holmgren, the team of animators and compositors developed the 2D animations in Flash, After Effects, Shake and Boujou.
Shot in DVCam, Locomotion ingested all footage using their 4 Gb SAN network at broadcast resolution, enabling the compositors and editors to work in tandem at online quality throughout the project.
Says Peter Davies, Executive Producer at the CBBC, ‘Producing Little Howard for CBBC has meant breaking new ground from inception to delivery. We’ve had to write the manual from scratch for how to make a live action factual comedy featuring a six year old animated boy. We couldn’t have done this without a post production facility house with unique skills’.
Credits
The series is written by Howard Read and Chris Chantler.
Peter Davies – Executive Producer BBC Children’s
Vanessa Frances – Series Producer
Dermot Canterbury and Bruce Webb – Directors
Locomotion – Post Production Partner
Dan Coster – Post Production & VFX Supervisor
Lars Holmgren – VFX Supervisor
Jen Reznick – Line Producer
Petria Whelan – Flash Animator
Scott Flyger and Anuree De Silva – Off-line Editors
Lee Bamsey, Miland Suman, Alex Hare and Martin Macdonald – Compositing, Grading and On-line Editing
Locomotion creates ‘Cupcakes’ to promote BUG, London’s essential music video event
Locomotion premieres the second in a series of three identity opening title spots for BUG, the bi-monthly music video festival held at BFI Southbank.
Entitled ‘Cupcakes’, the 2 minute spot follows the same alien ‘bug’ theme that was introduced in Locomotion’s first title spot ‘Hills Are Alive’, a pastiche on the musical film genre.
This time around, concept creator and Director Lars Magnus Holmgren takes a tongue-in-cheek look at our caffeine fuelled and sleep deprived culture through a weird and wonderful ‘Happy Days’ pastiche that follows one young man’s madness after one too many cappuccinos… you’ll never look at a cup cake in quite the same way again.
Stop motion stills camera work was sought for the live-action to add a twitchy ‘bugged-out’ quality that mirrors the nerves-on-edge adrenalin rush of strong coffee.
The cupcake bugs and character animation were seamlessly integrated with the stop motion footage to achieve a natural twitchy high-energy feel.
Watch it now!
Turning It Up for The Feeling
Now that The Feeling’s promo for their latest single ‘Turn It Up’ is on MTV, we’re free to shout about the magic…
With a vision to create a decadent ‘carnival of life’ that parades past as the band plays, complete with revelers, balloons and streamers, Director Caswell Coggins needed to enhance the party scenes and Crossroad Production’s turned to our VFX team for help.
Senior 3D Artist Tony Lee and senior editor Lee Bamsey advised during pre-planning and supervised the setting of VFX shots on location.
Once back at Locomotion Tony worked closely with Coggins to enhance the colourful crowd scenes by duplicating crowd shots and compositing in After Effects to bring the throng to life and create an enormous sense of space to the end hero shots.
Tony also built additional balloons in 3D using Lightwave particle system to recreate the dynamics of falling balloons, adding texture and lighting to match the real ones from the shoot, and interaction when they landed near people. Further layers of 3D confetti and streamers were also generated using the same software. Finally, all elements were composited into the shots and graded to achieve the final effect the Director was looking for.
The video was edited at Marshall Street Editing and then conformed here at Locomotion by our Senior Editor Lee Bamsey in Final Cut Pro.
Check it out here…
Do Something Different with Loco
When Bare Creative came up with this little gem of a concept for Mabox’s client Do Something Different.com, we stepped in to advise on the post production and VFX for the live-action viral film.
Our Digital and VFX teams team advised on how to achieve certain visual effects and our MD Danny recommended shooting the film in HD, on a Panasonic HVX 200 HD, because of the efficiency and flexibility it affords for workflow and creative treatments.
The film was shot on location in London by Bare Creative. Capturing straight to a P2 card eliminated the need for tape, allowing for high speed transfer of the rushes to Locomotion’s 4GB XSAN server. Also, working directly at HD resolution ensured high end quality of post treatments, such as tracking, keying and the visual effects we used, including time lapse, primary and secondary colour grading and the lightning strike. Lee Bamsey, Senior Editor at Locomotion handled the entire project, from editing, compositing, visual effects and screen graphics to sound design, making the workflow extremely efficient.
“Working at HD resolution also means that output variations for cross platform delivery maintains quality and integrity despite image size and formats, and everything at Locomotion was done at broadcast quality to future proof the campaign assets” adds Danny.
All in all, everyone was delighted with the results. See it for yourself here and remember to Do Something Different – before it’s too late!
