Over the past week I’ve had my camera save black and white versions of all of my photos alongside RAWs. The big apple looks great in black and white…

Click the link below to have a look at a gallery.

Read the rest of this post »

We were welcomed to New York with the most appropriate present possible… a cake that looked like a burger. Yum!

Thanks to Linda and Ben for it!

The Mill has released an iPhone application that can apply looks or emulate some basic color grading tools found in a grading suite. The app has some rudimentary preset looks, as well as controls for lift, gain, gamma and saturation.

Click here to open iTunes to the app in the store.

The Flickr group for images graded using the app can be found here.
FX Guide Article

Anyone who is involved with capturing or dealing with digital imagery in any way should read this excellent article by John Galt, the Senior Vice President of Advanced Digital Imaging at Panavision.

Here’s a trailer for my current project, Sherlock Holmes. Starring Robert Downey Jr. as Holmes and Jude Law as Dr. Watson, it’s directed by Guy Ritchie.

I recently completed work as the Visual Effects Supervisor and Compositor for Todd and the Tooth Fairy.
Produced by Gigi Berardi and directed by Tony Clark, it’s a short film aimed at children about a boy who loses his false front tooth during a football match. With the school disco fast approaching the story follows the boy’s journey and the characters he meets as he tries to find his tooth.
I completed around 40 visual effects shots ranging from glowing eyes and magical fire effects, to crystal ball inserts, computer generated environments and numerous tooth removal shots.
Hopefully the film should start working it’s way around festivals soon, at which point I’ll try and get a Quicktime on the site.

For both testing and blogging purposes, I thought I’d try and create my own Google Map of our trip to China to see how well it integrates into the blog page.

View China in a larger map
Seems to work pretty well I’d say!
Google Maps

I (and probably thousands of others) signed up with Twitter after watching Stephen Fry singing its praises on Friday Night with Jonathan Ross. It’s like the status updates of Facebook, and… well that’s about it. Simple really, and quite effective.
After an initial flurry of followers and followings things have died down. But for Stephen Fry, who seems to document his every waking moment on it, it seems to be going from strength to strength. He has written about it quite a bit on his website. It’s also an obvious excuse for yet another app for the iPhone! Twitterfon is my favourite of the free bunch. I’ve even managed to get my blog to read my latest Twitter updates (or ‘Tweets’) and display them in the sidebar… nice! If you feel like following me click here to get started and find out what all the fuss is about.

My Twitter page

BAFTA have announced their nominations for this year’s film awards and QUANTUM OF SOLACE has been included in the shortlist for Special Visual Effects.

Here’s the full list:

THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON
Eric Barba, Craig Barron, Nathan McGuinness, Edson Williams

THE DARK KNIGHT
Chris Corbould, Nick Davis, Paul Franklin, Tim Webber

INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL
Pablo Helman, Marshall Krasser, Steve Rawlins

IRON MAN
Hal Hickel, Shane Patrick Mahan, John Nelson, Ben Snow

QUANTUM OF SOLACE
Chris Corbould, Kevin Tod Haug

Bafta nominations

The awards ceremony takes place on 8th February.

The Siena Chase and Fight Sequence of QUANTUM OF SOLACE has been nominated in the Outstanding Compositing in a Feature Motion Picture category of the 2009 Visual Effects Society Awards.

Here is the full list:

THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA, PRINCE CASPIAN
Stuart Lashley, Arundi Asregadoo, Mark Curtis, Richard Baker

THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON – Benjamin Comes Together
Janelle Croshaw, Paul Lambert, Sonja Burchard, Sarahjane Javelo

IRON MAN – Head Under Display – HUD Compositing
Jonathan Rothbart, Dav Rauch, Kyle McCulloch, Kent Seki

QUANTUM OF SOLACE – Siena Chase and Fight Sequence
Anthony Smith, Christian Kaestner, Adrian Metzelaar, Jon Thum

CG Society Article
FX Guide Article

The awards ceremony takes place on 21st February.