NIGHT ON TERROR ISLAND BOOK TRAILER

Another book trailer, this time for 'Night On Terror Island' by Philip Caveney. The story is about Kip, a young boy who finds himself trapped in a horror movie trying to survive Sabertooth Tigers and rampaging Neanderthals when his father hires a mysterious new projectionist to work at his cinema.

















The trailer was shown at the book's launch event at the Stockport Plaza, attended by 500 school children. By all accounts the trailer went down a storm and the launch was a great success. You can read more about the launch and Philip Caveney at the Bookwitch blog here.














I'm really enjoying the recent book trailer work I've been doing, they're a lot of fun and they allow a lot of room to be creative. I've got another exciting project coming up for a really prestigious series of books and I think it is going to be a really good one.

I'll post more information when I can!

CHRONICLES OF THE RED KING BOOK TRAILER

Take a look at this book trailer I animated for Brighton based Crush. The book is 'Chronicles of the Red King' by Jenny Nimmo author of the best selling 'Charlie Bone' series and is the beginning of a brand new series about Charlie's heroic ancestor.

The animation features plenty of dramatic camera swoops and some pretty cool text effects. It was a lot of fun to work on and I hope it does the job of getting young readers excited enough to go out and buy the book!

ASTHMA UK WEB BANNERS

Recently I worked on some Flash banners with digital agency Kanoti for Asthma UK. They form part of a campaign called 'Get it off your chest' that encourages asthma sufferers to post stories online about their asthma related experiences.

These will then be displayed on a map of the UK offering a snapshot of the way Asthma affects people across the whole country.

The animations themselves are simple but fun, using inhalers to represent different emotions associated with the condition. As always with web banners the biggest challenge is keeping the file size down, hopefully I managed to cram in as much animation as possible and that they will do the job of attracting people to the site, which you can visit here.

FLICKER NYC

On April the 17th at Southpaw in Brooklyn, New York's only Super 8 film festival will celebrate it's 10th anniversary. This year's festival features an international line up of films including my Super 8 wonder 'Robot' which has managed to surprise me once again with another prestigious screening.

To mark the occasion IndieWire the independent film website has featured an interview with Flicker founder David Teague, you can read all about it here. In the article David talks about how the festival is put together and comments on the rise of Super 8 in a digital world.

All in all it is a great event to be part of.

VFX ADVANTAGE AT BAFTA

No, I haven't won a BAFTA.... But I did attend a brilliant event at BAFTA the other day called VFX Advantage!

It was a day packed full of great advice from some of the best visual effects companies in the world. Speakers included Double Negative (Quantum of Solace, Green Zone) Framestore (Avatar, The Dark Knight, Sherlock Holmes) MPC (The Wolfman, The Chronicles of Narnia: Voyage of The Dawn Treader) and many more.

We were given an insight into how some of the effects are created, what it is like to work in the industry and how to approach visual effects in our own projects.

Some of the FX we saw were incredible, not to mention the technology. I was lucky enough to have a go at using one of the 'cameras' used to capture the performances in Avatar and the forth coming Spielberg film TinTin.















It took a few moments to get used to but was basically like playing with an Xbox controller, something I am very familiar with thanks to Halo Reach on Xbox Live! That's not me in the picture by the way, that's the fellow who had a go after I finally handed it over.

The highlight of the day however has to be the talk by Gareth Edwards & Colin Goudie. Gareth is the Writer / Director of the hugely successful 'Monsters' a Sci-Fi film for which he created all the vfx himself and Colin was the man who edited all the footage and added all the sound to make it one of the most exciting debut films for a long time. All in all, their talk was inspirational stuff and has left me in no doubt of the possibilities when it comes to creating highly ambitious and visually stunning films on a budget.

LITTLE WHITE LIES FEATURE

Little White Lies have featured me as part of their Grass Roots platform, an initiative that allows up-and-coming filmmakers the chance to showcase their work.

This is very exciting since Little White Lies is a fantastic independent film magazine, published bi-monthly since 2005 it has become the home of inspirational film journalism and a wonderful example of creativity. The design for each issue is based around the theme of a single film, most recently Attack The Block and before that Black Swan which was my personal favourite and can be seen below.

















You can read the full interview with me where I discuss my career thus far and my plans for the future here.

Massive thanks to LWL for the feature and you never know, one day it just might be one of my films on the front cover!

2011 SHOWREEL

Another year brings another Showreel. I'm very pleased with the work done over the last year and I'm proud to be adding it into edit, if this year goes half as well as the last then I will surely have a 2012 showreel suitable for the end of the world!