First up is ESB:

Next up are some Bord Gais bits:

And finally is a Two FM ad we did, I only had small role in this but its still pretty cool to see how it was put together:

That’s all from me for tonight folks. Bars open till’ 2am. DJ Toupé will take it from here and play you out with all your favourite hits from the golden years of cruise liner cabaret.
Hit it DJ Toupes…

TUNE!!!

All work completed at Piranhabar.

Linky link

Yay!

This house was abused with the power of 3D and its evil sister, compositing. The ripples were created in Softimage with the help of a nice ICE compound which can be found by going to this generous mans site and then composited over the live action footage. Simon Burke, Will Sharkey and myself worked on the ripples. Sam Boyd worked on some trees and foliage and I did some leaves that go from green and healthy to red and well, dead (…autumny).
Gavin Kelly and Paul Heagney worked on compositing.

All work completed at Piranhabar.

In the background we see household objects morph/transform into new household objects. Some may question the ethics of plastic surgery spreading its manipulative and exploitative money stained fingers into the domain of inanimate and therefore, defenseless objects but I for one welcome it. I’d rather have a flat and barren white shelf than one with character any day if the price is right! All this digital surgery was achieved with the help of many hundreds of reference photographs of the objects on set and then brought into the computer, modeled and then textured. Then each had to be figured out like a puzzle that wont sit still to change from one object into another. Some had to morph 3 or 4 times to go from 1920’s, to 50’s, to 70’s to modern objects. There are lethal levels of compositing and vfx trickery going on to achieve a veritable nuclear explosion of an ad. Too much? Ok, its a nice ad but could clearly have been improved if our hero was tearing up the house in a Delorean during his time traveling spiel.

On the graphics side of things it was Sam Boyd, Gavin Kelly and me on the 3d end and Gavin Kelly and Paul Heagney on the compositing end.

All work completed at Piranhabar.

Everything aside from the people and vehicles is CGI. As for my role on this, it was relatively small. I did the “Come Together” sign and the worked on the print campaigns. I also built a lot of the detailing for the set… most of which you can’t see as its all dark n’ Hollywoody. All the rest of the 3D work was handled by Simon Burke, Sam Boyd and Will Sharkey.

All work completed at Piranhabar.

Most of the set is either fully digital or the elements morphing are digital. The first half with the fashionable room was executed by John O’ Connel and his v-ray machine. The other half, in the room of hallucinations was executed by Simon Burke, Will Sharkey, Paul the Flame guy, Gavin Kelly and me. I did morphing fireplace shots, the lamp shot, the cushion on the chair and the foot of the chair.

Just light the pack…and run for cover…

All work completed at Piranhabar.

Click for the interview over at cgadvertising.com.

Directed by Gavin Kelly
Produced by David Burke
Production manager Marc Long
Director Of Photography Fergal O’ Hanlon
Editors Paul Giles, Damien O’ Connell
3D Animation Lead John O’ Connell
3D Animation Will Sharkey, Cormac Kelly
RED Camera Kindly Supplied by “The Production Depot”
Music by Steve Lynch at StellarSound
Digital Transfer Technial Assistant Cathal McHugh
Compositing Arron Ingles, Declan MacErlane

If you liked it, it is the hard work of all these people that made it possible.

Please visit http://www.piranhabar.ie for more of our work.

Cormac.

This is a short film I worked on a while ago called “Avatar Days”. What makes it a little bit special is that the whole thing from filming, to vfx right through to compositing was done inside 4 very sleepless days and nights. I was part of the team on this one alongside John O’ Connel, Will Sharkey and director Gavin Kelly.

The documentary follows 4 MMORPG players talking about their online persona’s as we see them go about their daily lives against the dreary backdrop of an overcast day in Dublin city…as their Avatars!

This one picked up a few awards along the film festival circuit and was definately a fun one to work on. The bottle of “Kick” the Mage is holding in the queue is the same one that kept me awake helping make this sucker.

EDIT: Big thanks to Danny O’ Dwyer from CitizenGame.co.uk for featuring this on their front page. Cheers man!